For aspiring world conquerors everywhere

I’ve been having contractions throughout the night and into this morning. I’m not sure if they’re the real kind, or if they’re a false alarm – darn those Braxton Hicks.

In any case, I haven’t called the doctor yet because 1) we’re still in the process of recording the time between contractions 2) I’d rather stay home as long as possible and 3) I can still talk (and type) through them.

On that note, I figure the best way to get through this is to breathe, blog and play World of Warcraft. It’s hard to be stressed when you’re editing a post or beating down virtual monsters.

I’ve also started our #labor twitter updates. Part of me is reluctant, just in case this is too much personal information to put on the internet, but what the hell, it’s a Brave New World and I’m going to roll with it.

Breathing is pretty self-explanatory – I’m trying to use the coping mechanism Jon’s Mom suggested, which involves kind of going with the pain, and visualizing to help your body do what it needs to instead of resisting this. The fact that I can still be rational about it tells me that this is the very beginning and things are going to get a lot more painful.

I’ve also been resisting urges to clean the fridge, to spray my plants with lemon oil for fruit flies and to do laundry. All these things need to be done, but after hours of off-and-on contractions, I know I’m going to be tired later, and want to conserve my energy.

Wish us luck, and cross your fingers that this is the real deal – we’re ready for this baby to arrive! Drop us a line via Twitter or email – unless the hospital turns off the wireless internet, we’ll be on throughout the day.

Image Credit: Warcraft Baby and nesting

Well, we’re at T-minus 5 days and counting, and here are some random thoughts that have been collecting in the empty space that used to house my brain:

1. I feel like a poser every time someone wishes me a Happy Mother’s Day. My Mom, who is amazingly talented at the right gesture in any situation, actually found and mailed me a “Happy Mother’s-To-Be Day” card. If she was in charge of the world, things would run much more smoothly.

On that note, I wish my sister was on Facebook so I could wish her a Happy Mother’s Day without having to use my phone. My newest unobtainable desire is an iPhone, which is so awesome of a phone that you don’t have to speak into it to communicate, you can just email people from any location.

2. Time slows down when you’re waiting for things. Yesterday, we had time to do some contract website work, visit Crane Castle , try out a new pizza place in Ipswich, and we also spent a good two hours hanging out with the Tivo guy, who was very nice and tried hard, but who utterly failed to fix our box.

3. You must get really great upper arm strength once you have a baby. We live on the 3rd floor of our apartment complex, and I was trying to work out the logistics of carrying my laptop, the baby and the baby’s bag down to the car, and I came up with two trips, carrying the baby the whole time.

It’s sort of like those logic puzzles where you have to cross a river with a wolf, a sheep and a head of sheep-attracting lettuce, and you can’t leave either the wolf or the lettuce with the sheep. So, you just carry those suckers with you everywhere.

Finally, wish us luck! Remember, we’ll be online during the labor until I become incoherent, or, like my friend Sarah suggested, until I have a contraction and snap my laptop in half.

Image credit: he man, original image: bouquet and pizza.

The Baby

Right now, we’re playing the waiting game. We’re half past week 38, and the baby could come any time. I’ve got a few thing to wrap up at work, but am feeling pretty good about having things in order. Our bag is packed, the house is tidied up, and a kind co-worker has offered to show us how to install our Graco car seat, so we don’t have to enlist aid from the fire department.

Physically, he’s a lot lower now, and still moving up a storm. He’s pretty big now, so when he turns over, you can see a bulge of baby sticking out between my ribs or smack in the middle of my stomach. The only other change is that I’ve been feeling more of a compulsion to do family get-togethers lately, because I want the baby to enjoy an extended family like I had while growing up.

This means trips to Kristy’s farm as well, which is a win-win, because the baby will get to see his cousin AND learn about that whole “nature” thing, which he is unlikely to discover in our overly-technological household.

The Mommy

I’ve been down with a mild cold for the past few days, courtesy of a mucus-spewing waitress who perhaps should have 1) stayed home instead of serving food or 2) worn a suave swine-flu mask to work.

