I feel lousy this afternoon. And a little bit nauseous.
Yay!!!
With the pregnancies where I knew my exact date of ovulation, I always got sick at 5 weeks to the day, so if that is true of this pregnancy as well, then I was one day off in my guess of my ovulation day. (It's a little hard to be 100% sure on those things when you have a night-nursing toddler plus post-miscarriage hormones throwing off your charts.)
So let's go with this:

"The changes to your growing embryo are not quite as drastic this week as they've been in the last few weeks. Growth is now largely focused on their little head, which is starting to develop much more rapidly than the rest of their tiny body. This is because their amazing brain is undergoing some very crucial and rapid development in order to effectively regulate their heart rate, blood circulation, and other vital functions. As for the rest of their miniature body, what were simple limb buds last week are limb flippers this week and the tail is more expressed. Amazingly, within a mere five weeks your little miracle is already developing the rudimentary forms of their liver, pancreas, lungs, stomach and nasal pits while their little heart is already increasing its circulation. Your baby is now a whopping 4-6mm in length."

Ladies and gentlemen, my little one is only as big as a grain of rice, but he/she has a heartbeat. That just blows my mind. ☺

Question of the Day: Picking Birth Months

So I've made it clear on more than one occasion that I have not had much control over the timing of my children. They have come to me when they (and God) planned, not when I did. HOWEVER, a lot of people seem to be able to have a baby whichever old month they choose.

So, if you could pick what months your children were born in, what would you choose? Why?

I have several criteria, some logical, some silly:

1--I like February, May, September, and October because they have pretty birthstones and I have a mother's ring so I'm allowed to care about stuff like birthstones

(amethyst, emerald, sapphire, and opal respectively, if you didn't know) you have to admit they are pretty stones! (but of course my kids were born in June and January and this one is due in November. Oh well!)

2--I think it's nicer as a kid to have a birthday that is around a half-year away from Christmas. It makes it easier to get through the year when the two present-getting days are spread out rather than right next to each other. I have a July birthday and always found it satisfactory. Hubby said his January birthday was rather lame in that regard.

3--I think spring/summer babies are nice because then by the time winter and cold/flu season rolls around they are older and have a stronger immune system.

4--Once you have a kid or two, I think it's nice to spread out the birthdays...have everybody in different months. One of my sisters-in-law has 3 kids with birthdays in May. She planned that because she feels that May is the perfect month to have a baby. Well, be that as it may (no pun intended), it means that she's got three birthdays in a two week period every year. There's potential for financial strain for presents, stress over multiple parties, and the risk that the poor kids will end up having their celebrations combined. It's almost as bad as having your birthday on Christmas Day. So let's hear it for spreading out the birthdays! (It also keeps the mother's ring more interesting!)

5--A baby at the end of the year is nice for financial purposes (dare I confess that I'm thrilled that this one is coming within the year? Because for us it's not just the tax deduction, it's also the PFD--that oil dividend that Alaskan residents get. It's a lot of money!)

Telling

When do you tell people? You know what I mean—you get the pregnancy test: you know, your spouse knows, your chosen baby-catcher knows (or will soon)...but do you wait to tell your family? Mom, dad, siblings? What about your older kids (the soon-to-be-big-brothers and sisters)? Friends? Neighbors? Do you bring it up? Do you mention it if the topic comes up? Do you wait for them to notice the belly (or the morning sickness) and ask? Do you tell everyone right away? Or are you one of those women who even waits a while to tell the new daddy? (Once I waited a whole day to tell Hubby--I will definitely not do that again!)
With my first pregnancy we told our immediate family within a few days of when we found out, but we held off on telling anyone else. We figured that the smart thing was to wait until the end of the first trimester—after all, that’s when the danger of miscarriage is past, right? So at 13 weeks gestation I finally, gleefully, sent an email off to the extended family and friends, telling them our happy news…and less than a week later I had to send them another email telling them that I had miscarried. Few of them had time to share our joy, and some congratulations even arrived after they were obsolete. Since almost no one had known about the baby, almost no one was there to grieve with us.
With my second pregnancy I had a different perspective. After all, it’s not as though there are degrees of pregnancy—either you are pregnant or you are not—and if you are, then it should not matter whether you are 3 weeks or 13 weeks or 30 weeks along when you tell people. It should be whenever you want it to be—because when you make the announcement has no bearing on whether you are going to miscarry! (This seems so obvious in theory, but when you’re in the situation somehow it’s a lot fuzzier.) Anyway, with my second pregnancy I started telling everyone right away. At 13 weeks along I miscarried, but this time I was not alone.
Based on those two experiences, I have concluded that I am definitely in the “tell everybody early” camp. I may not tell everyone the day I get the test, but they’ll hear about it within a few weeks. There are those who will argue that telling the world sooner will make the pregnancy seem longer. Um, a pregnancy is going to be the same length whether people know about it or not. I also think that the family and neighbors are going to feel like those weeks go by a lot faster than mom is, and mom already knows!

