Due to various strictures on time, money, and motivation, neither Pete nor I assembled Halloween costumes for ourselves this year.  This makes me feel terribly lame, but at least we have large amounts of candy on hand for trick-or-treaters — now that we’re living in a house in a subdivision with a huge number of families, I’m sure that we’re going to get slammed.  So I’ve been sampling the wares for the past few days, in order to not get all embittered when the under-13 set inevitably cleans us out of Snickers.

This year, Garth is attempting to extort extra kibble from us by dressing as the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.  I’m not sure if he’s completely reading his Walter Benjamin correctly, but points for effort anyway.

Meanwhile, Sebastian is moonlighting as a nonplussed Jedi master.

As I have briefly mentioned before, Prospective Baby Jejune is the product of much ado.  Were there not substantial ethical concerns standing in the way of my doing so, I would consider permanently imprinting Prospective Baby’s Prospective Butt with a “Sponsored By [Outline of the State of Massachusetts"] stamp, because the only reason this pregnancy happened is the Massachusetts mandate for insurers to cover the cost of fertility treatments. Without digging into my sizable folder of insurance claim statements, I’d estimate that they footed something around $10,000 worth of medical bills, drugs, and diagnostics — and that’s only for the first six months of 2011, without me being a particularly unusual or extreme case.  Thanks, Massachusetts!  Had I thought about it, I would’ve packed a small tupperware full of dirt from our old backyard into the moving truck to bring along with us to the hospital, so we could imprint the baby’s foot into it immediately after birth and thus enable him to swear fealty to the Commonwealth.

As with any grand enterprise where so much time, money, and, I don’t know, the potential creation of a human life is concerned, you tend to not take the decision to have kids — your decision or other people’s, in whatever form it may or may not take — for granted.  It still feels like a real luxury to be able to concern myself with even the most trifling details of modern maternity: painting the nursery (in the entirely baby-like color of gray), feeling vague anxiety about finding day care, and — oh yeah — wondering what the kid will eventually be like.

I mean, take the basic question of rudimentary phenotypic resemblance: how will the child come to resemble me, and how will he come to resemble Pete?  To me, most babies just look kind of like babies, as opposed to one of their parents, unless one of their parents is kind of red and scaly of skin, has bleary, squinty eyes, and emits a lot of toothless cries.  So we’ll have the next few years to discover if Prospective Baby Jejune has…

• light-colored eyes, or slightly less light-colored eyes?
• thick dark brown wavy hair, or slightly less thick dark brown wavy-curly hair?
• a thin build, or a thin-medium build?
• average height, or average height?
• pale skin, or slightly less pale skin?

Really, we’re all just going to have to wait until he’s old enough to have either developed a discernible chin, or a notable lack of one.  Or unusually wide feet, or unusually narrow feet.  Or, if we’re debating about intangibles, whether he’s sided with the string / piano / percussion side of the musical family, or sticks firmly within the brass camp.   That will be the determining factor, for sure.

I spent some of the weekend sifting through the photos that I’ve taken over the past few years to try and extract (several hundred) highlights for printing and plunking into photo albums. Because people are always warning you to back up your photos in case of catastrophic hard drive failure and — more to the point — I just have too damn many photos on my computer for them to be browse-able, and the (respectable) number devoted to people and events manages to be superseded by the number devoted to knitwear, the cats, or, like, thirty nearly-identical shots of a single tree.

But the problem with moving every year or two — besides the absurd drain on money, energy, and your social life, that is — is that it sort of compacts your life into an excessive number of nostalgia-worthy nuggets, making the years stand out in a way that they don’t when you remain in the same place and with the same people. I’ve gone through 2009 and part of 2010, and, when distilled into a desktop folder of selected photographic mementos, it turns the years into an unbroken string of friends! Good times! Travels! Adventure!

