#MicroblogMondays: Odds & ends

• No baby (great-nephew) yet. (Official due date: Nov. 15th.) Dh & I are already fielding calls & texts from extended family members about him, along with requests to be kept in the loop about his arrival...!  Trying to stay calm & positive and not let my Dead Baby Mama nerves get the best of me... 
• Still feeling gutted for my high school friend over the death of her 28-year-old daughter after a car accident last week.  The funeral/celebration of life will be later this week. It's a little too far for me to attend, but I'm comforted knowing she will be surrounded by many members of her large extended family as well as friends. I will be there in spirit. 
• I am waaayyyy behind on my blog reading & commenting, but wanted to share this piece about Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Month... soooooooo true!! 
• The sky is clearing and the sun is shining right now. November is sooooooo much easier to endure when the sun shines!  :)  
• I wish I could think of something more original than an odds & ends post for #MM...! (But it's better than nothing, lol.) 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here. 

"The Brink of Being" by Julia Bueno

I have read a lot of books & memoirs about pregnancy loss since my daughter was stillborn 21 years ago. "The Brink of Being: Talking about Miscarriage" by Julia Bueno ranks among the very best. It deserves to be widely read, not only by those who have experienced loss, but those around them, including family members & friends as well as medical professionals, human resources experts and others. 

Bueno uses the experience of her own miscarriages (including twin girls), as well as those of composite patients from her psychotherapy practice (specializing in infertility & loss issues), to explore various aspects of this often misunderstood loss.  (I tend to be slightly leery of the use of "composite" figures in books, but these were so well drawn with such compelling and believable stories that after a while I forgot they were composites.) 

"I then stepped back out into the world as a woman who had just had a miscarriage," Bueno writes in the introduction. "This was a world that would struggle to understand both the physical process that I had been through and the agonizing nature of my everlasting grief. A world that didn't want to know the details of what had happened, let alone remember them;  a world that didn't know if I was a mother or David a father or whether my two babies had been born or whether they had actually died. This world was poorly equipped to support me -- and the countless other women and couples I soon discovered who were also reeling in their own versions of such pain."

The book explores "the potentially profound relationship that can come into being with a barely conceived or even unconceived baby, which lays the foundations for profound grief when a pregnancy ends."  It examines the differences -- and similarities -- between early and later losses, and "the gruelling nature of repeated miscarriage." Bueno also addresses the impact miscarriage has on partners and other family members, and how we choose to dispose of (cremate/bury/etc.), and remember, these tiny beings (in a chapter titled "Efforts to Remember, Pressure to Forget").

In addition to personal stories, there is a blend of research and statistics, as well as examples of how different cultures deal with the subject of miscarriage and other pregnancy losses, and advances in developing medical protocols and support structures to help those affected. (Bueno is British, and most of her information is U.K.-centric, but she also includes information from the U.S., Australia and other countries.)  "Although I acknowledge how far we have come, I also want to show you how much further we can, and must, go," she writes in the introduction. 

This was a lovely, warm, compassionate book about a rather un-lovely subject.  Five stars on Goodreads.

This was book #40 that I have read in 2019 to date, bringing me to 167% (!) of my 2019 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 24 books.  I have completed my challenge for the year -- currently 16 books beyond my  goal -- and I have surpassed my reading total for 2018 by 13 books.  :)

Right now

Right now... (an occasional meme, alternating from time to time with "The Current")

Reading:  6 (!) books in October (including 4 while visiting my parents)(all but one reviewed during October on this blog):

• The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin & Kate Kelly 
• The Baby Matrix by Laura Carroll 
• Kate Hardy by D.E. Stevenson (for my online DES fan group) 
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (for my library book club -- or so I thought, lol.) 
• Normal People by Sally Rooney 
• The Brink of Being: Talking About Miscarriage by Julia Bueno (review to come) 

Current read(s):

• This Particular Happiness:  A Childless Love Story by Jackie Shannon Hollis (the next book we'll be discussing -- WITH the author! -- in the private Gateway Women community, later in November). 

Coming up:

• The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman (which seems to have an ALI-related plot -- to be discussed at my November library book club meeting).  