Being 8 1/2 months pregnant and sick is frustrating, because you’re never sure which symptoms are from the baby and which are from being sick. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, since in about 2 weeks, I should be either recovering or recovered from both and enjoying the nice summer weather on maternity leave. So, it’s just a matter of getting there.

Housing

We’re still looking at open houses – lately, there’s been an increase in available houses, which is nice, since there haven’t been many for the past year. We may go look at a house in Danvers today, right after we stop by Lowes or Home Depot, which are wonderful, wonderful stores.

Jon Vs. Cats

The reason we are going to Home Depot is that Jon has recently declared war on our cats, and refuses to let them wander around freely at night. I can buy into that, because I’m up already about 3 times a night from the baby, and being woken up by cats as well is just not okay.

Unfortunately, our cats do not share this feeling, and need special precautions, like a rug wedged under the door so they don’t scratch up our hall carpet and cost us deposit money from the apartment complex, a new compact litter box, and the door handles reversed – I had to put the one with the lock button on the outside, because otherwise they engage the push handles and let themselves out. I would be irritated, but I kind of have to applaud their talents. Then, there’s the morning sweeping to take care of the spilled litter, food and rug shreds.

All in all, this is almost more trouble then just being woken up a couple of times during the night. I’m looking forward to having a house with a big basement, where they can roam about all night, or maybe even a kitchen where they could be locked in. And then, we could train them to make us breakfast, so when we got up in the morning, the coffee would be ready.

Today, I had a “non-stress test,” a.k.a. being hooked up to a fetal monitor for 2 1/2 hours in a hospital bed. It is more fun than being shot in the chest and left for dead, but you know, most things are.

I figure that it’s better to be safe, and all those doctors must have some reason for prescribing this, so we’re going to do this once a week until the baby is born.

On the plus side, there may be internet access in the birth center area of the hospital. (Jon was able to get online today during the test.) This means LIVE TWEETS OF THE BIRTH, which is vastly entertaining and should contain choice bits of interesting pregnancy information. That is, if I can type at that point.

If anything, after the phone calls to our parents, this will be the first place where the birth will be announced, so if you want to be one of the first to know, check out our twitter feeds. You can view my updates on my twitter feed, or get Jon’s perspective on his feed.

Pregnancy Weekly’s post Nesting Instinct describes the phenomenon of nesting, common to pregnant women. Italicized text is excerpted from the post.

Here is how I measure up:

Around the fifth month of pregnancy, the “nesting” instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one’s house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world.

Well, this week, I’ve been trying to get everything tied up at work, and have sent several totally OCD write ups to my co-workers outlining my open projects and responsibilities.

At home, I’ve set up the bassinet, done baby laundry, organized all his clothes by size, wrote up a birth plan, and made enough risotto to sink a barge (I AM a barge right now).

Females of the animal kingdom are all equipped with this same need. It is a primal instinct…You may become a homebody and want to retreat into the comfort of home and familiar company, like a brooding hen.

I haven’t really wanted to be sitting around at home, although I am very excited that I now have an excuse to flaunt my primal instincts. Another one of my pregnancy books said new mothers sometimes growl at people. I am also looking forward this.

Nesting brings about some unique and seemingly irrational behaviors in pregnant women and all of them experience it differently.

Irrational? That’s just absurd. Okay, so maybe I cussed out a cashier in a liquor store today, but that’s besides the point. She had it coming.

This unusual burst of energy is responsible for women ironing anything in the house that couldn’t out run them. Being preoccupied with ant killing, squishing them one at a time for weeks on end. Packing and unpacking the labor bag 50 times. Cleaning the kitchen cupboards and organizing everything by size to the point that you make sure the silverware patterns match when it’s stacked in the cutlery drawer. Sorting the baby’s clothes over and over again is a favorite theme.

This might be a problem. I am already really, really OCD. If I get any more OCD, like my friend Kate says, I’m going to have to start spelling it CDO so it’s alphabetical.

Every time I move my files from one computer to another, I ask Jon to transfer everything, and then I reload my files into iTunes manually. As a result, my current computer has about 30 GB of duplicate mp3 files.

Recently, I’ve been working with larger image files, which has made me aware of how much space I have left on my MacBook Pro. Understandably, I’d rather not have 30 GB of duplicate files.

