This was written on Friday, but Blogger was out of order.

I've been a bad bad blogger - reading everybody else's blog and not writing in my own. I find myself wishing people would update more often and then noticing the state of my own blog. I've been reading Dervala and Riverbend avidly and wishing more people were posting at Sustenance.

I've been kicking the name Dervala around in my head if the baby's a girl. Would that be weird, to have two kids with these completely Irish names? Steve is mostly Irish, but I am mostly not. The pronunciation is here.

Riverbend is an Iraqi woman and I found myself relating information from her blog to the family at dinner. We were using what seemed like an enormous amount of dishes and utensils for soup-salad-meal-serving utensils etc. I mentioned that she had posted that her family often had no water and how that effects everyday life, specifically that they use dishes as little as possible. Then I mentioned that there was another Iraqi blogger, a man, but that I appreciated her POV as a woman who can no longer leave the house without accompaniament, whose job wouldn't rehire her after the "war" because they couldn't guarantee her safety. My SIL wanted to know how long women had lived like this in Iraq.

Do people not realize that Iraq was a secular country before the US invaded? That women largely enjoyed equal priviledges as men? That the danger women are in now in Iraq is completely a result of lawlessness since the US invasion? That we have created a power vacuum that is attracting Islamic fundamentalists, the people who hate us? DO YOU REALIZE THIS? It was news to my husband's well read and well educated politically liberal family.

The housing update: I sent an e-mail to everyone that I know in Columbia County last week and I got so many leads, people trying to help, it made me feel so so good and cared for. One woman, who I don't even know that well, gave me the number of another woman who has TWO houses for rent! They are a tiny bit more expensive than we wanted, but if they are good, we can manage it.

I signed Aidan up for soccer upstate, not knowing when we'd get up there. I was grateful that they even let me sign him up from here. I got a call from his coach that his first practice is on Sunday afternoon, so I called the woman who own the houses and asked if we could come on Sunday. It turns out she coaches the same age group in the same league and will be there at the same park that afternoon, so we will meet up with her afterwards and go see the houses.

The other big thing that I am doing is diving back into developing the Tarot website that I started over a year ago. I had two big hurdles, one was getting an agreement with a publisher to use a deck and the other was making a logo. When I first started working on it again, I was totally going crazy, spinning my wheels in my head, I just couldn't seem to get it going, but I think I've got some momentum going now and things seem to be falling into place. I found a deck with an Italian company that might be more agreeable than US Games (which gave me a sort of "no, because I said so"). As for the logo, I had a conversation with a graphic designer from upstate who might need someone to code a website that she had designed. We ultimately got to talking about doing trades and she said that she would be up for it. She used to work for Martha Stewart Living, and I know that professional logo design can be terribly expensive, so I was nervous asking her, but she actually brought it up! She even made me feel better by telling me that all designers have trouble doing work for themselves and that she knows designers who have traded to design each other's promotional material. That was such a relief to hear, because it was making me feel really incompetent.

By the way, we're going to need beta testers for the tarot readings.

I'm also reading Zeldman's book and it is totally blowing my mind and making me really excited to dive into doing web design more seriously. Actually, I've always been really serious about the web design, it's the money making that I haven't been real slick with. But reading this book is making me feel more confident and valuable. I have often felt inadequate because I can't do backend programming and don't really aspire to. I also don't really do graphic design. I mean, I can, but I'm not trained in it and there are a lot of holes in my graphic design knowlege. But everything that I can do is given a lot of value in this book, and that has been really good for my confidence. I completely get everything Zeldman says in this book - every little thing.

I can't wait to get back upstate and get on with my life.