Are you smarter than a.... ?

So I came across this web site call "The Blog Readability Test." You type in the web address of your blog, and it spits back the reading level of your posts (e.g. elementary school, college undergrad, etc). Here's mine:

When this popped up, I was utterly horrified. I mean, as if I don't feel guilty enough for not using my undergraduate journalism degree in the professional realm... now it turns out my writing style is on par with the prepubescent crowd. I nearly ran upstairs in a fit of tears to take my diploma off the wall and delete my blog in shame. But suddenly in dawned on me. The standard in journalism is to write for an audience with a 7th grade reading level. And I totally nailed it. So mom and dad, it was in fact money well spent on that degree. Blog on.

Other random thoughts:

I read in my weekly pregnancy email from babycenter.com that my blood supply is 40% - 50% greater than when I first got pregnant. I find this incredibly disgusting. (I have a thing about blood, if you haven't gleaned that from my posts yet.) Anyway, this fact grosses me out to the point of distraction. It's really hard to type at this very moment, because I see the veins on the back of my hands and I think about all the extra blood pumping through them. I feel fragile now -- that if I move too quickly, my tiny, straining veins will become overwhelmed, exploding this extra blood everywhere. I think I need to stop reading those emails.

Pregnant or not, I have always had vivid dreams that I remember clearly upon waking. The dreams typically have one of two sources: a message from my subconscious, or something that I saw on television or read about that day. (I remember waking DH up one morning in horror, relating a nightmare I had about engaging in a slow-motion knife fight with Jennifer Love Hewitt. He informed me that I had just described a preview for "The Tuxedo" with Jackie Chan, which had played as I was falling asleep that night.) Anyway, I've been studying up on the labor/birth process before bed. As you can imagine from the paragraph above, this highly disturbs me. Between that and an unsuccessful attempt to use saline nasal spray for my cold (I need a new primary doc, that suggestion was entirely unacceptable), I was incredibly cross when I went to bed on Monday night. I have not had any notable dreams yet about the baby, and I was hoping that this heightened emotional state would prompt my subconscious to speak up, because I obviously have some things to work out. I ended up dreaming that talking tigers were in our garage trying to get me, and I stayed safe by climbing on the moving boxes still full of crap that we are storing in there. Eventually I escaped into the house and locked the door, with the lions promising to get me later. So I'm thinking it was either my mind processing that horrible story about the San Francisco zoo mauling or my subconscious giving me permission not to unpack those boxes. I'm open to interpretations.

Last weekend, we found out the hard way how long it takes for a dog to puke after you give her hydrogen peroxide. Our ever-enterprising pooch decided to jump onto the kitchen counter when we were upstairs and chow down on half of a dark chocolate candy bar. We caught her in the act, fortunately, and immediately called the emergency animal hospital. We followed their instructions, giving the dog 1 tsp of the peroxide so she'd throw up before digesting the chocolate poison. DH took her outside, hoping to reduce the amount of cleanup we'd have to do. (Eeeewwww! What a gross post this is turning out to be!) They were in the yard for 10 minutes when DH decided to come inside and ask me how long the vet said it would take for her to puke. The dog followed him in and answered the question... 10 minutes and 30 seconds.