ninety-nine days

I was reviewing my calendar before I left work today and, according to the note I put in it at some point, today marks the point in the pregnancy countdown where I have moved from triple to double digits.

After work I stopped off at one of those big discount shopping places to buy a big mirror for my studio/dining room. According to Feng Shui principles I need a mirror on the north facing wall of this room because the house notches in at that particular place and as a result makes that section, which happens to be the "wealth" section, missing. That is certainly not good Feng Shui. But I digress, because the reason I mentioned stopping off at the big store isn't because of Feng Shui or mirrors. While I was there I decided to cruise the aisles to see what else might catch my eye. I've never gone past the front section of this particular store before, so it was more out of curiosity than anything else. After passing through most of the store, well at the back, I came to an aisle full of baby items. I decided to buy some things: an organic wearable sleep blanket, a flannel waterproof crib pad, and a simple cotton receiving blanket. It didn't feel as scary to do this as I had anticipated.

The sun came out today and while it was bitingly cold it was still lovely. According to weather.com tomorrow will most likely bring clouds and rain/ice but in the days ahead the forecast features more little sunshine illustrations than it does clouds. Yay. People who have lived here for a long time tell me that winter is pretty much over by the middle of February. I usually take whatever weather comes along and don't mind one way or another. I lived the first 11 years of my life in a town that is only a few miles away from the Pacific Rain Forest where it rains what seems like 360 days of the year. People out there joke that the natives are born with webbed feet. For the rest of my life (until I moved to the east side of the state) I lived in various locations throughout Northwest Washington, so rain continued to be a big part of life. But lately I have been longing for the sun.

This poem by Emily Dickinson has been on my mind lately:
Hope
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.