My Goodreads 2019 Reading Challenge YTD total now stands at 40 books -- 16 more than my goal of 24 (167%).  :)

(Some) recent purchases/additions to the TBR pile (that I haven't read yet):  (Ahhh, fall book release season...!  ;)  ) 

• Me by Elton John  
• Parking the Moose:  One American's Epic Quest to Uncover His Incredible Canadian Roots by Dave Hilton 
• Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow 
• No Stopping Us Now: A History of Older Women in America by Gail Collins  

Watching:  We saw one movie in-theatre in October:  "Western Stars," a sort of a companion piece to Bruce Springsteen's album of the same name. Bruce performs the entire album (with a bonus track at the end: Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy"!), backed up by a 30-piece band/orchestra in the loft of a 100-year-old barn on his property in New Jersey. The songs are interspersed with scenes from the American West with voice-overs by Bruce explaining the stories and inspiration behind each song. Dh leaned over to me at one point and whispered, "He makes you fall in love with him all over again."  ;)  Bruce never disappoints!

On television:  

• I'm continuing to watch the final season (#5) of Poldark on PBS (slightly annoyed at the deviations from the books this season -- but I do love the characters & actors...). 
• The Battle of the Blades finale was on CBC TV last night (a uniquely Canadian reality competition, which pairs hockey players -- both male & female -- with figure skaters, skating for their favourite charities). The final result was voted on by Canadian viewers... and as I suspected, Sheldon Kennedy & Kaitlyn Weaver won over my favourites, Ekaterina Gordeeva & Bruno Gervais. I liked Sheldon & Kaitlyn too -- they had great chemistry, skated some great routines, and I loved how Sheldon was clearly game to try anything. (The guy is 50 years old!)  He's a national hero, not only because of hockey but because of how he went public with the story of how he (& others) were abused by his junior hockey coach, and became an advocate for victims of abuse & bullying (check out the barebones story on his Wikipedia profile). I just felt Ekaterina & Bruno were the clearly superior team, technically. Oh well! It was fun watching! 

Listening:  Not enough lately... I have a huge backlog of podcasts on my Google Play & Spotify apps! 

Following:  Continuing to follow the unfolding impeachment drama in the U.S.

Drinking/Eating: Leftover Halloween candy, lol.  This was the fourth Halloween that we've lived here, and we've never had any trick or treaters visit us -- although dh insists on buying some Halloween candy anyway, "just in case"... ;)  Maybe next year our little great-nephew will come??

Buying (besides books, lol):  Restocked some of my Sephora staples recently -- which include Benefit Browvo! eyebrow primer/conditioner, L'Occitane foot cream, and Fresh Sugar Advanced Therapy Lip Treatment. Expensive, but sooooo good...! 

Wearing: Back to long jeans, socks & shoes, and (around the house) long yoga pants, long-sleeved T-shirts & sweatshirts, socks and even slippers on some days when the floors are particularly cold.  (I was very glad I brought my winter jacket with me to Manitoba when I was there for Thanksgiving to visit my parents!)  

Trying:  Not to let the gloom of November envelop me this year, as it sometimes does (albeit not to the same extent it once did). 

Wanting:  Some magic answers to appear to my genealogy questions, lol.

Celebrating:  I got tickets to "Hamilton"!!

Loving: My family. So much.

Waiting impatiently: For the arrival of our first great-nephew, very soon!  Feeling: Excited -- but also very anxious (given my own reproductive history & the parallel timelines between this pregnancy & my own, 21 years ago..).... 

Also feeling:  Devastated by the precariousness of life. :(   I posted a few days ago about the 28-year-old daughter of a high school friend who was in serious condition in the hospital following a car accident.  Sadly, she took a turn for the worse, and her parents and husband made the difficult decision to remove life support. She died just before noon today. I am devastated for my friend, who has endured several other sad losses in her family over the past few years too (albeit none quite like  this). I never met her daughter, but from the photos I've seen, she looked so much like her mother. She says "Hug your kids. Tell them you love them every time you say goodbye."

Blogoversary #12!

Twelve years!  Today is the TWELFTH anniversary of the day I started this blog, back in 2007!

It's hard to come up with an original "blogoversary" post after 12 years of writing them, lol -- although I have been doing some reflecting lately on how the blogging world has changed, and some of the points I drafted a while back seem suitable for a blogoversary post.

When I started writing here, blogs were mostly personal things. Most bloggers then didn't worry about "monetizing" or "branding" or creating "platforms" or gaining followers. Not that there is anything wrong with this approach... it's just not "me."

As I've said before, I started this blog for two main reasons:  I wanted to add my perspective on childless/free living after infertility & loss to the very few such blogs that existed at the time (Pamela's blog Coming2Terms being one, and one of the very, VERY few from that time that has lasted, albeit in somewhat different form)(Coming2Terms eventually morphed into Silent Sorority).  And I wanted to take part in Stirrup Queen Mel's book club. :)  If you find my posts helpful &/or relatable, if you get something out of what you read here, that's great -- it makes me really happy. :)  But that's not why (or at least the only or primary reason why) I started blogging, and continue to blog.

