Either I'm taking the time to find the pleasures in the small things or, as I said to AH, I'm lowering my expectations. Whatever, it's working. Actually, I like to think I have always found the pleasure in the small things; now I am just trying to fit them in a different place. Like Tuesday, a good day. So what if in order to get my NY Times paper (and crossword!) and a decent cup of coffee, I had to go to a Whole Foods? I still got to sit outside and slowly and patiently read and puzzle and eat warm peach and ginger scones in the sun.

I then spent most of the day in the Duke Fine Arts Library which was heart-paralyzingly happy making - though I could see about a hundred ways to rearrange the space to make it flow better. Some of my best thinking happens in a library when I randomly pick up books and jot down ideas in my notebook and doodle and write down words I love and make connections, hours and hours of thinking and reading. Right now I am obsessed with thinking and reading about architecture, which is directly tied in to our dream of A House of Our Own and my constant searching through the Realtor's webpages.

Then I walked to Downtown Durham and the rare/old bookstore was having a sale. And in the doorway was a couple of hardcover Cynthia Voigt's. "Homecoming" by Cynthia Voigt was one of Those Books for me as a kid, brought home by my Mom from the library and I still re-read it every few years. The whole Tillerman saga is as comforting to me as a quilt. So when I picked up "Seventeen Against the Dealer", the final book in the Tillerman series, and saw it was inscribed:

To Kay:
The last of the Tillermans, or so I hope
Cynthia Voigt

I had to have it. That note of exasperation, the sense that she was done, just done - perfect. And 50% off. I also found a children's book I had never heard of by my favourite Canadian poet, bp nichol illustrated by Anita Lobel.

With these in hand, I wandered over to Parker and Otis for what I had been craving all day, a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato. Sat on the porch with the gently circulating fans and my book and then a giant piece of key lime pie and wondered exactly why I had been sad about days all to myself and lots of reading. In five months or so, I will likely look back on these lazy days and want to weep.

Speaking of the baby, last night was "Meet the Midwives", a get-to-know-you session at the hospital I've chosen. It is hospital based birth but the midwives are your primary care, pre and post-natal and are your main labour advisors. Doctors only get involved if there are medical complications. They try not to induce or do c-sections, try as hard as they can. Their episiotimy rate is less than 1%, music to my ears. But as we trooped around the labour rooms, a gaggle of waddling pregnant women and their partners, and the nursery and the post-partum rooms I almost hyperventilated. This is where my kid will be born, I tried to convince myself. But I'm too young to do this! I thought, even as I looked around and noted that I was one of the older women there. I had this total West Coasty flash of indignation at the meeting - they kept referring to your partner as "Dad" and "the husband" over and over despite the fact that "partner" would have been actually inclusive AND there was a lesbian couple in the audience and single women - it just didn't jibe with what I thought mid-wives would do. "Good thing you got me legally knocked up", I whispered to AH, "Imagine if we were having a bastard-child!"

We Three, the Holy Family, are headed off on a pilgrimage to Athens, GA this weekend for a friends self-described Birthday Hootenany. I'll be the pudgy one drinking the NA beer and heading back to the hotel by midnight. Have a lovely one...