So that’s my Tum at 18 weeks. Hunny says we can’t call it a tummy anymore, it’s too big. Junior is roughly the length of my hand now, and making his presence felt. Usually when I have been sitting still at my desk for a while; seems Junior doesn’t like me to keep still already. His movement makes it so very much more real though. Well that, and the fact that I can no longer see my toes when I look straight down …

Truck made a full recovery. We went to pick him up last Tuesday, and he’s been on his best behavior ever since. Maybe he’s learnt his lesson. Bonus point: the mechanics finished Truck a whole day earlier than they originally said they would. How cool is that?

Otherwise the life of Alex has been rather boring. Work has keep me up late at night, woken me up too early in the mornings, and kept me behind my PC all weekend. I haven’t pulled work hours like these in very many years and my body is complaining terribly. It should all die down this week though, if things go my way …

Last happy snap for the day: this is the reason why I think I’ll need a bigger bath mat this winter …

It is 6:30 on Friday morning and I am at work – one of the perks of getting a lift with my morning person husband. In fact, waiting for me held him up around 15 minutes. But what starts early ends early, right? Or so I am hoping. I need this weekend right now. I’m tired and grumpy today, for more than one reason, but probably the most of it is bad sleep.

This “pregnant chicks should sleep on their left side” thing isn’t working for me. On Wednesday night I tried my left side with pillow between my knees and woke up on my back with my right arm above my head and my left hand clutching the pillow – which was on top of the covers … I suppose that didn’t work.

Last night I thought I’d try right side with pillow. I woke up on my back with the pillow next to me, and both arms above my head. Man I hate it when I do that. Gives me serious knots in my shoulders. Plus: this is winter! They get cold! It seems to be an involuntary thing I do in my sleep when I have trouble breathing – like when I have a blocked nose, or have a small baby taking up the space where my internal organs once were. This is gonna be fun.

There is good news on Trucks front though. The nice people from Steve’s Auto Clinic say that he should make a full recovery by Wednesday, and at about a third of the cost that Mitsubishi quoted us. Still not pleasant, but manageable.

Here’s hoping this day improves, there really is no excuse to be grumpy on a Friday.

I have bad vehicle Karma. Motorized transport does not like to belong to me. I know this because most of the vehicles I have owned have bailed on me. I think they hope that if they behave badly enough I’ll sell them onto someone who they’ll like more.

The only exception is my very first car, the extra-ordinarily cool Nissan Exa, red, with pop up headlights. That car took more abuse than it gave, and ultimately paid with its life in a head-on collision with a drunk driver while heroically sparing me anything worse than a few bruises and emotional trauma.

(Nissan Exa – mine was in better condition than this, but you get the picture)

If you traipse through this blog and my old one, you may find references to tales of woe about my experiences with my Renault and of course, the Greenie story. I don’t think I posted about my trucks prop-shaft repair and clutch replacement last August, but yeah, that happened too. I like Truck, so I was willing to give him another chance. I tried hard to treat him right and make him feel loved but alas, he too seems to want to move on to greener pastures.

It started with a little whining noise in his engine last Wednesday, accompanied by some bubbling in the engine. We topped up the water, which wasn’t empty, hoping that would do the trick, but when I drove around to my folks on Thursday, the temperature gauge flipped right up to max within a couple of km’s. With the long weekend there wasn’t much to be done but leave it till Monday, so Truck spent the weekend at the folks outside in the cold, so he could take some time to contemplate what he’d done, and perhaps show some remorse.

Sadly, that didn’t work. We took Truck to his doctor (Mitsubishi Garage) on Monday. Freek (yes, that really is his name) from Mitsubishi phoned me at around 10:00 AM and started to describe to me in heavy Afrikaans – because of course mechanics are all Afrikaans here – that I have a cracked cylinder head gasket and the quote to heal Truck would be 60K. Yeah, that’s right, R60 000! That’s more than half the value of the vehicle! Of course I promptly told him to phone my husband because I don’t have anything like that kind of money available because he is also Afrikaans.

Now this would be the reason why I love my Hunny so much more this week. Not because he speaks Afrikaans or because he’s great at keeping money aside for emergencies, but because he is totally unflappable. He calmly asked Freek to fax him the quote so we could make sure that they weren’t quoting to replace the whole front-end of the truck. Well, it turns out that they were. As with most dealerships, they don’t fix anything; they just replace the broken part and any part that links to that part and half the parts that link into those parts …

Hunny then calmly phoned me and said: well, if that’s the case then so be it. But we can’t get that amount of money together today, so lets go and fetch Truck, and see what else can be done.

