The Duncans

Rumors of my demise...

2011-04-27T15:17:00.001-07:00

Coming out of hibernation just to say once again how much I love Glee, and how I enjoyed the latest episode "Born This Way."

Bad Luck, or "How the Dentist Made Me Cry"

2011-01-27T00:52:00.000-08:00

I had a fairly straightforward dental appointment today to fill some small cavities. I have terrible tooth genetics and so my mouth more closely resembles a desperately defended shanty of a fort against the ravening horde of cavities. I apparently have the most innocuous spit or flimsiest enamel in human history.

Anyway. It was supposed to be simple, but in the last few days one of my molars had me puzzling. It was a little tender to chew on it, and some investigative tongue-prodding left me wondering if that was a dent where a filling used to be. Staring at it in the mirror didn't help; I mean that tooth is WAY back there. But if you're taking odds as to whether or not a tooth of mine is supposed to have a filling in it, always bet on the filling.

So before the dentist started in on me today, I asked "So hey, is there supposed to be a filling in this tooth?" I already knew the answer, because I'm a quick study and they have monitors up displaying your chart in plain view from the chair. He took a quick look and indeed, the filling was gone, and part of my cusp with it. A couple x-rays later, and I'm having a discussion with him about the horizontal fracture running through my tooth and the crown that needs to go on it, pronto.

This is not what I had planned.

Motto of my life.

Unimpressed, mostly because our dental insurance appears to be largely lackluster, and I didn't intend to drop another $600 into my mouth today, they change their plans for me, nudge the next two crown seating appointments for other people back, and here we go again.

The dentist was trying to joke and tease with me. "Oh Melissa why'd you have to do this to me, I don't want to have to put a crown in!" We also have a chat about how I seem to be clenching or grinding my teeth, and how people will often apply maximum pressure during sleep and such. Lately I've been finding myself with tension headaches and keeping my jaw too tight, even waking up with headaches, and so this all makes sense. He wants to get me one of those super awesome guards to wear at night so I don't proceed to snap the rest of my teeth. Something my insurance does not cover. At all. At least I have the privilege of being annoyed rather than financially devastated by such things, but it still sucks?

I spend a few minutes in my chair, stewing over how my general tension and stress and unhappiness with my life has managed to manifest itself physically. I'm not impressed and I'm trying to think of ways I can forcibly will myself into being calmer, more relaxed. They administer the anesthetic, and while they're waiting for it to kick in, the dentist says:

"Well, Melissa. I wouldn't say you have terrible luck. I don't want to say that. But I would say that you have bad luck."

The poor man thinks he's talking about the kind of luck that makes a filling fall out and take part of your tooth with it.

I'm thinking about the kind of luck that means your child gets a congenital defect that happens to only 1 in 250,000 people. The kind of luck that means despite unimpressive odds, that your kid should have been able to live. But doesn't. The kind of odds that means your kid has complications, and then more complications, and then every problem in the book. The kind of luck that means your baby dies. That means you go on to have a miscarriage. And infertility. The kind of bad luck that means you're in the small percentage for whom Clomid doesn't work. That puts you in such a place where you start clenching your jaw in your sleep on top of / because of everything else.

My weak and fragile grasp on sanity and composure just crumbles as in a flash I contemplate that sort of feeling that's been bubbling under the surface for a long, long time: shitty things keep happening.

I can feel the cry coming. I'm willing it away. I'm trying so hard, but I lose. And the tears well up, and my chin starts to quiver. In moments I've lost it entirely, and I've buried my rapidly numbing face in my hands, lost in a full on sobbing cry.

The dental assistant is hugging me sideways from next to the chair. Someone else is holding Kleenex out to me. The dentist is assuring me that it's fine, and he was so sorry, and we're gonna get it taken care of, and it's not a big deal.

Later, he tried to entertain and cheer me up with youtube videos.

They thought I was crying about a crown.

Zumba

2011-01-19T10:57:00.000-08:00

So I mentioned a while back how I was starting to go to Curves. With the exception of two weeks when I was sick, and about 2-3 weeks around the holidays, I've been pretty consistent about going.

I can't say as I've really lost any weight. I'd managed to go from 140 to 137, but between the holidays and my body fucking up and not having a period, I've managed to get back to 140.

But I guess the good news is that I stopped gaining weight, as I'd gone from 127 to 140 between January and September of last year.

But more than that, because while I am somewhat unhappy with the little bit of extra padding I am carrying around, almost exclusively in my belly, I feel so much better. I can feel that I am in better shape. I can feel that I am building muscle. I feel stronger. I have my belly flub, but my sides are tightening in so I actually feel like I have a discernible waist again.

My local place has started doing the Zumba classes lately, and I've been going. It's a lot of fun. I also get to work on overcoming my overblown sense of self-consciousness and fear of embarrassing myself, because it makes me do a bunch of latin-esque dance moves I am no good at in a group of people. But I am having fun with it, and feeling better about myself. So that's a win.