Motherhood Part III: Quiverfull

If you missed the other posts about motherhood, you can see them here:
Part I (on not delaying childbearing)
Part II (mother staying at home)
Part IV (for those who are childless)

Today in Part III you get to hear my thoughts on family planning. (Aren't you lucky?!)

Part I has a comprehensive list of links to my sources, but I've tried to include links for each individual quote as well. ☺ All italicized/indented portions of the post are quotes, boldfacing of course is mine.
I posted once before about the religious reasons behind having large families, but today's post has more depth, and lots more quotes.

~~~~~~~~

Whenever someone asks us how many kids we hope to have, Hubby smiles and says, "well, at least one more." This is because we don't know how many children we want. We know we'd like several, but how many that means we don't know. We have decided to just take it one child at a time, and see what feels right at the time.

"Children are an heritage of the Lord and . . . happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them" (Psalm 127: 3-5 ).

There is a recent movement, or rather, there is a recent name for an old movement, and it's called "being quiverfull." It comes from the scripture in Psalms that I quoted above. Being a quiverfull family does not mean that you have to have 20 children, or even 8, rather it means that you do your family planning with the Lord, and are open to accepting and raising as many children as He sees fit to send you. I know quiverfull families who have 4 children and families who have 23. I know quiverfull families that are growing slowly via biological means, and families that grow 2 or 4 children at a time via adoption. The point is not about how many children one has, but about the attitude with which one approaches family planning.

The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to their potential for parenthood as husband and wife. We declare that God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force. [link]

Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children. “Children are an heritage of the Lord” (Psalms 127:3). Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, to teach them to love and serve one another, to observe the commandments of God and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live. Husbands and wives—mothers and fathers—will be held accountable before God for the discharge of these obligations. [link]

Whereas parents are obligated to teach their children, I would suggest that having several children can be a great help. Children learn by example, and having lots of examples is very helpful. (Might the older child teach the younger one something naughty? Well of course they might, but trust me that we oldest kids teach the younger ones a lot of good things too.) Also, I think that when the microcosm of your family has the diversity of multiple ages and personalities, it's a better preparation for life in the real world.

I have always loved the words of Solomon: "Children are an heritage of the Lord and . . . happy is the man [and woman] that hath [their] quiver full of them" (see Psalm 127: 3-5 ).
I know the special blessings of a large and happy family, for my dear parents had a quiver full of children. Being the oldest of eleven children, I saw the principles of unselfishness, mutual consideration, loyalty to each other, and a host of other virtues developed in a large and wonderful family with my noble mother as the queen of that home. ~ETBenson [link]

I come from a family of 9 children. I loved always having a sibling around--sure, sometimes they get on your nerves, but on the other hand when there are lots of siblings to choose from, it's pretty easy to just go away from the annoying one and play with somebody else instead. I had often thought that only children must be lonely, but I never realized it fully until my own son was an only child for over 6 years. Of course the first 3 of those were before Hubby and I met and married, but then it took us 3 years and several miscarriages before we moved up to being a two-kid family. I watched my son develop into a lonely child. He was accustomed to being the only kid in the house, and became pretty self-centered and demanding (more than I ever remember being at his age). In some ways he did not really grow up, because he was still 'the baby.' When we finally did have a second child, the transition was really hard for him. Obviously the spacing between our children was not of our preference, but if I had ever doubted the wisdom of having children closer together, my experiences suggest to me that having kids two or three years apart is easier on them than if they are 6 years apart.

Do not curtail the number of your children for personal or selfish reasons. Material possessions, social convenience, and so-called professional advantages are nothing compared to a righteous posterity. In the eternal perspective, children--not possessions, not position, not prestige--are our greatest jewels. ~ETBenson [link]

For anyone who argues that having a large family is just too expensive, I will tell you that the largest families I know are usually the most frugal. And no, that doesn't mean that everyone wears thrice-patched hand-me-downs and lives on beans and rice. It does mean that they grow gardens and take care of their things and learn to work hard....but I've always considered hard work, frugality, and carefulness to be virtues. I know lots of big families who live comfortably enough on one income, and often that one income is not particularly large. My dad is a school teacher. The question of 'affording children' is not about dollar amounts so much as it is about willingness to take what you have and just figure things out.
