Nick and I went for a second sonogram today to check on the baby's progress (all the growth measurements were normal). This first image shows our genteel little lady sucking her thumb (or picking her nose, we're not sure which).

This one makes it look like she's blowing smoke rings, doesn't it? Like maybe she's got a little hookah in there and she's just going to town with it? Well in reality those little bubbles are segments of the umbilical cord that's resting beside her.

Just because I think they're funny, here are a couple of videos for your viewing enjoyment. There's one for the Star Wars fans out there, and another for those of you who love all things Walken. Happy holidays! Now you can't say I never gave you anything.

This weekend Nick and I went out and purchased a baby stroller/car seat combo. Kinda neat, so we decided to strap Yellow Bear into it and try it out. (Yellow Bear was Nick's favorite stuffed animal as a kid.) We rolled it around the room a couple of times and Yellow Bear didn't complain, so I think we're going to deem the purchase a success.

What does music sound like to a fetus? It has to be fairly muffled, like listening to the car radio when you're curled up in the trunk. Sometimes I like to imagine our little girl as a miniature blues singer with a harmonica. Or maybe a Johnny Cash clone, whiling away the time in her hide-out until she can emerge and make her musical mark on the world:

I hear the heart a'beatin,'

It's comin' 'round the bend,

And I ain't seen the sunshine

Since I don't know when.

I'm stuck in Karen's belly,

And time keeps draggin' on . . .

Wow. Let me just say, I don't think I have ever been so proud to be an American. Last night, the country showed that it could be broader and richer and more beautiful than any of us imagined possible. Everything feels different now, like the promise of America has finally been realized. This is huge.

Here are some freaky eyeball sugar cookies I made for Halloween. In case you're wondering, the irises are Life Savers and the pupils are chocolate chips. Yummy + terrifying = perfect.

For anyone interested, here's a video of the newest member of the family. The subject is currently in beta testing, with a scheduled release date of late February/early March.

One day I went outside, absolutely convinced that there was some kind of decomposing plant matter nearby. I could smell it everywhere, pungent and rotten-smelling. But when I dragged Nick out to verify it, he wasn't able to smell anything at all.

I don't know how it's possible to be this overheated all of the time. Sometimes my face feels like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So my body is building a home for the baby, and it's apparently doing it 24/7 based on the symptoms I've been experiencing. Don't they have unions in the uterus? Seriously. Someone's getting overworked.

Flavors are all wrong. I also have a terrible aftertaste following every meal, drink, or snack. What's with that? It's like I taste every flavor, and then I taste the haunted carnival version of the flavor. It's the same basic taste, but all sinister and unpleasant.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were educational tapes and videos that you could use to teach the baby about the world while it was still in the womb? You know, like in Superman.

A few observations:

America, this is really important. If you're not already registered to vote, you can do so now by clicking here

or

here

or

here.

I have some great news, dear Readers. There appears to be a living thing in my belly, and it's not a tapeworm. It's a miniature person! More info and observations to come, but briefly:

I've recently read some pretty cool books. (Thanks, Brandi, for letting me borrow them!) They include:

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis. I suppose this would be categorized as . . . uh . . . autobiographical fiction? The author is the narrator in this book, but the story quickly takes a turn for the fantastic, incorporating ghosts and Patrick Bateman (the lead character from American Psycho, which Ellis also wrote) and stuffed animals that have been possessed by demonic forces. It's a strange, riveting story about the things that haunt us. And there were times when it scared the living crap out of me.

So Nick and I were downtown this weekend, and we happened upon this freaky car show and parade. My guess is that there weren't any rules dictating car design . . . you just had to make it as unusual and distinctive as possible. Take a gander at some of the entries.

So you know how there are sleeper Cylons on Battlestar Galactica? How they looked and thought and worked just like everyone else, until one day when a switch flipped on in their heads and activated them? It was a scary thing to watch. They started to think back on all of their memories, and it seemed like their personalities had split in two, carrying on paths that were parallel to each other without ever quite intersecting. Boomer, for example, was programmed to shoot Adama in the face, which ticked him off royally and pretty much ensured that she would never work in that town again. And it wasn't even her fault, because the hard-wiring took over.

So guess what? My car wouldn't start this morning. The radio and lights came on like usual, but where I should have heard that beautiful sound of the engine sparking, I just heard this awful chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga sound. Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga. When we lifted the hood, this is what we were faced with:

Nick and I went to the Kansas Democratic caucus last night, and it was total craziness. For starters, there was a record turnout. Two thousand two hundred and eighteen people were all crammed into the livestock area of the Douglas County Fairgrounds. (Do I even need to point out the whole people-as-cattle thing going on here?) The event was set to start at 7 p.m., but the caucus organizers let us know pretty early that it would be delayed until 7:30 so that the new/undeclared voters could register as Democrats. There were tons of people voting for the first time, which was really really cool.

We aren't born hating mimes. I'm convinced of this. It's something that is a learned behavior, like coordinating your clothing or eating haggis. So whence cometh the mime-hate of late? Why am I hearing mime-hating jokes? Why am I hearing urban legend-type stories about mimes who slash, dismember, and kill? There are whole websites devoted to mime-hate. Mime-hating clubs. Is it because they refuse to talk? Is that what makes them seem somehow warped and unnatural to us? Like maybe they have telekinetic powers or something? I could understand if it were clowns. Clowns are the mime's sinister cousin. Clown-hating is a perfectly common, perfectly respectable pastime these days, and the explanation for it is a simple one--extreme creepiness. On the creepy scale, clowns rate somewhere between Jason Voorhees and those twin girls from The Shining. Have you noticed, by the way, that clown-hating is kind of a generational thing? Boomers have no problem with clowns. A Boomer can see a clown and not be disturbed in the slightest. He or she might even respond with laughter and merriment (presumably this is the clown's goal). It's Gen X'ers and younger who have taken issue with Ronald McScary and his terrifying henchmen. But I'm straying from my original question, which is: why do we as a culture hate mimes so much? Is it just a natural outgrowth of the clown thing, a sort of Jungian color-bleed of our psychological laundry?