Politics suck sometimes...

...but some things are worth fighting for. I'm not going to say much about the disappointing Prop 8 announcement from California the other day, you can read about it. What I do want to do is show my support for groups like Courage Campaign who are trying to change the tide towards equality. I can't get my head around the fact that some parts of our community are threatened by the fact that I would like to marry my beloved!



Please sign the petition. I'm not sure if non-US zip codes work but ours is 78230. I know this is only California but these issues are worth fighting wherever they appear. I promise to post something less political (and probably edible) soon!

The beloved's birthday

I know this happened a while ago but I thought I'd pop up a quick post about Josie's birthday since it is a good excuse to post some more Pregatron photos :D

See, from the front you can't really tell she's pregnant!

But I promise she really is! Hard to believe we nearly at week 33 though.

The week of Josie's birthday was pretty hectic as we had collaborators visiting from Portland then a visitor from Tassie on the weekend, but we did go out for a special dinner with the work crowd on the Friday night at a fabulous place called Tre Trattoria. Great linguine with clams, excellent antipasto and I think half the table ordered the fresh pasta with wild mushrooms and thyme, including the birthday girl!

Somebody was asking what she got for her birthday, so I thought I'd post a couple of pics on here. Jose would be the first to profess that she was spoiled rotten, but it was brilliant to see her light up every time a card or package appeared. Eclectic presents not shown here include a footspa, antique plate-fragment jewelery and Charles Rennie Mackintosh glass decals direct from Scotland!

For those of you who don't know, our hamsters died while I was in Australia. They were well over their expected lifespan and had lived very happy hammie lives. We feel bad about the names we gave them now because Busy appeared to just run out of steam and Lumpy died of a tumor... Anyhow, the point is that I found her this actual-size needle-felted hamster for her birthday as a memento of our girls.

Robo the tiny hamster and her birth certificate. Also shown is a card that totally cracked me up!

I also found her these lovely earrings that were handmade by a jeweler called Joanna Rutter from Devon, and I highly recommend her work! I found both the earrings and the hamster on Etsy (support handmade goods!)

The tiny bird earrings

And one last present that I just had to show you. Our friend Katy went to Paris to bring us back some baby Dior socks! I kid you not. Ok it probably wasn't the only reason she went to Paris but still, how cute are they??

That's baby Dior darling

The first babyshower!

We had our first baby shower on Saturday and it was an absolute blast! I say first because there are three (!) lined up in all. Seems showers are something that Americans love. They love to shop and they are so generous so it is the perfect combination. Jo and I were feeling seriously uncomfortable about it but our friends were pretty persuasive and won us over in the end. Then it turned out that I had to set up registries for these things. And not just one! I set one up at target but there was too much 'online only' stuff apparently so I was sent off to set up another at Babies'R'Us (ack how I hate names with R in them). That was another experience entirely and actually a lot of fun, where we ran round the store with a scanner blipping things.

These cupcakes are the goods! Don't let the blue scare you, they're lemonade flavoured.

So, first shower Saturday and the weather decided to get into the spirit as well, a little over-enthusiastically. It didn't shower it poured! The kind of drenching rain where even getting into the car has water in places where only the bath should go. Didn't matter a bit in the end. This shower was organised by some of the chicks from Church, and they did an incredible job.

This was part of the incredible spread. The plate with the tongs on top is full of 'nano' tamales, beef, pork or bean, and they were incredible. If you look hard you can also see the storm pelting against the window!

I didn't feel uncomfortable for a second (well, only during the present part) and there were about as many men there as women...no secret womens' voodoo just friends and food and one totally off the wall game! Have a look at the following pics and see if you can work out what's going on!




Yep, that's right. We're playing the "poopy diaper game". Eight mystery candy bars were melted into the bottom of 8 diapers (nappies - but I think I've already explained why I need to call them diapers here) and our job was to use sight and smell (no tasting!) to determine what the different sweets were.

Josie's score card. She doesn't eat enough candy from the looks of it...

This is our friend Liz, who is a chocolate connoisseur, working out 'what is that smell, I know it...'

The gummi bears weren't too tricky to identify. The Reece's peanut butter cups were just gross...

And yes, you're looking at the champion of the day. Well, actually Liz beat me with 7/8 but she was an organiser (as well as a chocolate fiend) so she stepped down to lucky number 2, which was me with 6/8. The two I missed were the two I'm holding and that's only because I've never tried either of them before in my life! Look at me, I'm all blurry with excitement!

The final phase of the party was opening the masses of generosity in the form of gorgeous present bags, dripping with ribbons and tissue paper. One thing Americans seem to know how to do well, aside from shopping, is wrapping!

We are incredibly blessed to have such lovely and generous friends here and let me tell you, Tuesday is a very lucky boy. I'll take a few snaps of some of the presents later but a couple of my favorites off the bat are the steam breathing red dragon humidifier, the lamaze magnetic stackable pond critters, and the (happy) monster squishable nightlight.

Spring went sproing

And all of a sudden the world is full of baby bunnies! This little guy lives just outside my office window and is so tame that you could pick him up. We haven't because a) we don't want him to become spooked by people and b) he probably has fleas. Cute (and potentially tasty) though...

You can't tell from the pic but he's only about 15cm long!

Happy Star Wars Day

May the 4th be with you...

And tomorrow it is not only Cinco de Mayo, but it is also the beloved's birthday! Not sure what the plan is yet but it will surely involve food. As to whether it is food at home or eating out, that all depends on our energy levels since this is shaping up to be one whopper of a week. Rest assured I will keep you posted on whichever celebratory path we choose.

And just for fun, here's a fun Star Wars related clip for thems who haven't seen it yet (Star Wars or the clip although it's funnier if you have actually seen the films...)

Tuesday's first concert - Patty Griffin!

Last night we had such an awesome night in Gruene, a little town just north of San Antonio. We had tickets to see one of our favorite singers, Patty Griffin, play at the oldest dancehall in Texas! It was so good. She has such an incredible voice especially considering that she's a slip of a girl.

We had dinner before the show at the Gristmill, and enjoyed sitting outside and feeling the warm spring breeze. I had fall off the bone perfect baby back ribs with sticky BBQ sauce and Josie tucked into a burger with handcut fries. We could say we had dinner with Patty since she was sitting just behind us, but I'd talked myself out of believing it was her! hehe

We were lucky enough to make friends with some wonderful people, and they immediately scooted down on one of the picnic like table benches to allow the preggersaurus and me a seat. We were near the back behind the sound-desk, but could see well and the sound was fabulous. You could hear every word she sung. The new band were pretty awesome too, and I think it was only the second gig they'd all played together. Tuesday seemed to enjoy it, probably the loudest continuous noise he's heard except maybe for the breaking surf.

If you want to get a sense of the gig, someone has already been kind enough to upload a lot of it to youtube. "Top of the world" was one of my favorites, although she did belt out a couple of others that had me in tears! Nothing from "Living with ghosts" but that was my only disappointment. You can watch "top of the world" from last night's gig below, and even though the sound quality isn't great you should get the idea of just how amazing she was! (actually I switched vids because there was a bug with top of the world...this one had us all in tears!)