Kids from big families also learn how to get along with other people--it's a survival skill. They learn to be generous and considerate of others. They learn to be friends with people of a variety of ages; in other words, they learn what real life is like while they are still living at home. There are enough of them to help with fixing the meals and cleaning up the messes that they make--more important life skills. There are enough kids to form teams and play games or sports without having to wait for friends/neighbors to come over. Children from large families have built-in life-long friends no matter where they go or how often they move.
Kids from big families also get to be part of fun things like this.

Brigham Young emphasized: "There are multitudes of pure and holy spirits waiting to take tabernacles, now what is our duty?--To prepare tabernacles for them; to take a course that will not tend to drive those spirits into the families of the wicked, where they will be trained in wickedness, debauchery, and every species of crime. It is the duty of every righteous man and woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can" (Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 197).
Yes, blessed is the husband and wife who have a family of children. The deepest joys and blessings in life are associated with family, parenthood, and sacrifice. To have those sweet spirits come into the home is worth practically any sacrifice. ~ETBenson [link]

Now please trust me that I know from experience that some families will not be able to have as many children as others. Some may not be able to have any at all. Some of us miscarry, or have physical limitations or complications which prevent us from having many children (or any at all). Some have mental health issues which affect their ability to be parents. The point is not about how many children we have or how they come to us, no, the point of all these quotes is that we should not avoid children for selfish reasons like money, education, or social position. We should be open to having children, and to having as many as we are able (physically, mentally, etc).

We should make God part of our family planning--and we should plan to have families!

In Which I Change My Mind and Knit Something I Never Thought I'd Knit

Last fall I traded on etsy to get this gorgeous handspun yarn called "Autumn Fire" (the photos really don't do justice to the brilliant colors).
I knew I wanted to use it to make something for me, but I couldn't decide what...first I was going to make a scarf, but being handspun yarn that bulky ball didn't have that much yardage on it (only about 100yds between the two balls), and I was only a couple of inches into the scarf when I realized that I would run out of yarn long before I had the length of scarf I wanted. So I frogged that and went back to thinking...
Finally I settled on this:
It's just a simple 1x1 rib knit in the round (for those of you who understand knitting lingo) and voila, warm ears even when my hair is up! Hats always seem to pull up and leave the lower half of my ears exposed and cold, but this keeps the entire ear warm. Plus it is ever so pretty. ☺


So, I have to confess, pretty much right up until this last month when I started making this thing I always thought they were kinda corney. I mean, why make a hat with no top, right? But then I was getting frustrated with hats not working when I wanted to put my hair up and realized that this sort of thing has a place.
I still don't get fingerless gloves though. I mean, really, isn't the point of a glove to warm your fingers? So why make it with no fingers? And if you're going to do it, why call it a 'fingerless glove' shouldn't it be called a 'wristwarmer'?

Musings on Home Pregnancy Tests

They have all these fancy home pregnancy tests now… “no need to try to decipher what the lines mean” they advertise, “our test shows you the words ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant!’” Um, huzzah? Hubby made the excellent point that if someone is too dumb to be able to read the directions and understand that one line means no and two lines means yes, well, they’ve got no business having kids.
Yeah, I’m snarky. I’m allowed to be—I’m hormonal.
Also I am smart enough to understand one line verses two lines. So there!

Heart Attacks are Different for Women

Do your self breast exam!

(don't you just love all the little sites out there for breast cancer awareness and research? They have all these fun little buttons and slogans... ☺ )

I appreciated all your input last month about which topics you'd like to hear more about. I'll get to them. ☺ But I recently received the following story via email and felt it would be a good idea to share it here.
Hopefully by now most women are aware that when we have heart attacks, we usually do not have the same symptoms as men--the stabbing pain in the chest, cold sweat, pain in the left arm... here is a firsthand account from a woman who had a heart attack, including excellent descriptions of how it felt.

I had a heart attack about 10 :30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect might've brought it on.

I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, 'A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.

