We went to LA today to do some research on book binding for a client of Toby’s. He has a job where he needs 100 booklets bound with leather. It’s kind of a tough assignment because the booklets are 12×18 and goat skin doesn’t even come that big. It makes me sad that a poor goat would even have to give it’s whole coat for some silly book that is probably going to get thrown away. It’s for a real estate development and the inside pages will mostly be renderings of something that isn’t even built yet. Hardly a coffee table book to be treasured for a lifetime.

The client has ridiculous amounts of money and he has his heart set on leather. If anybody knows anything about book binding and maybe some way I could find some pleather that looks like chocolate brown goat skin, that would be super cool. Right now, I’m kinda stuck between the cheap venders who want me to cover cardboard with fabric and the high end book binders who are purists who match their hand marbled inner pages with the outer leather that is hand tooled with chiseling based on something out of history. Each book will be made one at a time. It seems a shame to put so much work into something that is purely just hype. But the client gets what the client wants.

Anyway, this research did allow for a fun trip to LA for me. I love LA. Toby hates LA. I saw it as an opportunity to maybe browse some shops on Melrose and a fancy lunch out. Toby saw it as two hours of steering-wheel-pounding-traffic, parking tickets and an opportunity for his expensive camera to get stolen. We have drastically different opinions of LA.

Thankfully after the steering-wheel-pounding-traffic, I found us a great parking spot and we did have lunch at a really cool outdoor cafe that reminded me of Paris. We had sandwiches that didn’t look like sandwiches at all. They were open faced and had delicious things like pesto sauce and sun dried tomatoes on buffalo mozzarella cheese. Toby had roast beef with caper mayonnaise and scallions on top. Toby thought they were really stupid and silly. I think he even used the word, “namby pamby”. I thought they were divine.

Just a side note: The book bindery we went to today was housed in an old mortuary. At first I thought it was a church. It was the most interesting building with old old tiles on the floor and arches that reminded me of a Spanish Mission. There was a giant 30 foot table in the middle of the central room and fancy old chairs with red velvet cushions seated around it. The man who helped us told us that actually the chairs were very cheaply made and they came from the set of the movie, “Gone with the Wind.”

Only in LA…

Here I am just starting the first days of my third trimester. Woo Hoo! I’m almost there. I’ve managed to wear some of my non-pregnancy clothes all the way up until now. Woo Hoo #2, I’m not as fat as I could be. Or maybe some of my non-pregnancy clothes are pretty big and forgiving. Like for example my most favorite black walking pants. They are the best. They’re cut in such a way that they swish at the bottom when I walk. And they have a draw string. So they are never too tight and they always look flattering, as far as exercise clothes go.

But lately the draw string just isn’t working for me. I tie it at my belly button, which is roughly the circumference of a beach ball these days, and then two or three steps later my pants fall down below my belly. Not a good look for me since I haven’t really been tanning and it’s kinda chilly out when I go walking in the morning. So it’s like this: Walk, walk, walk, slip! Stop, retie. Walk, walk, walk, slip! It’s kind of annoying. Then I try method number two: I hold my pants up while I walk. That’s also annoying as I like to keep my hands free for talking on the phone with my mom (yes, I’m one of those kind of walkers–but hey, I have a great relationship with my mom) or taking pictures (for you internet, for you!). It’s just not working for me. By the end of my walk I get a little warm and I can take my sweatshirt off and tie it around my waist as a super bulky belt. That works. But it doesn’t work soon enough.

So I went to Target and I bought some new el cheapo black walking pants. They’re nice and big. They have a waste band that comes up to my chin that folds over. This seems to be a common design feature in maternity clothes. I haven’t really come to appreciate it yet. It seems a little bulky and I can never decide if I want to pull it up and tuck it under my bra or roll it down and give myself extra bulk around my middle. I shouldn’t complain, it’s nice to have choices. But even though they are nice, they’re just not my old walking pants. They’re bulky and they’re actually kind of too big. They weren’t too big when I tried them on in the dressing room but they are now.

Maternity clothes are a trip. I usually wear mediums in pants but I think I need to wear smalls. They just feel slouchy and they fall down after a while. They don’t fall down and show my belly but they get baggy in the crotch and I end up walking on the hems. Half way through my walk I want to pull out a safety pin or a belt and cinch them up. I tried to shrink them in the dryer but that didn’t work at all. I think they might have even gotten bigger. What kind of lycra gets looser when you dry them in a super hot laundromat dryer?

When I take them off, they look so humongous. Embarrassingly humongous. I can just imagine Toby grabbing them for me for my trip to the hospital and the thoughts that would go through his head as he holds them up and sees that he could easily pitch a tent with them if he had to. Or maybe it’s just Target sizes. I’m very flattered that they think I’m “small”. But I just don’t think I should go for a small. I think they would be small in places I don’t want them to be small. So for now I’m stuck. Maybe I’ll just grow into them. I do have three more months of growing afterall.

Three more months to go! Woo Hoo!

Today was a good day for hot tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s been rainy and cold for October. Toby says it will clear it up soon and we’ll have the hot dry weather we’re used to here in Southern California. But for today it felt like winter and I liked it. It was nice to wear tights and closed toe shoes and cook myself some hot soup for lunch. I guess I just needed some comfort foods.

Yesterday, it felt like the sky was falling in. Like perhaps the snowball of bad things was finally going to start rolling on us. We have been particularly lucky in life and I know these things can’t last forever. All night I worried about getting reamed for not paying our taxes, maybe even go to jail and then one of us would get cancer and then my child would be born with some horrible devastating disease and we wouldn’t be able to pay the medical bills and then we would end up homeless or worse. These things happen to good people all the time. And it could still happen.

But I woke up and it was just another day. We aren’t going to jail. Nobody has cancer yet. My baby is kicking like a normal baby.

I went to the lab for my glucose test today. Which, by the way, wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. Thanks to my new pregnancy sweet tooth, the glucose drink tasted like flat mountain dew and didn’t make me gag at all. I felt kind of sluggish and crappy after I drank it but I didn’t get sick. Then I went home and I did laundry and cleaned the house and the sky didn’t fall in then either. As I was putting my clothes away, I eyeballed my “cuddle pillow” that I sleep with (that is supposed to help my hips from hurting but it doesn’t work a bit) and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I made a cover for it with a tale of a whale*? I mean how bad can life be when you have thoughts like that? Maybe failure is just a state of mind. Or maybe I’m just in denial. Either way, sulking about it isn’t going to change anything. We do have a follow up appointment with our tax man and he says everything is going to be okay. Somehow it will be.

Thought of you Pinky.