I’ve posted before about my fear and loathing for inter-stall restroom communication. It just totally freaks me out that people will hold conversations while performing bodily functions. Afterwards at the sink is fine, but if either party is in the stall this is a complete no go, and this obviously extends to cell phone conversations too.

Well this morning I was left totally gob smacked. I was sitting in the stall doing minding my own business when a woman walked in and occupied the stall next to mine. She closed the door, sat down, and then took out her cell phone to make a call! Taking a call could be understandable, if still not acceptable, under certain circumstances but actually making the call?!

The recipient wasn’t there but she left a voicemail, at just about the same time she started a torrential wee accompanied by a great big fart. Recorded into someone’s voicemail box. I could not believe it.

I was so totally embarrassed for her (not that I think she was, but I thought she should be and I get embarrassed for other people…) that I couldn’t possibly run the risk seeing who it was. She left her name on the voicemail and it wasn’t anyone I know. I sat in my stall until she left the restroom, after what felt like an age as she, by the sounds of it, washed her hands, touched up her make-up, combed her hair and took her morning vitamins.

No matter how much of a hurry I was in, I could just never do that! It’s plain wrong! Or am I just a prude?

I was secretly looking forward to having some weird pregnancy cravings. Something really arbitrary that I could send Hunny out for at 11 o’clock at night. Well I hadn’t noticed anything, but on Tuesday Hunny spotted it. My pregnancy craving is:

Shoes.

I never was much of a shoe shopper before, but the eight pairs in the photo above have all been purchased since I found out I was pregnant.

Pickles and ice cream would have been cheaper.

I had a dream last night that I was accepting a hay delivery for my mom while she was away. Two different farmers pitched up at the same time, and both were in a hurry to get on their way. There was only myself and Joe (the guy who looks after our horses) to offload, so there I was my pregnant self moving around large and heavy round and square bales of hay. It was tiring even in the dream. When my mom got home she complained that I hadn’t stacked them neatly enough.

The dream reminded me of this photo. Last year we got some great oat-hay for the horses. So great that the two horses in the paddock next to the hay shed would hardly let us offload it, they kept trying to take mouthfuls while we where reversing the trailer and offloading.

Here are my two boys, in the pouring rain, trying to grab the last few mouthfuls from the back of the truck

Well, they’re not both mine, the bay (brown) boy at the back is my funny horse, Dartmoor, he is about half the width of the other horse and about as brave as he is wide: not very. The chestnut (orange) big guy at the front is Pickle. He belongs to my mom but I love him to bits; he’s the one I’m still riding on occasion. He is built like a tank and is as bold as they come. Despite their differences these two are best mates. They call for each other if you separate them.

Today is one of those days when I wish I had an anonymous blog, so I could tell you about the thing my mom did that upset me so …

Okay, so own up. For the last 3 weeks at least, I have had a number of searches each week along the lines of “alex van niekerk”, “alex van niekerk orange” and “alex van niekerk blog”. This can only mean that someone who knows me is spying on looking for me, but he / she leaves no comment. I have a reasonable idea who you are, so you can stop lurking and at least leave a comment folks! I don’t bite.

At least once a week one disappointed person a week gets here looking for brown recluse spider bites and photos of brown recluse spider bites. Hunny hasn’t posted his picture story yet, because well, it’s not done yet, so a here’s quick update on that story: Nearly 3 months on, Hunny’s arm is still not fully healed. He stopped applying the dressing properly for a while which resulted in a bit of back-sliding in the healing process. Since he started doing it properly again (for about the last month) the skin/scar tissue is growing back, but it’s still not closed up yet. In short: those bites are nasty things and if you suspect you may have been bitten by a brown recluse (also known here in SA as violin spiders), see your doctor as soon as possible. The sooner you catch it, the less dead tissue they will have to remove.

I feel marginally bad about the 1-2 searches a week that still reach my blog looking for smiths motorcycles. But only marginally, because in truth that really was a kak* service experience. By far the worst in my short medium-length life. But it was also probably a once in a lifetime thing, so perhaps your experience with Norm won’t be the same as mine was.

More dream snippets from last night:

• Flossing my teeth
• Putting my foot in my shoe to find a huge orange spider in there. It was made of felt cloth, but was non-the-less alive. It crawled out the shoe (once I had stopped screaming and removed my foot) and climbed up the wall.

* for the non South Africans: ‘kak’ is Afrikaans, and translates directly to ‘crap’, but really it’s just so much more than that…

Rarely a night goes by without me dreaming something odd recently. I don’t remember all of them, some of them are just random clips strung together, but last nights was pretty good… See if you can spot the punch-line before the end

I dreamt Hunny and I bought a piece of land to build on. Not the plot I would like, but significantly larger than what we have at the moment. It was a secluded pan-handle plot, part of an old farm that had been sub-divided into smaller plots and sold off. This was the last one available.

When the plot had been split up, they demolished the old farm house, which was pretty run down anyway, and it was the piece of land that had held the main homestead that we bought. Because of this it still had an established garden. We were visiting the plot, and I was checking out exactly what we had bought. Nice big trees and an established garden. A pond that had crystal clear water and fish in it. A rock water feature, still running. A swimming pool, miraculously restored, still with a pool side entertainment area that had a toilet with working plumbing. Another outbuilding, also with a toilet in functional order…

Walking around our land, I started to need the toilet. I said to Hunny that it was time to go home, I needed to pee. He replied that I should just use the toilet in the poolside entertainment area. Which I was just about to do when I woke myself up and took myself off to the toilet in my real-life house…

I am a little sad that the land was just a dream but am quite amused at my brains way of letting me know that my bladder won’t hold till morning.

Fells like this pregnancy has hit a bit of a flat spot. Well, two actually. One I can rest a (decaf) coffee mug on if I slouch down a little, the other is more psychological. It may sound odd, but it seems that all the exciting bits about this pregnancy are done already. The major scans have happened and all looks good. Junior is moving pretty much non stop these days, and he’s a little past the stage where the kicks are cute, and a bit into the stage when they are uncomfortable. From here on, I have a sneaky suspicion that they’ll get unpleasant. So now we read parenting books and wait for C-day …

Junior’s growing like a champ though. Our week by the seaside obviously did him good because at his scan and weigh-in last Monday, he tipped the scales at an impressive 921 grams, a full 300 grams more than the average 24 week-old, and looks set to make 3.8 kilos. His dad is very proud. Hi mom is a little afraid. I have no idea where I am going to put the remaining 2.9 kilos of him. I feel like I am stretched to breaking point already. Every time I burp / hiccough I get a little taste of whatever I just ate because my stomach is presently halfway up my esophagus… There is nowhere else for it to go. I think it’s found a little space between my heart and my left lung, but even that seem to be under threat. Junior likes to brace his feet against my ribcage for a good stretch; or that is what it feels like anyway, but maybe he’s just pushing my kidneys up there.

As a parting shot here’s by little cutie giving a thumbs up to the camera / scanner… Would you look at that bicep already?