A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you've been in a hurry, grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water. That hurried bite seems to feel like you've swallowed a golf ball going down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn't have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation--the only trouble was that I hadn't taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.

After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasming), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum (breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).

This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. 'AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening -- we've all read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI [Miocardial Infarction aka Heart Attack] happening, haven't we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God, I think I'm having a heart attack!

I lowered the footrest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this IS a heart attack, I shouldn't be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else ...on the other hand, if I don't, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in a moment.

I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics... told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I didn't feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, if so, to unbolt the door then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.

I unlocked the door, laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness. I don't remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way. I briefly awaken when we arrived and saw that the Cardiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like 'Have you taken any medications?') but I couldn't make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and partner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stents to hold open my right coronary artery.

I know it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the Paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St. Jude are only minutes away from my home. My Cardiologist was already to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on restarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.

Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.

1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body not the usual men's symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act). It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn't know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion. They just take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they'll feel better in the morning when they wake up ... which doesn't happen.
My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you've not felt before. It's better to have a 'false alarm' visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!

2. Note that I said 'Call the Paramedics.' And if you can take an Aspirin.
Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!
Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER - you are a hazard to others on the road.
Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be speeding and looking anxiously at what's happening with you instead of the road.
Do NOT call your doctor -- he doesn't know where you live and if it's at night you won't reach him anyway, and if it's daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn't carry the equipment in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.

3. Don't assume it couldn't be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it's unbelievably high and/or accompanied by high blood pressure). MI's are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let's be careful and be aware. The more we know, the better chance we could survive.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this mail sends it to 10 people, you can be sure that we'll save at least one life.

And now I will tell you my own story.
I woke up one night in the middle of the night with intense pain in my chest. It felt as though I was being compressed and I found it difficult to breathe. I also knew that womens risk factors are not always the same as mens, so in spite of being in my early 20s, at a healthy weight, and with a fairly good diet, I genuinely wondered if I was having heart attack. It was one of the scariest things that's ever happened to me. After a little while it dissapated, and I went back to sleep, but the following morning I couldn't get it out of my mind, so I made some calls...I finally concluded that it would be a good idea to go into the doctor's office and be checked out (thankfully our insurance covered this). They did a chest x-ray and an EKG and concluded that I had not had a heart attack. It was all a bit embarrassing after the fact (because, you know, it was probably just bad indigestion...), but I think about the tragic results that occur so often when a woman who IS having a heart attack passes it off as indigestion...and I don't think I overreacted. We need to know what our symptoms are, because if we have a heart attack, it's probably not gonna look like the ones on the movies.

In Which Things Become Complicated...

I really enjoyed being pregnant with the Bear. Sure, I had the morning sickness ikkies, but they mostly involved feeling tired and a bit nauseous; I rarely actually threw up and I wasn't sleeping on the bathroom floor or carrying baggies with me everywhere. By week 14 or so that had passed, and by week 16 I could feel the little guy start to move. In the last couple of weeks it got harder to sleep comfortably and sometimes I had to get up in the night to pee... But for the most part, I loved being pregnant. I loved feeling a little one inside me moving around. I loved talking to him and singing to him. I loved how easy it was to care for him while he was in-utero (no crying, no diapers!) I loved knowing that pretty soon he'd be out to play.
