This August, my husband and I finally made a trip out to Glacier National Park, as we’ve wanted to do for several years. Since I’m now 20 weeks pregnant, I’m glad we had our babymoon while we could! We had four bear sightings, three mountain goat sightings and a bighorn sheep sighting. Pictures are on Flickr. Going to the Sun Road was spectacularly scenic, in spite of the haze from the enormous forest fire in neighboring Idaho. We enjoyed our trip, but it was also tiring doing all that driving, so we also enjoyed coming home. I’m ready now to take nothing but short trips for the next couple of years, which is the perfect feeling to have with a baby on the way. Some day, when our baby is old enough, we’ll all go back out West as a family, even if we have to ride our bikes out there due to the price of gas!

A word of advice for those traveling to Glacier National Park: no grilling allowed anywhere, so don’t bother buying any meat. The fire risk is too high. Plan on spending a lot of money on eating out. Also, be careful of cabins that supposedly have kitchenettes. Apparently, a kitchenette can still be called a kitchenette, even if it only has a microwave. So be sure to ask if your kitchenette actually comes with a real stove. Unless you’re actually one of those people who like to microwave their breakfast eggs in styrofoam cups, break open the cups and eat styrofoam cup-shaped eggs. I ended up throwing out the carton of eggs I bought, as well as a package of smoked grillers and hamburger meat. The impossibility of cooking was the main irritation of the trip, other than the smokey haze that obscured the distant mountain views. I like to eat out, but j it’s nice to have the flexibility to go back to your cabin and relax and grill dinner, too. It’s also nice sometimes to get up early and make breakfast before heading out for the day, rather than having to decide on a restaurant and drive to it before being able to eat breakfast.

Now that we’re back home, we’ve been busy getting the house ready for the baby. My computer lair is to become the nursery. My desk and books are going out into a nook in the living room. It won’t be a problem, since our living room is quite large. Before moving my desk out into the living room, though, we’ve got to work on the walls. I was willing to pay a contractor $500 to patch some cracks in the plaster and texturize over them, but he never called me back to set up a time to do the job. Hence, I’ve been learning the art of being pregnant while patching and sanding cracks while wearing a dust filtering mask. One thing I’ve found out is that it’s worth it to get the sanding attachment for the shop vac! Otherwise, the white dust gets all over me, all over the floor and all over anything nearby. Another thing I’ve learned is that my cat Marten is desperate to gobble up paint chips.

The Myth of Merula is temporarily on hold, but I know I will return to it and get all caught up on my online writing classes before the baby comes. Things always slow down in the winter. Meanwhile, I haven’t been doing much with my Web Site besides deleting SPAM and blocking SPAMMERs from the DreamFishery Philosophy Wiki. Much of the SPAM seems to be coming from the folks who are known as Chinese Farmers in the World of Warcraft universe. These folks make a living leveling up characters and illegally selling them to people. They have become extremely pesky to me. It’s unfortunate that the first few hours I have been able to spend getting back to my Web Site after being away from it all summer, I had to use my time combatting SPAM.