This morning, I had a haircut appointment across town, miscalculated how long it would take me to get there, and showed up at the salon significantly early. My stylist, meanwhile, was running behind schedule because her previous client showed up late. So, with my newly-discovered period of free time, I decided to go across the street to a little cafe and just hang out.

I ordered a cup of coffee and a blueberry scone and sat down at a table next to a young couple with a two-year-old son. As I ate my breakfast, the little boy was doing about what you'd expect from a two-year-old ... chattering a lot, not showing much interest in eating his French toast, and just generally requiring a great deal of direction from his mom. This meant that there was a steady stream of noise from their table, but I didn't mind. About the time they finished eating, I pulled out my journal to spend the last few minutes before I needed to leave catching up on some writing. At the table next to me, the young couple got ready to leave, so the mom started cleaning syrup off the little boy and talking to him about where they were going next. As she was doing this, she turned around in her seat and saw me sitting there writing in my journal. Eyeing my pregnant belly and still talking to her son, she said in a knowing voice:

"Yes, honey, let's go now and let this nice lady enjoy her quiet time. It's clearly about to come to an end."

So true.

My sister-in-law Dinah is in town and we are having too much fun for me to blog. But if you go to Rebecca's blog, you can read a pretty funny post from her about her daughter, Livia, and some of the more hilarious things she is saying these days.

See how useless I've become now that I've quit work?

This weekend I had the great pleasure of reading "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok for the first time, but probably not the last time. I think this is probably one of those books that everyone else read in high school (I found it on the "Summer Reading for High School" table at Barnes and Noble) but somehow I didn't pick up until now. I'm glad I read it, and I would really recommend it to anyone looking for the kind of book that just makes you feel what an enormous privilege it is to be literate. On that note, a digression from the book review:

One reason that I read fiction is because a good writer can use their story to help you sympathize with a character, even if you have nothing in common with that character. That's a valuable exercise. As human beings, I think our tendency is to only consider things from our point of view, shaped by our own upbringing and life experience. That, in turn, can lead us to judge people too quickly because we don't understand anything about the forces that have shaped their lives and the point of view that they hold. I know it's pretty easy for me to judge people. One way to avoid that is to make a conscious effort to try to imagine how other people feel about a situation. Reading fiction is one thing that has helped me practice doing that. I also read because I don't want my view on the world to be as narrow as my personal experience. Within the limitations of time and space, I can only really experience my life, as a white, middle class girl from a loving family in the Deep South who went to college, has a fantastic husband and a baby on the way. That's a wonderful life, and I wouldn't trade it. But it means that outside of reading or extensive world travel, I'm probably never going to know what it's like to live in, say, Turkey. World travel is expensive, so I read.

Maybe it's for that reason that the most satisfying books, to me, are the ones that allow me to really understand something new about other people or a time in history other than my own. I suppose I could pick up a history textbook and learn the same things, but I'm a story person, and I don't find the facts alone particularly compelling. I don't think I'm alone in that. Even the Bible reflects the human gravitation to stories. If you notice, Jesus told an awful lot of stories to help people understand the things he was teaching them.

The Chosen was helpful both in the category of human understanding and in terms of providing a great overview of the history behind the creation of the modern day nation of Israel. I know that the history of that part of the Middle East is extremely relevant to any discussion of what is going on in our world today, but to someone born in the 1980s, the conflict in that part of the world can seem inexplicable, unrtraceable, and too enormous to even try to unravel. So it was very enlightening to read a novel set against the backdrop of at least a small part of that story, the creation of Israel as a nation. I am also, I discovered, largely ignorant about Judaism, and so it was interesting to learn a little about that religion, albeit from an extremely orthodox perspective.

In the human category, well, I've never been a teenage boy, or a post-World War II American Jew, never known the weight of being part of a religious community for whom persecution is not a distant memory, and I've never been destined from birth to succeed my father in the leadership of an entire community of people. Really, even if I just tried to imagine that I was all those things, it's so far removed from my own experience that I don't think I could do it. But the book made it easy because the narrator and the story were so compelling.

"The Chosen" is also remarkably easy to read, and I used it as a break from another book I'm reading right now that is good but not particularly easy reading. This is why it's good to buy more than one book at a time. But that's another post for another day.