So, this morning when I saw that a friend of mine had joined the facebook group "We love/loved being pregnant" I clicked the button to join up too. Of course when one does this, the message goes up to all your friends "Jenni has joined the group 'We love/loved being pregnant' [and also another group which has no bearing on this story]."
Apparently this was interpreted by many as an announcement that I was pregnant. It was not intended to be an announcement, but people took it as such. (Argh, dumb ol facebook!)

Here is the real complication, you see, because just yesterday I found out something:

☺

For all the assuming about the announcement that I wasn't trying to make...y'all were actually right. So while I was here at home, oblivious to my little faux-pas, Hubby was at work on a break (for his planning period) and one of our mutual facebook friends saw him online and utilized the chat feature to ask him straight out if we were expecting. Hubby, caught off-guard, didn't reply with a vague "why do you ask?" but surmised that I must have said something, and so confirmed the fact. Then he called me and told me that I'd better call our folks NOW so that they heard it from us and not via the grapevine.
Oops.
So much for waiting a couple of weeks before telling everyone. Last time we waited until 10ish weeks (at Hubby's request) but my own inclination has always been to tell right away, so in spite of it being inadvertent, I guess this time we did it my way.


So, yes, a new Wild Thing is anticipated to arrive in November. My long-term readers know that this is something very planned and long-awaited (although November's birthstone is not one I'd have picked for my mother's ring...but neither are June or January, so oh well!). I'm thrilled at the news in spite of being caught slightly off-guard--I rather thought we'd missed the timing on this one with Hubby being out of town earlier this month combined with my anything-but-usual cycle schedule due to last month's craziness. We are discussing an appropriate animal nickname/totem for this one, so we can start calling him/her something. Hubby suggested Orca (I think because our Alaskan wildlife calendar had a Bear, then a Wolf, and march is an Orca), but I vetoed any blubber-heavy creatures. I'm leaning toward Lynx or Hawk...maybe Tiger or Eagle. I'm open to suggestions of course (it has to be high on the food chain, a creature with characteristics worth emulating, and yes, it should be beautiful ☺).

You Might Live in Pelican if...

this is for all my readers who keep asking to hear more about life in Pelican...

I confess to swiping some of this list from my SouthEast Alaska facebook group, but some are my own addition too...I left a couple that don't specifically apply to me cuz they're so funny, but most of these are either about me or one of my friends here.

You Might Live in Pelican (or SouthEast Alaska) if:

- People hear that you live in Alaska and ask about the polar bears/tundra/constant darkness, and you have to explain that you live in the 'other' part of Alaska...the part with rainforest, grizzly bears, salmon, fishing, cruises, whales, and bald eagles...

- You live in the tiny town of Pelican on the very large island of Chichagof, but your family still refers to "Pelican Island" and thinks it's little

- You know what muskeg is

- Anything short of a torrential downpour and raining sideways is "good weather"

- You cannot stay inside when the sun is out, no matter how briefly

- By the time you get your coat and boots on the sun is gone again, but you stay outside for a few minutes anyway

- You have worn X-tra Tuffs to school or work or on a date

- You own more than one pair of X-tra Tuffs --->

- You think name brands are Grundens, Helle Hansen, X-tra Tuff, and Carhartt

- Your Christmas list includes such items as boat parts, raingear, long underwear, or rifle ammunition

- You know everybody in your town, and I mean EVERYBODY

- You also know their dogs by name (and which dogs will be nice to your dog/toddler)

- You know that boat dogs--male or female--squat to pee, even on land. Raising a leg on a boat = falling over

- The kids in town wear lifevests (aka 'float coats') everywhere, all the time

- You take up knitting because the weekly knitting circle is the only social event in town (unless you like to hang out in smoke-filled bars with drunk fishermen)

- You drag a plastic sled to the post office/store to bring home your mail/packages/groceries.

- You keep a tidetable in the house because your son likes to walk to/from school over the tideflats, and he doesn't always pay attention to whether the tide is in or out before he starts walking

- You have to go into Juneau to go shopping (and it's expensive, so you only go a couple of times a year, or else get everything shipped on the seaplane/ferry)

- Ferry day is worth canceling school (so everyone can go help unload their family's groceries)

- You can't remember the last time you locked your front door, even when you were out of town for a week

- You have thought about inventing a bumper sticker that reads "this car does not brake for cannery workers" (variations include same phrase in other languages or substituting "tourists" for "cannery workers")

- You would put the bumper sticker on your 4-wheeler or golf cart...because you don't actually have a car

- Riding in someone elses golf cart feels really fast (because you're used to walking)

