The dish is called Blackened Salmon.  I made it on purpose, but clearly my new oven is not sophisticated enough to grasp the underlying culinary concept in the term "blackened".

I just have one question about Blackened Salmon: why, for the love of God almighty, is the smoke alarm system in our house SO DAMN LOUD?  I'm telling you, it's abusively loud; it's approximately the same decibel level of a WWII air raid siren.  Seriously, why was this alarm system built with the assumption that the general public is deaf?

Oh, don't answer me really. I know why.

It is so loud because obviously our house hates me and wants to embarrass me in front of the neighbors.  And it hates Fab Husband too, since he had a headache and was fast asleep at the time the siren began to wail. 

Our smoke alarm system is not one of those benign, 9-volt battery systems, either, but I did not know this until I dragged (drug?) the footstool over to the screeching alarm and yanked its little hat-thinger from the ceiling in a frantic attempt to permanently cork it's screaming buzz-hole. 

But did I see the 9-volt, Duracell battery, sleeping in its little battery nest, a-ripe for the pluckin'?

No.

No, I did not.

Instead of a battery, when I removed the alarm cover I was instead assaulted by a pile of red and black WIRES that came tumbling out of the system from within the ceiling, like the guts of a damaged airplane. 

In the meantime the alarm, which is squealing SO DAMN LOUDLY that is is probably causing our unborn child to leap under her little wooden desk for cover in-utero, is attracting the attention of our very nice & normal neighbors and there I am standing in the front hallway on the footstool, with tears in my eyes, multi-colored nest of wires in my hands, barefoot and enormous with dinner BLACKENING (not burning) and smoke pouring out of the cracks of the oven yelling up to Fab Husband and to my neighbors with tears in my eyes, "I can't make it stop! I can't make it stop!".

And that is when my Fabulous, engineer husband came flying down the stairs in his superhero cape (a green plaid bathrobe with the household alias "The Turtle Suit"), grabbed the wires, did something engineery with them and ultimately Silenced the Alarm. For. Good.

And now?

Now I am sitting on the couch looking at the hole in the ceiling with wires hanging out and I am laughing and laughing at the impotent smoke alarm that once mocked my superior cooking skills.

Ha.

I'm an avid reader, and what I'm reading about these days is pregnancy and birth.  

I would like to share with you, fellow readers, a collection of some of my most favorite educational illustrations as featured in said pregnancy and birth books.

I trust that you will find them to be as useful as I have in preparing oneself for labor, childbirth, and motherhood. 

To get the full, detailed effect of each illustration, you may need to maximize the browser window size of the window after you click each link. Enjoy.

My mom has a very fun travel blog. 

Last year I linked to her blog from this blog, but as soon as I did that she stopped posting to her blog for a while (no internet access where they were traveling).  I had to take her blog off the list of great blogs I read because, well, I got tired of going there to re-read the post about their visit to Prince Edward Island. 

A week after I pulled them from my link list, of course, they started posting to it again.  

If you're interested in what it's like to winter in an RV in Florida, check it out. 

I would like to point out here that that I have come a long way to be able to say, in public, the following sentence:  "My mother & stepdad winter in an RV in Florida."  

Oh, and just FYI an RV is not an airstream trailer.  I learned that last year.