Preparing for my imminent re-entry into adult society, I sorted through my clothes today and packed away everything I had bought for the pregnancy.

Even though my weight is down roughly where it was before, it seems to have been redistributed somehow: more than half of my clothes were too tight around the waist and hips. But luckily the remainder fits, some of them even better than before. So I have at least enough business-casual clothes that I can go to work without a desperate shopping trip: two pairs of trousers and three skirts. And most of my shirts still fit as well.

The question I am asking myself now is, is this permanent (which would necessitate some shopping in the medium term)? And if not, when will I revert to the old shape – when I stop breastfeeding, or when I start getting some exercise again? Oh how I look forward to some cycling and yoga…

The weather has turned to spring with no warning and great speed, catching me unawares and unequipped. (Not that I’m complaining – I love this weather!)

My own “normal” clothes are all still in the attic; all I have hanging in the wardrobe is fleece skirts and a single pair of trousers that sort of fit. Everything else was packed away last spring when my belly started growing. Time for some attic-digging.

Ingrid, likewise, has a nice thick jacket and fleece trousers, but almost no clothes suited for this weather. We need to do some urgent shopping there. I’m impatiently waiting for some bodies I ordered from BeamingBaby – they’re supposedly cut to fit over cloth nappies. If those sit well, I’ll order trousers from the same place as well.

Four weeks from today I’ll be going back to work.

Five months ago, half a year at home seemed like an eternity. Now all that time has somehow just disappeared.

I do look forward to working again. I can already feel my brain decaying from lack of activity. If this goes on much longer, I might get used to it… and then wake up 20 years from now and realise that I haven’t learned anything new for years.

Mothers are the same everywhere, apparently.

I read an engrossing (and somewhat gross) article about tapeworms the other day, and it was better written and more interesting than some of the fiction works I’ve read recently. Chock-full of bizarre and baffling facts about the evolution and physiology of tapeworms, flatworms and other related creatures.

Did you know that humans are host to 54 species of tapeworm, and they can get up to 18 metres long?

And how about this:

Here’s a digression but a good one: some monogeneans give birth to offspring without releasing them from their bodies. Their offspring mature inside them and give birth as well. Like a hideous Russian doll, a monogenean may contain twenty generations of descendents inside its body! [“Kids, it’s time you found a place of your own…”]

Studying these worms is probably a very interesting job, but it doesn’t make for good conversation fodder. Imagine yourself at a dinner party, and someone asking what you work with… On the other hand, it could well be a hit topic with teenagers!

When I went out with Ingrid today for our afternoon walk / nap, I found several streets around Aldgate East cordoned off, with lots of idle-looking police stopping curious passers-by from entering. Behind the blue-and-white plastic ribbons were more police, several groups of men in hard hats and various unusual vehicles (large trucks labelled “RESCUE”, for example). While there was no frantic action, they didn’t seem to be packing up to leave, either.

Curiously, I asked one of the policemen what was going on, and was told that “a house fell down.”

A house? Fell down? In central London? Not the sort of thing one expects to happen in one’s neighbourhood, in the 21st century!

Once I’d circled round to the other side of the cordoned-off area, I could indeed see a house in a very collapsed state. I vaguely recall seeing that building surrounded by scaffolding for a while, but works had mostly been going on inside. I wonder how they managed this – they (whoever “they” were) must have hollowed out the building completely, or burrowed like badgers, to make it collapse so totally. Luckily no one was hurt.

Things I learned today:

• Houses do fall down
• The Salvation Army provides sandwiches to emergency workers. Among the unusual-but-not-surprising vehicles (two large cranes, impressively antenna’ed trucks marked “COMMAND UNIT” and “CONFERENCE UNIT”, etc.) crowding around the remains of the house, I spotted a red canteen truck bearing the Salvation Army logo. What a nice way to make emergency workers’ life easier – every Englishman I’ve ever met is immediately comforted by a hot cuppa.

I’m an avid reader of blogs and online news sources, especially now that I’m at home almost all day. I’ve found good sources for general news, Swedish news, tech news, quirky stuff, thoughtful essays, book reviews and parenting hacks – you name it.

What I don’t have is good online reading material in Estonian. I’ve been reading EPL mostly out of desperation, but the site is really annoying, with bad layout, slow loading times, and excessive auto-refreshes.

If anyone out there could point me towards a good Estonian news source and/or a well-written blog in Estonian, I’d be most happy.

Random fact of the day:
Did you know that the noise generated by a screaming baby can reach 115 dB, which is roughly the pain/injury threshold for human hearing?

I’ve never quite understood the appeal of games like The Sims or online worlds such as Second Life. I tried The Sims for a while but couldn’t see the point of it. It isn’t a proper game since there are hardly any rules or goals, and no real challenge. It’s like real life but on the screen, at a distance. I’ve not even tried Second Life because it just seems like more of the same. Anything I could do in Second Life, I could do in the first one, and better. (Well, the one advantage of SL might be that I wouldn’t have to leave my desk to do it.)

Today I found an essay expressing and explaining this all much better than I have ever been able to.

I used to weep envious buckets watching whatshisname in Close Encounters of the Third Kind being taken off-world to the absolutely not here anymore by those delightful doe-eyed creatures, and Second Life seemed to offer a way of doing this without the hassle of the striving, making mountains out of mashed potato, quest thing. So I signed up.

The problem turned out to be (as it must) that Second Life is organised and inhabited by beings from the real world who have by definition very little experience of being anywhere or any way else. Being virtual is not very different from being real because the virtual place and its beings are controlled by the same old us as always.

Sad but true. For a “second life” that’s really different, we need aliens or a fifth dimension. Or books.

We had snow this morning!

Snow is a rare thing in central London. There are occasional flakes in the air, but it usually melts before it lands, and snow on the ground is seen maybe once a year. Last time we had snow outside our window was February two years ago. And there was an evening of snowfall three years ago as well, but that melted very fast.

I miss snow. But I don’t miss the cold winters, or the sleet in late autumn, or the slushy snowmelt of spring. On the balance I rather like London winters, especially if combined with occasional (brief) trips to picturesque snowy places.