- Two 4-wheelers/golf carts within sight of each other constitutes a traffic jam

- You have been married 35 years and have 5 kids but have never had a drivers license...because there are no cars in town so who needs one

- After living in Pelican for a few months you visit Juneau and borrow your cousin's car, and while tooling down the highway at what seems like a good clip you notice everyone passing you, and so you look at the speedometer to verify that you are going 45mph, and realize that you're doing 32.

- Fishing is not a hobby but a job

- You know what dogs, reds, humpys, coho, pinks, silvers, sockeye, chinook, chum, and kings are and can tell them all apart by sight OR taste

- Everyone you know has a picture like this --->

- When you can tell the difference between wild and farmed salmon in a restaurant, even if the waiters can't

- You have a bumper sticker that looks like this:

Friends DON'T let friends
EAT FARMED FISH

(and you display it in your window)

- You know who will (and won't) ship a fish box fast enough that the fish is still good when it arrives

- It's not uncommon to come home and find a 'big king salmon' in the sink that your neighbors dropped off because they didn't have room in their freezer.... so you eat it for dinner

- You tell people down south you are a commercial fisherman and they ask if it's like Deadliest Catch

- You are more proud to be an Alaskan than an American and you don't really get offended when people mistake you for being Canadian

- You know that "SouthEast" means SEA (southeast alaska) and that it's actually north and west of "The NorthWest"

- You know that Seattle is down south, which is totally unrelated to The South (where people eat gumbo and say "y'all"). People from down south just don't understand . . .

- You have spent 30+ hours on a ferry on one trip, and you can recognize every one of them from 3 miles away

- You have taken a float plane or a commercial fishing vessel for a school trip

- You've been stuck in Sitka, Gustavus, Hoonah, Angoon, or Juneau because of a wimpy pilot who circled over your hometown until you were too dizzy to know what's going on and then landed you somewhere else
- The lady at the seaplane office leaves her home number on the answering machine for the days when it's foggy/windy/stormy and she won't be getting down to the office

- You have been on a seaplane flight where all 6 people in the cabin applauded the pilot for landing you safely on the water after a pee-your-pants scary ride involving "flying by braille" in the fog or falling 1000 feet in 2 seconds (yay wind!)

- You're not the least bit baffled by city names like Ketchikan, Chichagof, Baranof, and Klukwan, and you know that Gustavus is pronounced "Gus-TAVE-us"

- Puddle jumping is part of your cross country or track teams' regular practices

- You only go to school on Wednesdays during your sports' season because you're traveling the rest of the time

- You look forward to school trips as mini-vacations off the island and shopping opportunities

- You have gone to high school basketball or wrestling regionals even if you weren't competing in anything, simply because otherwise you would have been the only person left in your town.

- Papa Murphy's Take n Bake pizza IS delivery (and it comes on a seaplane, and the entire town orders on the same day to share the freight cost)

- You have taken a skiff to get to school (a skiff is what non-alaskans would refer to as "a motorboat" or something with no cabin and that's too small for commercial fishing)

- You travel down south to visit family and grandma points out a songbird to your toddler...and he looks and looks but doesn't seem to see it, and then you realize that the only birds anyone has ever pointed out to him before were great blue herons and bald eagles

Jane and Me

So, I have a confession. Brace yourself ladies, but I have never read a book by Jane Austen. Ever.
I have seen several of the movies (which I realize doesn't count) and I hated every single one.

Since all my friends raved about Austen though, I dutifully pulled Pride & Prejudice off the shelf and dug in. I think I got partway into the second chapter before I had to give it up.
Please understand that it's not about the language or style (I read Shakespeare for pleasure and didn't have a problem getting through Dickens). No, it seems to be Miss Jane's stories themselves that disagree with me.



But then a few weeks ago I saw a movie. You can probably guess which movie it was:and (are you ready for this?) I loved it. I didn't really expect to love it, since I have never loved anything Jane, but I'd heard that it was really popular, and (since our tiny library mostly caters to the fishermen--ie, horror and violence) when I saw it on the shelf I snatched it up. And it was fabulous. I figure I should get my hands on the book since books are always better than the movies made from them, right?
So, due to the movie, I have decided to give Jane another chance. No matter how annoyed I was with any past experience, or how annoyed I may become in the middle of this one... I'm going to read the entire book. (And if I one day suddenly stop blogging, you may assume that I died from the experience.)
Based on JABC, I think have decided which book I want to read, however, I'd be very interested to hear your recommendations and favorites (and why you recommend or love them, of course!) If you're one of the few with whom I've already discussed this, and you already know my choice, no telling, ok?



I can still hate the regency dresses though. They make everybody look fat. Who thought of that style anyway? And the hair?! ewwww!