summer's here

Well, long time no post. It's late on a Monday. well past my bedtime - especially these days, but it's still far too warm to get to sleep. I tried. Took a cool shower after work and propped some pillows up in the corner of bed so I could flop awhile without resorting to the inevitable side position. It worked for a little while, and I did doze in and out.

The Bear tried real hard to make me happy today, and while the real plan didn't work, he still succeeded. He went out to the surplus/clearance store and found a refurbished air conditioner to try and cool off at least one area of the house for me. He hauled it up the stairs, picked through the installation manual and engineered an adaptation for our 'newer windows in old frames' arrangement, hoisted the window shaker up to mount it in the window, extruded himself through the remaining window space out to the roof to check that everything was solid, and did some extra beefing up just to be sure. I did go fetch the ladder for him so he could get off the roof a little less tortuously, and handed a few tools out the window to him, but he did his best to let me try and flop til the cooler came on.

Sadly, after all that, the refurbished unit was a dud, and he had to hoist it back out of the window and down the stairs again and hope he can get it repaired. So now we're both occupying ourselves until it either cools down enough inside to sleep comfortably or we're sufficiently exhausted to sleep anyway. Fortunately, this is rather unusual weather for the coast. The ocean tends to keep things relatively mild year round. I've just got the extra internal furnace burning - I think the radiant heat off of my belly at night is keeping the Bear up more than the weather.

Well, I never was a big fan of the heat. And back in Kelowna it's a good bit warmer in the day than it is here, and it's not unusual at all. Long live the coast and send me an ocean breeze, eh?


So, since I'm still fairly awake, I'll fill you all in on the other happenings around here. It's been a busy couple of weekends. Last weekend we had the Bear's mom and stepdad out, and they helped with some of the prep work in the yard - moving a bunch of raspberries to the back to clear space for some deck modifications. This weekend we had my mom and stepdad over from the mainland. The guys tackled replacement of the deck steps and a couple of windows in what will be the baby room, while my mom tried valiantly to help me find some order in the chaos indoors. I 'supervised', and did what I could for everyone, which mostly consisted of running tools and parts up and down stairs and answering questions. And I did finally get the kitchen floor and hallway mopped, though the living area still needs some work. All in all not bad for a weekend's work.

Time to try for some sleep again - I find myself staring at the screen and blinking, like I'm expecting something to happen.

Attention Deficit Discovery

Okay, 'discovery' is perhaps too strong a word. It implies far more credibility than is warranted, but fits better in the title than unsubstantiated wild-a$$ theory. Perhaps 'diversion' or 'delusion' would be better.
Some of you may have heard a previous, related hypothesis from the Bear and I. I know we told someone, because I remember someone laughing hysterically at it - which was completely appropriate - I just can't remember who. For your amusement I'll repeat the background and original theory here before I add the new corollary.
Some of you who know the Bear know that he's quite ADD. If you know the Bear, but were not previously aware of the attention deficit, you might suddenly find a few things make more sense :) Anyhow, after we'd been married a few years, I learned a few things about ADD first hand, and over time found some good resources on ADD, particularly its effects into adulthood. The more I learned, the more I started to recognize certain common traits in myself. And the longer I was married to my favourite ADD adult, the more obvious and seemingly stronger some of these traits became. So in discussion with the Bear one day, we concluded that ADD is probably sexually transmitted.
So now you have the theory, here's the corollary. Since I've become pregnant (a condition also considered by some to be a sexually transmitted disease) I've noticed a certain intensification of some very ADD traits - and even the definite appearance of some I don't recall experiencing before. My best example of the latter is the complete inability to stick to one task for any length of time. This started first only at home, where the weekend's chores started to look like this: Wash one sinkful of dishes, wipe the stove but not the counter, spray cleaner in the upstairs bathtub, sweep the steps, wipe the kitchen counter and drain the sink, collect the bills from the coffee table, lose the pile of freshly collected bills, fill the bucket to mop the floor upstairs, respray the upstairs bath that's now dried again, and so on. And worst of all, it took awhile to recognize that I was even doing it.
Initially the work ethic and different stimuli at the office seemed to keep the effects isolated to home, but this week I started to notice it affecting me there, too. I have two computers at work, the PC provided by the client on which I do the majority of work, and the laptop provided by the company, which I tend to use more for corporate admin tasks, learning and research. On my worst day, I found myself frequently needing to jump over to the laptop to find some other brief distraction off the corporate intranet before I could continue with whatever job I had allocated my day to doing. Or I'd jump back and forth between two primary tasks at random points once or twice an hour.
So with this evidence before me, I've been thinking, "If relatively 'safe' sex over a number years with the same ADD partner results in a relatively slow but discernible transmission of select ADD traits, perhaps taking that act to its more frightening (admit it, parents, you were terrified, too) fruition in procreation results in a correspondingly more dramatic increase in ADD manifestations.
Of course, there's always the possibility that the original theory is flawed, that I've always been affected by ADD-like issues at a level somewhat below the radar and the fairly subjective clinical definition, and that it was merely my experience with and education about ADD in adults that made me conscious of it. And maybe all this recent stuff on which the corollary is based is just a typical effect of hormones. Or maybe the particular effect of hormones on a low-grade ADD adult. Or maybe a sign of an ADD adult-to-be growing within me.
Since I'm a first time mom, and there's never been any man for me but my same favourite ADD Bear, I can't exactly argue for a scientifically viable control case. I'd love to know if anyone out in academia has done some broader research on this; I'll admit I've poked around online to see if anyone was talking about it, but to no avail. Clearly I need more research, so send me your theories, your anecdotal evidence, your experiences. Maybe if I collect and formulate enough I can win me an Ig Nobel prize!

Score!

There's been tons of yard sales in our neighbourhood the last month or so, and though I'm not a 'pro' or a regular of any sort, I'll often pop my head in if I notice one in walking distance to see if there's anything interesting.
There were signs up for one just down the block this morning when I took the dogs out (still one dog at a time till Keko heals up). They had a couple of buckets of baby clothes all at 50 cents plus some nicer outfits - some brand names and such - for a buck or two. I may be new at this, but I know from shopping for nephews and nieces how pricey they can be (right up there with maternity clothes - grumble) and I've been well-warned how quickly they grow through them. So I picked through all the piles - largely filtered out the very pink and some other things I just didn't like - and brought home a grocery bag stuffed full, plus a set of wooden alphabet blocks for $11. And to bring the total up to the average cost of a new brand name baby t-shirt, I got a pair of compact Bushnell binocs for myself at $15.
That was kinda fun.