Our living room now has a floor! Deciding what kind of flooring to get was like the last temptation of the environmentalists. There are lots of gorgeous tropical hardwoods available quite cheaply. Plus, many of these trees are so slow-growing, they create wood that's incredibly hard and durable, to withstand any number of dance parties, even the kinds of dances that involve shoes. In a few years, a floor made of these tropical hardwoods will be even more rare and valuable I'm sure, since those species of trees will probably be extinct.

There was also the option of bamboo, which is quickly grown on farms, killing no trees whatsoever. Then it's processed into beautiful flooring by Chinese slave labor. There's even a type called "strand woven bamboo" which is every bit as hard as those endangered tropical hardwoods. It's woven and pressed together, with some formaldehyde and probably the occasional unfortunate worker who fell into the vat, a la that Bodies exhibit. This would have been my choice, but Bob nixed it on the grounds that it looked weird, and he wanted a floor that looked like actual wood. So, we finally decided on some good old made-in-the-USA solid oak. It's so rare to find anything made in the USA, I figured this purchase was worth bragging about in my blog. Well actually with the dollar sinking, it's becoming profitable for businesses to make things in the USA again, so that's one good thing.

This floor's selling point, aside from the relatively smaller amount of destruction it wreaks on the world, is that it has a Scotchguard (tm) coating. I think that means it repels Scotsmen. Bob pointed out that it might just make their kilts levitate.

Any week now, the rest of the house will also have a floor, so there is much to look forward to. I can't wait to invite over some Scots.

Bob just interrupted my blogging to have me help him thread wires through the walls. We didn't notice when we first decided to buy this place, but the wiring is bizarre. Bob is redoing everything so that the lightswitches make some sort of intuitive sense, like they control things in the actual rooms they're in, instead of outlets in distant rooms. He's also installing ceiling lights, and threading speaker cables through the walls while he's at it. This means he's always drilling holes in the walls and crawling through the basement or attic or those tunnels that Scotty was always crawling through on the old Star Trek. I think Bob's good at electrical stuff because it's just like neuroscience.

In even better news, today, I finally met with a certified nurse midwife who does home births, and she says she can manage to fit me into her schedule! She's great. She measured my uterus, and said right away that it was smaller than average, but that's to be expected because of the shape I am, and the position the baby was in. She did not keep taking the measurement until she got the "right" one, like the midwives I've been going to. She even said that when she's teaching her apprentice to take this measurement, she has the apprentice hold the measuring tape upside down, so she can't see the numbers until it's time to read it. Finally, a midwife who has a good grasp of actual scientific data collection!

This midwife has a 6% cesarean rate, unlike the other practice's 20% rate, so I'm happy about that. I'm also tired, so that's all the blog you get tonight.