Social media was in its infancy back then (& basically meant Facebook). These days, it seems most/many bloggers (those who are still blogging!) promote their blogs via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or some combination thereof.  I've toyed with the idea of starting social media accounts for my blog, but decided against it.  It seems like a lot of work, and I have trouble enough keeping up with my personal accounts as it is...! (Or maybe I'm just lazy, lol.)

That said, having only personal accounts sometimes puts me in a bit of a weird/awkward position. I follow a lot of ALI-related blogs/bloggers/sites on social media -- and sometimes I get requests from them wanting to follow me back. If I have had some personal interaction with you (through comments, emails, etc.), I will probably say yes -- but if I don't really "know" you, I'm a little more reluctant to grant access. My personal accounts are generally just that, personal... I don't post a lot of ALI-related stuff there. If you're following me on social media with the expectation that I'll be providing the same kind of content there as I do here on my blog, you might be disappointed.

Anyway.  Blogging, social media & me may have a slightly uneasy co-existence (lol), but I am glad I'm still here, and that there are now so many, many more places people can go to find support for a life without children. Perhaps still not enough -- and perhaps the attitudes of the fortunately fertile have not changed enough for our liking. But I've seen a LOT of progress over the past 12 years, and I'm looking forward to seeing even more in the future. :)

Blogging stats, 12 years later:

Number of years blogging: 12

Published posts (including this one): 1,574

Average # of posts per year: 132 (up from an average of 128 last year!)

Average # of posts per month: 11
(So far in calendar year 2019, I've published 141 posts -- a minimum of 10 and as many as 19 in one month.)

Published comments: Unfortunately, Blogger only seem to be showing 1000 comments these days?? Nevertheless, I am grateful to all of you who comment!

Page views (tracked since May 2010):  almost 806,000

Followers (on Blogger):  149

Past blogoversary posts here.

First blog post ever here! :) 

More odds & ends

• Bracing myself for the onslaught of Halloween photos tomorrow...!  I enjoy them to a point, until it gets overwhelming.  We're not expecting any trick-or-treaters at our condo (haven't had any in the three previous Halloweens that we've lived here), but we did buy some chocolate, just in case... ;) 
• Something else is happening tomorrow that I'll be posting about -- any guesses as to what that might be??  ;)  
• Thank you to Turia for pointing me to this lovely first-person piece about stillbirth in The Guardian. 
• I went to my library book club meeting on Monday night, for the first time since the end of June. I had checked the library website & saw the book for this month's discussion was "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro (reviewed here).  I already had it in my collection, so I didn't bother to go to the library to check out a copy for the book club;  I simply showed up at the meeting, ready to discuss the book. What a surprise, then, to learn we were in fact discussing a completely different book!  Fortunately, it was one I'd already read -- one of the best books I'd read that year -- and was happy to discuss in a group setting: "Educated" by Tara Westover (reviewed here).  
• Just finished off another book (#40 so far this year!).  I'll be posting a review sometime in the next few days. 
• The 28-year-old daughter of a high school friend (am I really old enough to have a 28-year-old daughter? (let alone the 21-year-old daughter I was supposed to have) -- yes, I am...) was in a serious car accident a few days ago. She is in stable but serious condition at the hospital & will be undergoing several surgeries over the next while. Please keep her, her husband & her parents in your thoughts & prayers. :( 

#MicroblogMondays: Score!!

Getting tickets for the upcoming Toronto visit of the touring company of "Hamilton" was an exercise in nerves and patience. I'm just very glad I didn't have to take my blood pressure during the process...! 

First dibs on the tickets went to Mirvish company season ticket subscribers. I know some people who bought season tickets well over a year ago, specifically so they'd be guaranteed their preferred seats again for THIS year, and thus guaranteed access to "Hamilton" tickets. I love live theatre, but season tickets (and I like to get good seats when I go to the theatre, if I can) are pretty expensive, and obviously some productions interest me more than others.

So I passed on that, but got my name on the Mirvish email list. A block of tickets specifically for list subscribers went on sale this past weekend (American Express cardholders got their shot at the tickets on Sunday, and sales to the general public began today) and, as per the emailed instructions, I double-checked my log-in and account information in advance, and then checked into the virtual waiting room before 10 a.m. on Saturday.  When 10 a.m. rolled around, we were all randomly placed into a virtual queue, waiting our turn for the chance to buy tickets (limit of 4 per person).