Freek kindly explained to us why they replace everything under the bonnet when one part breaks, something about dealership warranties, and told us that this may not be entirely necessary. He also said that we’d easily find someone else who would replace only the necessary parts and fix anything that can be fixed. I’m pretty sure his being so forthcoming with information has a lot to do with the fact that Hunny spoke to him in Afrikaans.

Hunny has since found someone else who has given us a much more pleasant looking estimate over the phone, and collected Truck to do a proper assessment of damages. Of course, they may just have stolen Truck and taken him somewhere to be chopped down for parts, but I have no problem with that. We’d probably score more claiming the insurance.

So the saga continues, but that wasn’t supposed to be the point of the post. The point of the post is what a wonderful effect my Hunny has one me. At the best of times I lean towards melodrama (No! not me?! Surely not…) and a situation like this would usually have had me in tears and regretting the day I ever got a drivers license Instead I took my cue from my husband and the pregnant chick that just got a motor vehicle repair quote that would make an Oppenheimer flinch, just took it in her stride. We’ll find another way to get Truck running again. We won’t have to re-mortgage the house for this, and even if we do it won’t be the end of the world. This man really does have the very best effect on me. I love him more daily.

On the pregnancy front: I’m 16 weeks, but AJunior isn’t making his presence felt yet. Tummy is beginning to look less mistakable for fat and I can see the “is she or isn’t she pregnant” questions in people eyes. Or maybe that’s because this week I actually started wearing maternity clothes …

My new challenge is getting myself to fall asleep – and stay sleeping – on my left side. Apparently that’s the best position to sleep in when pregnant. It doesn’t squish any organs or cut off arteries. I sleep on either my right side or my stomach as a norm. Sometimes I sleep on my back or roll onto it during the night. I never sleep on my left side. This is a challenge. I had partial success last night, but woke up with knots in my shoulders. Ah well.

Otherwise weight is pretty much the same, around 65 kgs, although energy levels are low and I’ve been getting a bit light headed. I suspect I might be having some low iron issues. There is iron in my pregnancy vitamins, but maybe not enough. I’m loath to take extra iron supplements though, because the side-effects aren’t pleasant. Anyone who has taken iron tablets will know.

My Granny is sending us some UK Pounds (at R15 to the ₤, whoo hoo!) which we’ll use for a cot/crib. We have some clothes, diapers, a car seat, a stroller and a compactum, so we’re sorted now, right? Naivety is cool.

That’s all for now folks. Stay tuned for more updates on Truck recovery.

Seems the good habits are really easy to break. If I skip a couple of days blogging it’s easy to miss whole weeks. Getting my google analytics report in those weeks is a bit sad.

So what’s been up in the world of Alex? Well, my car broke. I have probably the worst car Karma of anyone I know. Don’t ever lend me your car, I’ll break it. But hey, it’s all fixed now, so we shall move on and pretend like that didn’t happen.

I rode a bull. I haven’t told my horse in case he gets jealous. Each month the new recruits at my place of work have to throw some sort of party for the company to introduce themselves. The last bunch were pretty creative with a cowboy theme complete with Mechanical bull. Figuring that an opportunity like that doesn’t coma around too often I just had to try it, and it was great fun. It’s surrounded by an inflated jumping castle type thingy, so you can’t hurt yourself falling off, which was pretty cool.

There was no official time limit and no competition, and the dude operating the controls was quite sweet about starting you off slowly. If you showed any talent at actually staying on, he cranked it up a bit. That said, I think I faired pretty well. On my second attempt I stayed on for a full minute and 6 seconds! Whooohoo! and did the most graceful dismount of the evening, landing on my feet.

There are photo’s which I may or may not publish. Haven’t decided yet.

Hunny & I made a pretty cool discovery yesterday. Cedar Square shopping center. If you live around Fourways this probably won’t be news to you. More to the point, the Mica superstore there is the coolest one ever. It has a similar range to Builders Warehouse (complete with fairly large gardening section) but about double the floorspace of your average Builders. Way cool, could have wandering around there for ages if the mucus in my sinuses was weighing me down (Yeah, friggin sick again – first time ever I think I’ve had two colds in one winter and it really sucks, or blows. Except it doesn’t actually blow, it just sits there going green and refusing to be blown out).

We got some cool lime green paint for the spare bedroom, and some more sedate “Labrador sands 3″ – it’s a stone colour – for the main bedroom. Did the spare room today, looks really great. Will do the main bedroom this weekend and them we’ll be sorted. No more white walls in the house. We like colour, every room will be a different colour. Mushroom kitchen, Avo green Family room & half dining area, Pale Yellow passage, Orange Study and Lime spare room so far. The passage used to look pretty bright until you saw it leading into the lime green room. Now it looks pretty pale. All the colour will probably detract future buyers, but we’re not looking to sell anytime soon, so I’m not bothered.

Cheers all, and (all SA readers) have a great Woman’s day on Thursday.