Countdown to insanity

Life has been more interesting than usual lately.

First, work is stressful at the moment. The Provost has decided to consolidate all the IT-related positions in the academic offices, and that includes me. As a result, on Friday I’m being moved out of the Writing Center and into the new group. Aside from the fact that I love the Writing Center and don’t want to leave, the timing really stinks — the baby’s due in less than a month. There are other issues that make the whole thing more fraught than it needs to be, about which the less said, the better.

One baby shower fell through at the last minute due to a death in the planner’s family, but there was a second one for my college friends, and that was awesome. Now I’m trying to get the family and local friends together for something informal at my house so they don’t feel too left out. Lots of timing problems there, too.

I thought we were just going to have my parents and one aunt over for Thanksgiving — I can’t travel anymore, so they sort of have to come here — but then my cousin somehow obtained tickets to the UT game, and now that whole side of the family is also coming over. I’ve just now figured out where they can all sleep. (Our house is just not that big.) Complicating factor: the delivery of the new couches we ordered a couple of months ago. They were going to be here on the 12th. Then they weren’t going to be here until after Thanskgiving. Now they might be here next week… but if they are, I won’t have room for the last couple of relatives who might need to sleep on the floor. So, people will either have no place to sit during the day or no place to sleep at night. Faaaaantastic.

(Why can’t they just sleep on the couches, you ask? Because this is the freakishly tall side of the family. None of them will fit on the couches.)

On the bright side, the baby’s room is painted, and Michael is almost done with the new kitchen island he’s been building on and off since we finished the rest of the remodeling last December. He couldn’t work on it for about six months because the garage is his workshop, and you might recall that it was hotter than the fires of hell this summer. By the time he got back to it, all the plywood had warped in the heat and he had to start over. He’s pulled it all together in about a month, and it looks wonderful.

I had a few weird pregnancy side effects pop up while I was at HighEdWeb, but they’ve mostly disappeared now and we’re both fine. And HighEdWeb was a blast, as always.

So now I just have to move offices, rearrange the living room, sell the old futon on Craigslist, get the new couches moved in, feed eleven nine (thank goodness) people a holiday meal, and host a last-minute, mom-organized baby shower. Then I can kick back and, you know, give birth.

… shoot me, please?