By comparison, the latter portion of 2011 is looking pretty unremarkable. Even though there’s never an unrelenting string of totally fun things that happen right after a move — it takes time to put down even tiny little surface roots — the mundanity of everyday life right now can’t compare to the anthologized highlights of an entire year, and I think that’s the case for nearly everyone.  Of course, jocular reminders by not-so-close acquaintances that we need to do everything fun now, before the baby arrives, because after that our lives are going to end and we will never do anything again don’t help.  (And, dude, I did have ambitions of camping in Big Bend during Thanksgiving, but that plan has been rendered gestationally inappropriate.)

In perspective, our lives are pretty damn good right now.  After years of fruitless medical intervention, this baby thing actually seems to be happening; Pete scored his dream job, and is loving it while not becoming stressed by all of the ridiculous demands of the first year on the tenure track; and my adviser is hitting me with all kinds of chapter revision plans and dissertation reorganizational strategies and demands for re-submitting article manuscripts that all seem to indicate that my graduation is, in fact, visible somewhere at the end of all these folders of Word documents.  And we have far more of a social life right now than we did at the end of 10 months in Massachusetts, interactions with the House of Aging Hippies included.

But this is still the reason why I try not to look through old photographs too often: they can make you forget that the present is pretty good, too.

Not that I still wouldn’t love to make that trip to Big Bend happen sometime, though.

While visiting the State Fair on Saturday, I was ushered around the entrance turnstile for reasons that I couldn’t immediately grasp.  Not that I don’t enjoy the special treatment, but I’d argue that I’m gaining far more in depth than I am in width.  Though it was a pretty narrow turnstile, and it would be really awkward to get stuck in it with hordes of fair-goers impatiently queuing up behind me.

One thing that I found unexpectedly fascinating about the fair was the economics of the ridiculous fried foods that it’s known for.  See, the fair sounds like an excuse for pure gluttony, but — with the exception of the ubiquitous jumbo turkey leg — most items are sold in fairly small portions, for a fair amount of money, so if you are cheap (check) and don’t eat the meat-based items (check) and don’t want to wait in line the whole time (check), you don’t necessarily leave with a bursting stomach.

Besides, I’m certain that nobody would want to eat more than a small amount of deep-fried butter.  It tastes just like it sounds.  And let us agree to not speak of the fried bubblegum.

We also saw the USMC Drum and Bugle Corps, acrobats from Cirque Shanghai, fewer cowboy boots and hats than you might imagine, what I’d call some very irregular judging of knitwear over in the Creative Arts Pavilion, and a very large butter sculpture.  The only thing that could’ve improved my fair-going experience would’ve been if scheduled performer Hanson hadn’t had to cancel due to illness.

The whole thing was surprisingly… well, clean and non-obnoxious, really.  At least until we were loaded into one of the highly organized trams to the parking lot at the end of the night, and got to listen to the loudly-voiced dismay our fellow fair-goers were feeling about discovering that they’d have to walk back from a tram stop to their cars.

You know, just like they did to get to the gate when they arrived a few hours earlier.  Before they spent all day… walking around.

That’s more like the fair-going experience I was anticipating.

(It is hard not to add “… Texas style!” to the end of otherwise innocuous phrases, isn’t it? Just me? Okay, then.)

Of all the moves we’ve made over the past few years, it was the unlikely relocation to North Texas that saw me joyfully reunited with one of my very favorite things ever: the full-sized, single-stream, be-wheeled recycling bin.

We had one of these in Madison, which was shared between Pete and me, our upstairs neighbor, and our landlord (when he was in town, which was sporadically).  The city instituted single-stream recycling while we were there, which was particularly exciting since the recycling trucks were also equipped with enormous mechanical fork-like appendages which would extend to pick up the cart, lift it high into the air, and tip it upside down into the truck like some kind of hungry monster filling its maw with empty bottles and junk mail.  Even the cats found this exciting.

Unfortunately, the recycling was only picked up every other week, and vigorous tussles were inevitably held once a fortnight to try and stuff all of our recycling into the generously-sized cart.  (In retrospect, this might be a reason why local courtesy dictated that guests rinse and travel home with their used beer bottles, so as to not intrude upon their hosts’ precious recycling real estate.)