At 10 a.m., I was #5382 in line, with an estimated wait time of more than an hour. (I posted a screen shot on social media... dh's cousin's daughter told me I was 20,000 ahead of her!! Yikes!  I felt a little less sorry for myself after that...!) I figured I had time to take a shower, so I did (cellphone close at hand!). An hour later, the line ahead of me was down to 3,300 people... and my ETA was just under an hour. I started to feel hopeful.

My turn finally came up around the 1.5 hour mark -- which was really not that bad, I thought. Each page I clicked on loaded soooooooo slowly, though... I only had 20 minutes to choose my dates & seats, and then 10 minutes to arrange payment. I just had to grit my teeth and wait and resist the urge to click & reclick or (suicide!!) try to reload the page.

The available dates on the first page that loaded were all in February... and most had a red or yellow light beside them (no tickets/limited availability).  My understanding was that the best availability would be later in the run (April/May).... so I clicked on page 6 (the last one listed) to load to see where that would take me. It brought up some dates in May (toward the end of the run), and I chose a matinee performance with a "green light" beside it ( = good seats still available).  I was NOT going to pay top price ($499 per seat!!) but I did get tickets (still pricey, but somewhat more reasonable) in the first row of the balcony/mezzanine, left-hand side of the stage. *Should* be pretty good. :)  I breathed a deep sigh of relief as I finally printed off my confirmation screen and shared the "I scored #Hamilton tickets" meme on my Instagram & Facebook, lol. (Personally, I think it should have said something more like "I survived the Hamilton tickets purchase process," lol.)

Later, scanning Twitter & the news headlines, I realized that I'd been pretty lucky (for once in my life in buying tickets!)... lots of people reporting that the site crashed or loaded so slowly that they timed out & had to go to the back of the line and start all over again. (Dh's cousin's daughter, who was 20,000 in line behind me, did get tickets, after 5 hours waiting for her turn to come up.)  The block of available tickets for email list subscribers sold out before the 12-hour allotted window closed.

Maybe the best part? Our tickets are for a certain weekend in May. Mother's Day weekend, to be exact. Happy Mother's/Voldemort Day weekend to me!! lol  ;)

Have you seen "Hamilton"? (Do you care??  lol)

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here. 

Odds & ends

• Our federal election is FINALLY over. I wouldn't say our politics are quite as toxic as the U.S. -- yet -- but they're certainly headed in that direction, and this campaign was one of the nastiest I can remember, with personal attacks and misinformation drowning out even nominally substantial policy discussions. I used to love elections;  these days, I can't wait for them to end. (Six weeks is PLENTY long enough;  I don't know how the Americans do it!!)  
• The fallout from this one has been nasty as well, with disgruntled friends and relatives -- who do NOT share my American friends' fondness for Justin Trudeau, lol -- posting such loathsome stuff on Facebook & the like that I've been seriously considering taking a break from social media until things settle down.  
• I rarely post anything overtly political on social media, but on the weekend before the election, I shared what I thought was an even-handed & helpful article from the Globe & Mail that outlined the platforms of all the political parties on my Facebook feed. Within minutes, I was subjected to a diatribe in the comments about Justin Trudeau -- and when I pointed out that the article was about the various party platforms and not JT specifically, I got blasted again. :p (And this is why I rarely post anything political on social media...!)  
• (On a happier note) I spent a lovely afternoon yesterday at the nearby art gallery where I hold a membership, viewing the exhibits (including a new exhibit of Maud Lewis's work), enjoying the beautiful fall colours and having a delicious (albeit slightly pricey) lunch in the cafe with two of my former work colleagues/friends (coincidentally, also both childless/free).  I don't often get to spend time with girlfriends these days, nevermind in such a lovely setting, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. :) 
• My reading progress has stalled since I got back from my trip west to see my family. Library book club meeting is Monday night, and I'll be picking up our next selection then... maybe that will be the kickstart I need to get back in the groove! 
• "Hamilton" tickets go on pre-sale online to email list subscribers on Saturday morning (that's me!)... dh is "meh" about going (although I am sure he will love it if I get the opportunity to drag him there...!)... wish me luck!  
• I found myself nodding over this New York Times piece on "The Lasting Trauma of Infertility." You probably will too! 
• Note that the introduction to the article refers to an entire SECTION of the Times's parenting website that deals with infertility!  I have added this to the infertility links in the sidebar of this blog.