Okay, here is the very last henna belly photo I will subject you to, unless of course you’d like to view the whole damn set, and who would blame you if you wouldn’t?

2215423983_82df76a8fe.jpg

I took that with a tripod and the self-timer on my camera, and I put a dog-hair-covered black blanket behind me and then I used Photoshop to black out the remainder of the background and these photos are officially the most self-obsessed thing I’ve about ever done because seriously, it occupied me throughout Riley’s entire naptime today and I tried on all kinds of outfits and I took about a thousand crappy images and if you’re wondering about the goofily downturned head it is because I could not deploy a facial expression that didn’t make me look like I was trying to act like Demi Fucking Moore or some shit, but WHAT THE HELL, I’m a thousand months pregnant and it’s very unlikely I’ll ever be pregnant again and I kind of wanted professional photos to document this last stage but these will have to do, dog hair and all.

I posted these on Flickr despite the fact that there sure are a lot of skeevy people who enjoy favoriting maternity photos, every few days I’ll see that someone has added one of my pictures to their collection of ripely enormous women and I’m just thinking, the hell? I know we all have our kinks but big pregnant bellies, really? Poor delusional bastards, someday they’ll actually be with a pregnant woman and their fantasies will be rudely crushed by the decidedly unsexy reality of acid reflux, gas, congestion, and hemorrhoids.

In other, non-body-part-exposing blog content, I have two questions for you. First: I have a copy of All the Pretty Horses on my nightstand which I am loving but it is taking me forever to read, probably because my brain is utterly useless at this point since it’s full of PLACENTA or something, and I’m planning a trip to the used bookstore this weekend to stock up on some light reading. You know, beach books, except it’s January and the weather sucks ass. Do you have any suggestions for fast-paced, entertaining novels that don’t feature high heels on the cover?

Second: I’d like to create a book out of my entries back over at ClubMom, just as a keepsake for me. I’ve looked into Blurb, and although their software seems like it has the right features, it’s slow as hell and crashy and generally is a pain to work with (at least on my Mac, dealing with a LOT of entries and pictures — its performance may well be a thousand times better under different circumstances). I’d like to use something that can automagically grab my blog content while it’s still hosted on Typepad, and dump it into something I can print — rather than, say, me having to format everything myself in some big gnarly Word document. Have any of you had any experience with successfully doing this?

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Mom101
16 years ago

Sorry to blow Mary O’s sense of symmetry, but the photos are absolutely stunning. Go you.

Diablevert
Diablevert
16 years ago

Cue pic. Book: Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis. Gay, debonair, a classic.

bad penguin
16 years ago

that’s a beautiful photo! You don’t look demi moore-esque at all. I’ve been trying to think of a good book recommendation, but apparently I haven’t read anything fun recently at all. I need to lighten up.

Beenami
16 years ago

How ’bout short stories? “Interpreter of Maladies is one of my favorite books ever, and you can come and go and still get a worthwile coupla minutes. Along the same ethnic/short story theme the book “Arranged Marriage” is also great, and they might talk about henna in it, so you can look at your belly knowingly while you read.

Frannie
Frannie
16 years ago

That is so awesome!! 9 months and still DIY the way it should be. Take that, Demi Moore. Wow, you’ve truly inspired me for some great ideas when I (ever) get pregnant!!

Victoria
16 years ago

I think your photo is absolutely beautiful and I’d favourite it myself with no creepy intentions whatsoever! : )

Also, try the Stephanie Plum (bouty hunter) series, they’re silly and fast although have some violence if you’re prone to nightmares…. (wait, am I making sense yet?)

riseyp
16 years ago

Linda,

I spoke to my boyfriend about your experience using Blurb, since he works there now, and I *used* to work there a couple years ago. Awesomest company ever btw…

So anyway, here you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth (aka, Jason Bull QA Manager of Blurb.com):

“We support the Typepad blogging engine and we can ‘slurp’ her entire blog straight into a book (I would suggest a 7×7 for blog books as they have the best blog-tastic layouts, but if she is going to have a lot of photos, more of a photo journal than a text blog, the other trim sizes may be better).

Make sure that she has BookSmart 1.9.2, the latest, and she can slurp her blog directly into a book without really having to do too much else to it. But we do recommend the following system requirements for Macs:

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.5 or later

Memory: 512 MB minimum, 1 GB or more recommended (especially for PPC Macs)

Processor: 1.5 GHz G4 minimum, 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster recommended

The thing is that if she is running a G4 Mac with an un-updated version of Tiger, she is likely to find the whole experience pretty miserable. You can do it. But it is no fun. At the very least she should run software update to make sure that she has the latest Java installed, as that sorts out a series of instabilities caused by OS X. But the G4s are not really powerful enough to push around the BookSmart bits I fear…

My advice would be that she try again, try to make a 7×7 blog book slurped directly from her site. If the application is still too slow on her hardware, then I fear that she will have to go to one of our competitors… L

Hope this helps.

J.”

trackback
15 years ago

Duprost.

Duprost.

trackback
15 years ago

Buy tadalis.

Buy tadalis.