Thanks, Lou. I do miss the part where it’s hard not to dance around, but I have all the energy of a bucket of sap. I’d nod my head in time with the music, but for those of you who don’t know this little fun-fact about pregnancy, your hair falls out like crazy; nodding my head produces a shower of shed.

Today the medicine is at least keeping the nausea at bay. The last two days were rough. Moments where I’d find myself spent from heave-spasms, standing over the disposal too exhausted to do anything but hold my mouth open while the pasty clumps of my last meal continued to crawl up my throat and over the back of my tongue assembly-line stye. I’m making this sound like a terminal disease. Let’s just say if I’m not in the 50 percent of women for whom this vomit-fest ends after 14 months or so, I fear I will lose it completely and start throwing puke at the walls with my hands. The delivery room nurse will have to spirit away my newborn for its own protection. “Welcome to the world, little baby; sorry your mommy went insane before you got here.”

Maybe I just need the semester to start. I’m teaching two classes, both on Thursdays, starting in a few weeks. If I am still this sick, I’ll be locating the classroom trash-can up front by the white board. Can’t you just see the end-of-semester student evaluations? “This teacher was pretty good, but the hurling sort of made it hard to concentrate.” Actually, I’m about to enter the window when this is supposed to all abate, and if it doesn’t, my doctor and I will be exploring further medicinal options. Either way, CLASS WILL GO ON!

Right now Mia is trying to convince me she is an outdoor cat. “See me meowing by the front door? It’s time for me to go out.” Yeah, just like all those other times. Not. Meanwhile, Linus continues to break in this same pizza box. Sarah-Architect suggested we put the pizza box on our bed. I explained that a lot of the POINT of the pizza box is that it gets Linus to sleep somewhere OTHER than our bed—this is why Stevel refers to it as “the decoy.” Apparently Sarah-Architect’s cat, who is affectionate on her own terms only, has taken to sleeping in a clear plastic storage box. Sarah-Architect revealed that she put this box on her bed, and much to her delight, the cat sleeps inside—this is the closest to snuggling her cat has permitted, although she says when she put her arm over the box, the cat stood up as if to say, “Look, I think I made my boundaries real clear when we did this.”

Another recent cat development: We’ve been watching the Planet Earth series on our HD TV. Fantastic, of course. Even Linus thinks so—he has been watching TV with us, which amuses me so much I can’t even watch the TV myself. A cat! Watching TV! If I catch him trying to program the TiVo, I will laugh myself to DEATH!