in bulleted format because i am lazy!

• i am loving the christmas shopping this year because hey! i'm getting a paycheck! regularly! that is more than i need to actually live on! every 2 weeks more money shows up in my bank account like magic, and even though i'm on a spending spree recently (i bought not 1 but 2 pairs of knee-high black boots in the last couple weeks, plus a new "i'm a professional" work bag, plus a too-expensive new jewelry box for my much-too-large collection of necklaces (to which i'm thinking of adding this), etc. anyway, i'm also buying christmas presents for people like this is the last christmas ever, and i'm loving it! so fun to have money! (says the woman who should start thinking about saving for my kid-on-the-way's college education).
• spanish: we have a new teacher, and OH MY GOD she's intolerable. she talks, aimlessly, all through class. the area in which we all need the most improvement is our speaking fluency, particularly when it comes to verb endings. but rather than, say, drilling us on verb endings or forcing us to speak more in class, she spends about half the class hours talking herSELF. about nothing! argh! and she's one of the senior, old guard teachers, so there's not even anyone we can go to about her. sigh... 2.5 more weeks til (a) christmas and (b) we get a new teacher.
• more spanish: i recently had my 2nd evaluation, and scored a "nearly" 2 in speaking, nearly 2+ in reading. this means that i have a "limited working proficiency." not bad for 3 months of spanish, if i do say so myself.
• pregnancy: i'm at 24 weeks now (16 more to go!) and i suppose this is the best part of the pregnancy so far. i'm loving my cute round belly, which is big enough and round enough that it's cute but not so big and unwieldy yet that it's annoying. plus, i feel better about my body now than i have at any time in the past. i wear shirts that show off my belly with its taught skin instead of trying to hide jiggly belly flab under artfully arranged shirts. it's glorious. not looking forward to post-baby belly flab, sigh... also, i'm feeling a lot of kicking (just now, kicking my cervix, which i could do without) and have recently started to SEE the kicking, which is totally cool in an alien invasion of my body kinda way.

  it's getting harder and harder to tie my shoes and pick up stuff off the floor, and i was totally going to go out this afternoon to buy some shoes that don't need tying, but took a 2.5 hour nap instead. as much as i'm loving the belly and loving the concept of this miraculous thing that karl and i started together, i'm not actually loving being pregnant so much, what with the nausea and the exhaustion and the back pain and the clothes that just don't fit right. so at the moment (i may change my mind, i suppose), i'm thinking that this will be the only pregnancy i have. this kid's future sibling(s) will be adopted, is what i'm thinking.

• i'm switching OBs yet aGAIN. i picked the first because it was getting time to pick someone and my mom had gotten a recommendation from someone. i switched to the second one because the first was way to far from home and the 2nd was a 20 minute walk. i'm about to switch again because the idea of giving birth in a hospital all medicalized and such is pissing me off. so i'm switching to a midwife-attended independent birthing center. i'd wanted to do this from the beginning, to be honest, but had gotten bad info about whether the birthing center was covered under my insurance. recently i found out that it actually is covered, so i'm switching again. even though the birthing center is about an hour from my house, it'll totally be worth it to not have to go to a hospital.
• last, and probably least, i got my first pregnancy comment from a random person on the street the other day. i was walking home from the metro and a man who happened to be walking beside me said, "are you expecting a baby?" and i said, "yes, in march," and he said, "is there a father in the picture?" and i gave him a Look and said, "yes," and he, suddenly realizing that this was a very strange conversation indeed, said, "ah. that's a good start."