Happy summer reading, everyone. Please tell me about any good books you've read lately. I'm always looking.

This week, I am officially in my third trimester, which, according to the people at BabyCenter, means I have about 84 days until Baby Kate arrives. That sounds simultaneously like a small eternity and also like it's just around the corner. But whether the rest of this pregnancy flies by or crawls, I figure reaching the last trimester is a happy milestone, so here is a celebratory baby belly picture. Total strangers now ask me when I'm due, so I think it's fair to say the stomach is becoming more prominent. My other major pregnancy symptom at this point is that unless the room I am in is cooled to about 65 degrees, I feel like I am about to spontaneously burst into flames. Carrying a baby is like having an internal space heater. Dan, meanwhile, is constantly freezing.

OK. Now I have to go crank up the air conditioner. Have a good night.

Being gloriously unemployed right now, my favorite thing about my days so far is the fact that I can spend some time every morning just having breakfast and doing some reading and generally enjoying my house in its soon-to-be-shattered calm. I've been spending that time at our kitchen table, which means I am sitting next to the screen door that looks out on our back yard. It's so wonderfully cool here in the mornings, so I open the door and enjoy the breeze from the screen. From that vantage point, I have observed some interesting things about my home that I never knew when I left at 7:30 and didn't come back until 5. Here they are, in no particular order:

Birds have fights. We have two bird feeders in the globe willow tree in our yard, and the chaos that ensues every time we fill it up with bird seed is just unbelievable. The birds are beautiful, but I am seriously wondering if we're really doing them any kind of favor by putting that food out there if they have to practically kill each other to get at it.

My yelling neighbors do not restrict their yelling to the evening hours as I had previously believed. No further comment on that except to say that this is all fine and dandy right now, but I think we're going to have a problem when I'm trying to get a baby to take a nap in a few months.

Apparently, we have a dog. The first morning that I was sitting here, I was startled to hear a bark come through the screen door and looked over to find a white, curly-haired poodle-looking dog of some variety yapping at me angrily, clearly indignant that I was trespassing on his territory. I have no idea who this dog belongs to, or how he gets into our yard, which is fenced, but every day, he makes an appearance at the screen door, yaps at me for a few minutes, spends about a half-hour wandering around our yard on some self-assigned patrol and then disappears until the next day. I'm sure he really does view me as an intruder, since he's probably been doing this for months without encountering anyone. Yesterday, we had a showdown because I caught him raising his leg, clearly preparing to pee on the only new object in the yard, the new pot we had just the day before moved our long-suffering tropical plumeria plant into. I yelled at him and he backed away, but he was clearly annoyed at having been prevented from marking this new thing as part of his territory, and just sat there glaring at me for about five minutes. So I took a picture of him. Here is our dog. Anyone want to name him?

Awesome.

We may have, as Tony Parker puts it, "a lot of old guys" on our team, but we sure do win a lot of titles. Robert Horry gets his seventh NBA Championship ring. Michael Finley gets his first. Tony Parker is the MVP. And then, you know, we have Tim Duncan. Yes, it's good to be a Spurs fan tonight.

Today is Dan's 27th birthday, which means that he has to stop calling me an old lady. I'm six months older than him, and he really enjoys the part of the year when he can refer to me as old. But it's over now. We're both the same amount of old, and I think 27 is going to be a big year for both of us, since this is the age we'll be when we become (cue the weighty-sounding music) .... Parents.

It's funny, but it's harder for me to picture myself as a mom than it is for me to picture Dan as a dad. I've always known Dan was going to make a great dad. He's wonderful with kids and genuinely enjoys spending time with them. And as several people at our church can confirm, kids really gravitate to him. I think it's because he just understands what kids would like to do more than most adults do. I'm not proud of this, since I think craft-type stuff is supposed to be something that women are just naturally good at, but after four years of leading the three-to-six-year-old Wednesday night Pioneer Clubs class at our church, the number of fun crafts and activities that I have planned for those evenings is far outweighed by the countless ones that Dan planned, bought supplies for, and led the kids in doing. After a while, it became obvious that his ideas were consistently better than mine, so he took over that aspect of the class entirely and I just helped the kids man their glue sticks and glitter. Dan can tell you about 25 things you can make with popsicle sticks without seeming at all un-manly. I love that.

