birthday lunches

Oh, hey, I'm anemic! The nurse called this afternoon to tell me the good news, and call in a prescription for iron supplements. This doesn't unduly concern me, except for how well my stomach will tolerate the pills, but.. uh. I guess it would explain how I have been falling asleep twice a day and having a few brushes with dizziness and almost passing out! In retrospect.. duh. I was even going to finally mention all of that at my next doctor appointment (tomorrow). During the last visit, they took some blood and I asked them what it was for. The only answer I could get was "standard third-trimester bloodwork". Okay. What does that test for? "Oh, just the usual." Well, what's usual? "The same things they tested for in the first trimester." So, yay! I found out what one of the tests was! Isn't it weird that the only way they want to tell you anything at all is when there's something wrong?

I went to work today but came home two hours early. I have been in charge of planning a birthday lunch for the division, which is something we do monthly (even if there are no birthdays for that month, as in June). It was a baked potatoes and salad lunch today. My plan was for three of us to bring already-baked potatoes, and we would reheat them in the oven. Never having tried to reheat forty baked potatoes (I MAY have over-planned, but in my defense, I was thinking of a normal Idaho potato, but we all brought gigantic baking potatoes) at once, I have been stressing over getting that to work out. I talked to my mom last night, and asked her opinion on how long at what temperature. Her comment of horror? "You know that a reheated baked potato isn't very good, don't you?" Of course, it was already planned by then, and my potatoes were already cooling for the fridge, so I had enough time to worry about my plan but not enough time to actually change it. Yay mom! ;) I brought in about fifteen potatoes in a cooler, thinking that if they cooked faster than I was planning for them to (two hours) I could just throw them in the cooler to keep warm--we didn't end up needing to do that, though. For the record, it did take a couple of hours to reheat them on 250 degrees F, and I turned it up to 325 for the last half hour or so. It might have been a little less if we hadn't needed to have the oven door open so much switching them around for even heat distribution. Anyway, the two points of this story are: 1) M did not approve of me carrying a heavy cooler of potatoes inside, so he stopped by my job on the way to work and carried them inside for me. Isn't that sweet? Also overkill because I am just pregnant, not.. you know.. an invalid, and I probably could carry fifteen potatoes, but terribly sweet nonetheless. 2) I might have stayed home if not for this birthday lunch, but I have been worrying about planning the thing for weeks now, and I wanted to see how it turned out. Very well, I think, or maybe I was just pregnancy-starving, but the potatoes did get hot enough (even if we had more than half of them left over.. cripes) and I thought it was very tasty. I happen to really like salad and baked potatoes for lunch, so I personally thought it was the best meal we've had in a while.. but then again, I am Potato's bitch... hence the decision to have it. I am really glad to have this over with. Normally, we have the thing at the end of the month, but I did NOT want to wait two more weeks for it. A lot can happen in two weeks!

Another reason I wanted to go to work this morning was that I had several things in mind that I needed to get done. One of them was finally turning in my maternity leave paperwork. I felt strongly that it had to get done this week, and I am off tomorrow. Here's hoping that wasn't a psychic flash, and just me being very, very in tune with my Outlook calendar these days, where I had scheduled it with a due date of today. I do love my Outlook. Wish I could use it at home. I guess I could if I just used it as a calendar and not for email. (I have trouble with my home email working with Outlook. I rely heavily on rules, and they refuse to work at home.)

M is on his way home unexpectedly early. We had two messages on our answering machine on Sunday. They were more or less identical, but one of them said that there was a Scandinavian club meeting on Thursday, and one said Saturday. We assumed they were both valid because they commonly DO have board meetings on Thursday evenings, and the one on Saturday we knew about already--it's the annual business meeting, so we figured it was natural that they were holding a pre-meeting meeting to decide on the agenda. So he left work today and drove to Lexington, only to find... that no one else had showed up. Apparently the message was a mistake. Commentary withheld. Oh, well, nothing much lost.. except an hour or so of time and a bit of gas money. And now we're going to have a three-day weekend together! That shall be fabulous. I just hope that I'm not sick for all of it.

I should go work on a website, but I think I might go play with fabric. Ducky needs more cute stuff...