Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009 - 6:43 a.m.

Well! The big news is that the baby is a girl. Yay! I feel kinda bad to say I was hoping for a girl, but I guess I was-- I guess I know what it's like to be a girl, and that gives me a little more (possibly illusory) confidence about things. Even though so much can go wrong between mothers and daughters. I guess knowing some problems/issues I had as a girl growing up, I can go into it with a theory of how to do things/not do things. Like body image stuff (Here's one: don't tell your 10 year old daughter she needs to lose weight). There'll be new problems that catch me completely off guard, of course, but, even if it's an illusion, I feel like with a girl, I'll be on firmer footing. I'm aware that this may be utter nonsense.

Anyway. It's nice to know.

Hah hah-- the weight stuff. We've been catching up on Mad Men, set in 1960. In 1960, my mother would have been 30 years old, and she worked as a secretary. So I see that office as a good representation of how gender stuff was when she was a young woman, and the weight thing is just pervasive. Part of the culture. So I understand, but that doesn't make it any less damaging.

So I went out to the compost pile yesterday and noticed that one of the tortillas that I'd put in the day before (they went moldy really fast!) was moving. Moving! What could it be? I took my Stick Of Compost Poking and carefully lifted the tortilla up. I thought it might be a mouse or something. But no! It was a vast, seething mass of Black Soldier Fly larvae! Maggots! About an inch long! It was totally gross. And totally awesome. I put the tortilla back, went in to get the newest batch of kitchen scraps (they had already worked through most of the tortillas, from what I could see, and I thought they might want more), but when I got back, they had dispersed back into the pile.

I dreamed last night that the neighbors (in a neighborhood that didn't really resemble where we actually live, it was more of a townhouse setup) had relocated my compost piles and now they were going to be community compost piles. No one had asked me, and they hadn't even set up the new piles in a good way. They had ruined them!

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