Talkative Day...

I tried to do a big "picture catch up" post last night w/pictures from our anniversary, my parents visit, and a couple of other things, but they would not upload and I was not in the mood to give it a second go. I will try again soon.

I am now officially reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - the biggest book on my "read before the baby comes" list that I previously posted. The copy I have is 1455 pages long, which is about average I believe. I am on page 122 - which is both significant in that I am not even 10% of the way through, and that it took me this long to really get into it. The writing is extremely theatrical in nature/narration style. Most of the time, instead of stating what a character is feeling or thinking, Tolstoy describes some physical appearance or characteristic that is a "tell" as to how they are feeling, almost like it is a play and he is describing how the actor should portray the character. I do look forward to continuing it. The story itself is supposed to be of epic proportion - concerning the invasion of Napolean into Russia, but right now it is just your standard society scheming and plotting, courtship and inheritance, sex and death. I do look forward to continuing it and am definitely feeling like I can make it through, which I really did not feel like was an option 1-2 months ago. Therefore, I think my inability to read anything serious in the past couple of months was related to my own psyche - the chaos of friends leaving, stress at work, summer business, and not to pregnancy brain.

DH and I got cable back! They came and reinstalled basic cable for us on Tuesday morning. In the next week or so I will cancel our Netflix. I don't know if I have discussed this decision on here or not. You may or may not know that Netflix announced a significant price increase to take effect Sept 1st. Basically they are going from packages that combine DVD and streaming services to seperate packages for each, that cost the same as what we are currently paying for both. So in other words, we currently pay $9.99 for DVD and streaming service. If we wanted to continue getting the same service we would have to pay $7.99 for the DVDs and $7.99 for streaming, for an overall price of $15.98, a 60% price increase. My response to this was two-sided. The rational/calculating side of me recognized that we almost NEVER use the DVD service and we would probably wouldn't even miss it if we just switched to streaming and continued using Netflix. The less calculating side of me was pissed off big time. A company that's service is totally entertainment can't just raise their prices 60% and expect their not to be a backlash. And in this case, they gave no real justification for the price range - and denied most of the justifications provided by the media (expense increases etc). I felt like the company was being totally scheming and not being honest with its customers. SO, in short. The combination of the price raise itself, the way the company did not explain the price increase, and the impending start of football (which cable is highly convenient for), has made us decide to drop Netflix and get cable again. The expectation is we will keep cable at least through January/the BCS games, and then decide exactly what we want to do. We should have a little wee one then, and we are not entirely sure how that will play out in terms of TV usage. On one hand, DH and I agree that we want to significantly cut back our our media usage when baby arrives (TV and internet crap) - not overexpose them to it, not rely on it, and when they get older, limit their use. On the other hand, we fully recognize that a TV may be our best friend when it is 2am and we are up with a nursing or screaming infant, trying to keep ourselves awake - and that cable will be much more effective at this than broadcast that goes dead at night. So... wait and see wait and see... our mantra on SO many things.

I am clearly in a talkative mood today!! So why not keep it going. Want to hear about my crazy/creepy dream last night? I have spoken to a few people who have "movie" dreams - so I know they are not uncommon, but I am not sure if EVERYONE has them or not. Probably not. What I mean by movie dreams is dreams where you are in a movie - either a character or actor - and are aware of it, but still are experiencing the emotions and realistic feelings of the story itself - or maybe you switch between being a character and an audience member, or a character and a director, or anything like that. This was a movie dream. I dreamt I was in a store talking to the store owner, like a little convenience store. He asked me how things were going and I told him that things were good, that I was going to be in the 3rd Batman movie, and infact my plotline started as soon as I left this store. He seemed very concerned about tis and asked me what role I had and how my plotline went. I told him I did not know how it went exactly, but I was not worried because this was the third movie in a trilogy so I thought there must be a happy ending. He still seemed worried, wanted details on where I was going to start my plotline, what I knew about my role, etc. I gave him what info I had, he just seemed so suspicious, but I thought he was being paranoid. I eventually left the store and walked the block or two to my house where my plot started. I was supposed to go home and meet my husband for a nice datenight in. (Not real DH, a character husband). I went in to the house and something was clearly wrong. All the sudden gunmen appeared holding hubby hostage, and they took me hostage. They were clearly waiting for something, discussing amongst themselves what to do. Hubby and I were crouched in a corner trying not to cause problems. I was afraid, but still felt like things would turn out OK. I thought Batman would break in and rescue us, or perhaps the guy from the store that had been so concerned was actually a hero character. But no one came. The gunmen decided I needed to do something, like call the bank to transfer money or something? Or call the police to try and get batman to come? I am not entirely sure. They took me into the kitchen to make the call. When I came back to the front room, my hubby was hanging dead from the ceiling fan, they had killed him. I freaked out, it was unreal. I did not believe it was happening and tried to get him down, tried to beat up the gunmen, etc. I was yelling at them and too myself that this is not how my plotline went, that it couldn't be. Then all the sudden something clicked in my head and I realized I was not the protagonist of the movie, I was the bad guy. I was catwoman, and this was the little clip at the beginning of the movie that showed how I got to be so hateful and evil. That I was already blaming Batman for my husbands death because he HADNT showed up to save us. I could feel myself turning evil, and I knew there would be no happy ending. Then I woke up. Fun Stuff. For the record- there is a third Batman movie coming out soon, but I don't know how soon. It is the third in the trilogy they are doing, and it does have catwoman in it. That is about all I know about it, so its weird I had such a strange dream. I really don't know what the plot will be and the character of catwoman has always confused me (she just does not seem that evil?). I have not been reading/seeing ads for the new movie and have not thought about it in months, so I have no idea what brought it up. It will be interesting to see when the movie comes out if they do any sort of background for her. Also of interest - this bizarre dream, like earlier mentioned reading issues, is not a product of pregnancy. I know that people have vivid dreams during pregnancy - but really this dream was well within the normal paramaters of what my dreams are like.

While we are talking about dreams, this is actually the second dream of note I have had this week. On Saturday or Sunday night I dreamed that DH got a promotion at work, that he replaced someone above him whose job he was already doing - we were both very excited about it and I was proud. He was a bit worried about the additional stress, but we were both excited about the pay raise. This dream came without obvious prompting. Once again, promotion was not something we had talked about for months and I can't identify a clear trigger. In this case, however, it seems there MUST have been a trigger for it, because on Tuesday DH found out he is getting a promotion! While it won't be to replace someone as in the dream, it will make him so he is getting paid the same ammount as the other people on his team who do the same type of work. Premonition? Possible, but I don't really believe in them for such matters. More likely he did mention in passing something about his annual review coming up or whatever and my imagination did the rest. The point is - congrats DH!!! combine that w/my impending "step up" raise at work and things are looking good for little turtle to come (financially).

Is that enough rambling for one day? I think so. See you some other day...