Water vapor will make your stove burn with an orange flame. The SW Gas man showed up at 0735 this morning. He came inside, saw the flame, and asked if I was running a humidifier. It's in the kitchen right now. I'm sick with sinusitis and it is helping. It's in the kitchen because the combination of a container of water with two cats on a new laminate floor just didn't sound like a good plan.

The LW woke up late this morning after going to bed with a headache. This combined with having me wake her up every hour or so during the night by coughing, didn't do her any favors. This morning she officially reached the point where eating small meals slowly became necessity. She had a big breakfast only to have CP push it right back out. That kid is already making her presence known to everyone around here.

We came home with our Britax Boulevard yesterday. We went to Aldrich Baby News here in town and picked it up. Mario, a great guy from the store, officially installed it in the car and now I see why my buddy Pat from out in Napa recommended this thing. The seat is a beast, but it has some cool features and CP should be able to use it for quite a while. I'm sure that we'll be regulars at this store for a while. They carry all kinds of Mustela products and stuff that we've only seen in catalogs. The website is kinda simple, but their selection is great.

This little snippet should show what's going on at our house right now. It's part of the bar graph from pollen.com. We're at 10.5 out of 12 on the scale here right now thanks to the rains that came last week. After 140+ days with no measurable rain, everything started pushing blooms recently in an effort to get while the gettin's good. I started sneezing earlier in the week and by Friday, it was full blown - not my nose, the sinusitis. I've been using Claritin and Mucinex for a couple of days and will be bound for the local doc this coming week. No fun there. It's beautiful outside and the LW has spent a good deal of time reading and enjoying the sunshine. She's also been doing the household stuff since I'm down and out for a bit. That's a strange reversal and it's a little hard to get accustomed to. Our little CP continues to move around alot and you can see it from the outside when she does. A few more weeks and she should be making her grand entrance. It's time to get the baby seat in the car and get the overnight baby bag ready to go.

CP is healthy and her heartbeat is fine. That's the news from the midwives at the Birth Center. Our little one continues to kickbox her mom's internal organs though and as an aside, has begun to give her mom some pretty stout back pain. Our doula is coming over tonight to do a basic interview session. It will be nice to meet her and see how her personality fits with the LW.

I'm almost done with my master gardener course and will be glad to not have to drive an hour or so each way to get to the class. This past week was citrus and Dr. Glenn Wright layed it out for us. By the end of his presentation, I wanted to plant all kinds of strange fruit. I had never heard of the Pummelo or the Cara Cara or most of the other varieties that he mentioned, but I'm determined to try them. It was a great class. Hopefully this fall we can get some dwarfs planted, but I have to see what performs well on "Flying Dragon" rootstock. I'd like an Oro Blanco and a Minneola Tangelo - the LW and I will have to wrestle over the other choices.

It rained here recently and it was a welcome sight. I'm sure that the critters enjoyed it. I figured that T. Beth over at FireFlyForest would have some great pictures this week. She never disappoints.

The LW started working from home today in the middle of her 35th week of carrying our little one. I got out back this morning so that she could have some quiet time and pulled our carrot patch. We figure that we came close to 40lbs of carrots from a 4'x16" patch that were planted from seeds. It took a while to get them cut, blanched, and packaged, but it's worth it. Little CP will have some home-grown baby food later this year and we'll have veggies on hand for cooking without making a trip to the store. The snow appears to be almost gone from the mountains. I guess that it got cold for one of the local road races recently. The snow sure is a pretty sight though and the critters and plants can use all the moisture that they can get. Last night was the last night of the childbirth class and we were tired when we got home. Something about having a childbirth class full of pregnant women sitting in one spot until almost 9pm just doesn't make sense. Maybe they're trying to get everyone accustomed to being tired. All is well and little CP continues to play visceral kickboxing with the LW's organs.

It's been a while since I've put anything here, and I apologize. Shortly after the last post, the LW's family started arriving. We had the parents in town for almost a week and on the same day that they headed toward Texas, one of the sisters arrived and entertained us through the weekend. Both were good visits as we saw Kartchner Caverns, a bit of Tombstone, and ran up Mt. Lemmon with the parents. We even conned LW's dad into making bread while he was here - good stuff. The Betsy was in town for the baby shower and while she was here we went to the short film contest at the Loft. Adding guests to our 750sf house was interesting, but the LW made it work beautifully.

The LW starts her new job soon and was quite happy to bid adieu to the guy who has made her present job grueling for the last month or two (although he said nothing upon hearing the news and hasn't communicated with her at all since). In her new job, she'll be doing technical writing from home. She's looking forward to just being a writer again since the last place couldn't figure out that they needed an office manager and Dianne was doing that job too. Only a month ago they finally figured it out and gave it to a technophobic engineer who thinks that an excel spreadsheet is as good as a well-configured database. Wheweee...wouldn't want to be a part owner in that company! Anyway, she's happy to be telecommuting again and will make site visits locally as necessary. This means that she'll be home with the little one and I most of the time. This should be very interesting.

It's starting to get warm out.