So today, I am happy that Dan was born, that he is my husband, and that he is going to be Kate's daddy. We're very blessed girls to have a man like him.

Sorry to have disappeared for a few days. I forgot to leave a note here saying that I was headed to Mississippi for one last visit with the family before the baby comes and airline travel takes on a whole new dimension of drama. Not that this trip wasn't exciting. I managed to book a flight on the day of the great United Airlines Computer Crash. I can't even remember the last time I flew United, but of course I did this time. It was swell, let me tell you. Nothing like being in Denver with hundreds of very testy airline travelers who are trying to grasp how a computer problem could ground flights all over the country.

I have lots to write about, including dramatic before and after pictures to post of a kitchen flooring replacement that Dan and some intrepid friends of ours took on in my absence, but today I need to unpack, do some laundry and go get some groceries. It appears that Dan has been existing entirely on fast food and condiments in the fridge for the last week.

When Dan and I bought this house in 2006, it was because we loved it immediately. We made an offer within an hour of seeing it for the first time and it only took us that long because I needed a few minutes to breathe deeply and remind myself that when you buy a house, it's perfectly normal to tell total strangers that you're willing to hand over large sums of money in exchange for a property you've just laid eyes on. Dan was ready to make an offer while we were still standing in the house, ten minutes after he walked through the door.

But amidst all the love we felt for the house before, during and after the sale, the one thing we really hated from the first moment was the kitchen floor. The kitchen/dining room in this house is spacious, well-lit and beautiful, but for reasons that I will never understand, the builders of the house decided to sabotage it. They did this by laying a really thin, cheap-looking linoleum in the kitchen area, and then, to add insult to injury, selecting a beige CARPET to put in the dining area. Where the table is located, along with the back door to the yard. So basically, they put carpet where everyone eats and wears their dirty shoes into the house. Brilliant!

Needless to say, this carpet looked as though it had been dragged behind a truck on a cross-country road trip. The linoleum had not fared much better, and was peeling in places. Cleaning the kitchen floors was an exercise in futility, since you could scrub, vacuum and mop all day long and they would never, ever look clean. So we knew that our first major house project would need to be replacing those floors. But we never got around to it. It was hard to choose what new flooring we wanted, hard to find a convenient time to shut down our kitchen, and really intimidating to think about taking on such a big job by ourselves. Prior to buying a home, our entire do-it-yourself experience consisted of picking up the phone and calling the apartment maintenance people whenever anything broke. We're not exactly what you'd call experienced.

This, among many other reasons, is why it is such a good thing that we have friends named Mike and Susan Newnam. Mike and Susan don't just have power tools. They have a two-story workshop on their property that they built themselves just to HOLD all their power tools and the things they are building with them. And even though they are very busy, they are also very generous with their time. So much so that when we really got ready to do this flooring project, Mike and Susan cheerfully came over and spent two days of their lives helping Dan do it. All this went on while I was out of the state, so I contributed absolutely nothing to the work, and only had to leave, have a nice trip, and then come back to gaze at my beautiful new wood laminate flooring. It's really completely unfair, but I'm so thankful.

So without further ado, I present to you some photos documenting the transformation of our kitchen floor, our biggest home renovation project to date.

First, the before. Here is the view from the kitchen looking into the dining room. Notice how you can actually SEE the big, nasty stains on the carpet, even from a great distance.

Here is our garage, filled with appliances that Dan and Mike moved, as well as various manly power tools that Mike brought over for the job. I am told there was a lot of sawdust. I am sure it made Dan very, very happy to have sawdust and loud racket billowing forth from his garage. That's what garages are for.

Here are Dan and Mike hard at work.

And now, the finished product: Brazilian cherry laminate floors that make the room look so much bigger, so much cleaner, that I want to lay down and kiss them just about every time I come into my kitchen.

The days on the calendar are flying away, and soon we will have to move on to the less power-tool intensive task of buying and setting up baby furniture. But for now, we are spending a couple of days marveling at how great it feels to have the one thing we really disliked about our house fixed, and how blessed we are to have friends who are willing to do so much work just to help us out. Thank you, Mike and Susan!