While we were living in Montreal, the city was experimenting with various recycling vessels, one of which looked kind of like a cheap, awkwardly-sized plastic clothes hamper, and the other of which was a standard small bin with an oversized hairnet attached in a vain attempt to stop clutter from scattering in the wind.  (Montreal, as much as I love it, is not a place that I would ever primarily describe as “clean.”)

Our place in Cambridge-adjacent came equipped with a similarly-sized bin which was also picked up every other week, meaning that it was always piled with precariously-arranged brown paper grocery bags filled with our separated recyclables.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that our current Texan municipality of 8,000 people — whose major commercial institutions are three truckstops, two liquor stores, a grocery store, a Dollar General, a post office, and a Sonic drive-in — provides us with a sturdy, shiny, properly-sized recycling bin, and picks it up once a week.

Granted, there’s no gigantic mechanical claw to dump it into the garbage truck, but I’ll take what I can get.

I went to the doctor’s office last week for my glucose screening, which is a routine test given to pregnant women that has, for whatever reason, acquired near-mythic status.  In the past, you apparently had to drink a thick, syrupy, super-sweet concoction, which (understandably) went over none too well with women suffering from persistent nausea and morning sickness.  What I was given, however, resembled nothing more fiendish than an open can of Sunkist that had been put back in the fridge for a few hours — maybe more like a generic orange soda, which comes out of the two-liter with the sweetness levels somehow off and tasting preemptively flat — so the dreaded glucose drink of doom ended up being something of an anticlimax.

I still prefer the alternate name “glucose challenge” for the test, because it makes me feel like I really tried hard and accomplished something through adversity.  A challenge!  Of drinking 12 ounces of flat orange pop in five minutes!  And I did it!  And all, as you can see hints of in the photo above, in the ridiculous waiting room populated by chandeliers and overstuffed couches covered in pewter-colored velvet!

The second part of the Glucose Challenge involves waiting an hour before a blood test.  I’m going to be really sorry when I finish the copy of Little Dorrit that I’ve been working my way through in between dissertation novels, sundry library books, and sundry other library books about how to keep small humans alive once they’re out of the womb; Dickens is episodic enough to keep my interest, but long enough to ensure that I will almost certainly not run out of reading material during even the most interminable lines and waits.  (Hello, DMVs!  Hi, 20,000-mile dealership car service!)

One thing that I am consistently ill-prepared for, though, is the keen interest that medical staff now have in collecting samples of my bodily fluids.  Blood samples are no problem, but it’s the inevitable request for a urine sample that catches me off-guard.  I’ve spent most of my life believing that going to the bathroom before I leave the house is a good thing, but it turns out that it’s also a hard and now-inconvenient habit to break.  At best, I have to chug down a bunch of water at the doctor’s office and wait impatiently for it to work its way through.  While waiting my hour during the Glucose Challenge, however, I was explicitly forbidden to have anything else to drink after the flat Sunkist, which made for a series of progressively more and more ridiculous conversations between me and the nurse on duty.

“Do you think you could give me a sample now?” she’d ask sweetly.

“Maybe, uh, in about another ten minutes?” I’d reply weakly, silently willing my urinary system to move faster.

We repeated this exchange several times, until — 55 minutes into the testing period — I triumphantly left a sample container (read: be-Sharpied plastic cup) in what I can’t help but think of as the Pee Hatch in the restroom.

This news was greeted with a reception so warm, I’ve only seen its match among the parents of potty-training toddlers.

But now that I’ve officially cleared my Glucose Challenge, I really need to start remembering to carry around a bottle of water with me, in addition to the Dickens.

Materials:  Bernat Cottontots (100% Cotton) in Catnip, and Stitch Nation Bamboo Ewe (55% viscose, 45% Wool) in Grape.  Size 5 circular needles and DPNs. Pattern: Daphne and Delilah the Momma and Baby Monster from Danger Crafts.

Time: A couple of weeks.

Cost: Under $10.

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The similitude is still uncanny!