Download Here

I started weeding through these manually, and then realized there’s a script for everything and I was wasting hours of my life. After a quick Google search, I found Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.

I checked with Jon to make sure I wasn’t going to fry my computer with this download (always a good step in your download process) and downloaded the file. There are directions on the site re: the correct way to download & open the file, just in case you do not also have an IT guy held hostage by marriage.

Getting All Your Mp3 Files Into Your iTunes Library

You can skip this section if you don’t have mp3 files outside of your iTunes Library.

If you have mp3 files outside of the iTunes Library (Music > iTunes > iTunes Music), you may want to move all the mp3s on your computer to iTunes first. To do this, open iTunes, go to File > Add to Library and select your main home folder, or whichever folder where you store your non-iTunes mp3s.

Read this whole paragraph before taking any action: After copying these files, you can delete all mp3 files outside of your iTunes Library. When I did this, I searched for “mp3″ and deleted any folder outside of the Library. Before you do this, you may want to back up your files first. (I used Time Machine.) You may also want to check a few files manually to make sure they are still working before you click Empty Trash.

Organizing Your Files

For organizational purposes, you may want to run File > Library > Consolidate Library. This will organize all your iTunes within your Library.

Using Dupin to Remove Your Duplicate Mp3 Files

Criteria

Now that you’re all organized, open Dupin, select your Criteria on the sidebar on the left and click Get Dupes on the top left. This will give you a list of 40 files, or 20 Dupe Groups. Initially, all of the files will be checked, meaning that Dupin will save these files. The criteria I use is: Name, Artist, Album, Time, Size and Track Number, but you may need to adjust it depending on your files.

Filter

Filter your playlist using the Filter Controls. I recommend Single Arbitrary, but just think about what makes the most sense for you. For example, since I had a lot of copied files, most of my file names looked like this: “Float On.mp3″ and “Float On 1.mp3″ so I filtered by Shorter Filename and removed all the files with the “1.mp3″ added on.

Check Your Work

Once half your files are checked and half are unchecked, take a quick look at the files to make sure the unchecked ones are the ones you want to delete. After a couple runs, you’ll be confident in your Criteria and Filter method, and will be able to skip this step.

Purge

When you’re ready to delete the duplicates, go to Tools > Purge. Click Remove when prompted. You will be asked if you want to keep the files or move them to trash. Since I wanted more space, I selected Move to Trash. If space isn’t an issue for you, you might choose to keep the files.

Paranoia Test

And you’re done! If you’re paranoid like me, you’ll test files periodically to make sure that they’re still working correctly in iTunes.

Warning

If you have files that vary widely in terms of quality, you may need to be more stringent with your Criteria and Filter methods. You may even want to go through these files manually, to avoid deleting the better quality files.

Dupin Review

This is a good application. It works exactly as advertised, is pretty simple to use, and it’s free (the demo version). This is a feature Apple might want to consider incorporating in iTunes to make it available to more users.

You know you’re loved when you’re in the shower for about 5 minutes and you start hearing loud, insistent meows outside your bathroom door. If cats spoke English, you would hear “HEY! What are you doing in there? Why aren’t I in there, too?” and “We has shower time now? Why iz door closed?”

When someone wants to hang out with you to the extent that they can’t deal with the 15 minutes of separation it takes for you to get ready in the morning, it really makes you feel appreciated.

Also, it helps you to conserve water, because it’s very distracting to hear MEOW! MEOW! MEOW MEOW MEOW! while you’re trying to relax, so you usually just get out.

As I type this, Sam is siting next to Jon on the couch, all blissed out on a blanket, and Horace is on the couch back behind me, as close as you can get without actually sitting on my shoulder. Purrrr. Purrrrr.

If we ever run out of cash and can’t pay our heating bills, we could probably just get 4 or 5 more cats like Sam and Horace. Since they like to be within 2 feet of us at all times, this would probably be a very efficient heating system – we could call it “living furs” and start our own company.

Of course, we would also have to account for the flailing claws whenever something startled your “coat.” Caution: sudden movements towards tuna may result in serious injury.