Acceptance?

2011-01-05T13:29:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated in a while.

I know this has worried a fair number of people: the suddenly dropping quiet.

I'm okay though.

And I'll explain the picture above in the process, but let's get right to killing any hopeful assumptions first -- I am not pregnant.

In the time since I've last blogged anything with substance here, I've officially gone off Clomid because it didn't work. I haven't ovulated since fucking July, and apparently my body has no interest in cooperating with the meds, either. I noted in my original post about taking Clomid that 20% of people who take it still don't ovulate. Hello, nice to meet you.

My OB's office wanted to refer me to the "big guns" reproductive and infertility specialist in Seattle. I told them no. One reason is that that shit's expensive. And still is no guarantee. I haven't looked into it to confirm, but I don't believe our current insurance has any coverage at all for infertility stuff. There's not a damn thing wrong with me that they can diagnose or point to, I just don't work? The second reason, and really the only reason I need is that I need a damn break from this.

I've had my fill on failure, disappointment, heartbreak, and always managing to land in the shitty end of the odds of any given thing. I was a terrible little ball of misery for a bit there. The last round of Clomid, I just knew it didn't work. I stopped taking my temps around CD21 when they were still too low for me to have ovulated. I went like a good little girl to get my blood drawn that day anyway, even though I knew what the results would be. (In retrospect, and from the nasty bruise I had on my hand for the next two weeks, and two other sticks in my arm from unsuccessful draws, I shouldn't have bothered.) By that time, I was well on my way to accepting my fate, and ready to move on, at least for now.

I'm okay with it. And I'm not saying I'm giving up trying forever. I'm not going to go on any form or birth control or anything, so there's always that "not preventing is as good as trying" thing, but when you're not ovulating, it doesn't really matter what you do. When my body decides it wants to participate again, then maybe it'll be game on.

Deciding to take a break has been a weight off. I've had people try to suggest taking a break, or just relax, or all the other useless platitudes, but when you're not ready to take a break, you're not ready, and that will just make you unhappy too. I am finding freedom in not taking my temperature every morning; the little beep beep beep that proceeds the low temp that tells me I still haven't ovulated. I am finding freedom in not having to think about it. I am enjoying eating all the things that the hyper-vigilant avoid. I drank coffee. I feel liberated.

As for the little onesie up there, I had scoured Etsy and ordered it way back a ways before we knew Clomid was a total bust. Through an address mixup (my fault) it took a while to get here, and didn't even show up until I knew Clomid hadn't worked. I looked hard to find it. Because of the "rainbow baby" symbolism in miscarriage and babyloss circles of the "rainbow after the storm" when you manage to have a living child after a loss, it was an affirmation to myself that it would happen some day, that there would be a little baby to take home in that. A baby that would actually come home. ('Cause my brain is broken; I can't see baby clothes without some little voice piping up from the back about how a pull-over-the-head style'd never work with all the tubes and wires and leads.)

The irony of me finally getting onesie after I had decided to stop trying is not lost on me.

But I am really am oddly okay with the decision to take a break for a while. Maybe it works because I've separated myself from that world. If you're not trying, you can't fail? But I still find that I have these veins of bitterness within me. It seems like everywhere I look someone is pregnant, someone is having a baby, yet another person from my past is shooting out another kid, like this is all the easiest thing in the world for everyone but me, and so it's not a world I want to be part of, and one I meet with some bitter antagonism.

I know the bitterness will fade in time, but right now I don't want anything to do with the whole world of reproducing. I've unfollowed lots of stuff in my media consumption, twitter, podcasts, Google Reader, wholesale hid people on Facebook who can't shut up about their kids, or post daily cell phone pictures of their kid making the same exact face every. single. day.

I had lamented a while back that of all the voices you hear about infertility, making it "better" is always all about getting a kid anyway, through some means. No one is the voice of saying you're okay no matter what. That you can be happy no matter what. And while I am definitely not happy now, I know that a lot of that is circumstances that are because of, but also separate from a failed attempt to have children. No one made me quit my job and up and move 1200 miles away from anything I knew to go start a family. This was not some 1950s arrangement of a submissive housewife. I fully chose do to so entirely on my own, and Josh would have never asked me to do it had I not wanted to. I chose this because it was what I wanted. And it not happening how I wanted is no one's fault, even though it sucks ass, and having made that choice makes the infertility even worse, because I don't have those other parts of my life to still be part of.

I guess maybe some times you have to be the voice you want to hear in the world. The world does not need any one else to rub their pregnant belly and tell infertile people that it gets better, but it could do with more people who can say "Yes, that really fucking sucks, but it's not the end." That you can pick back up from rock bottom and be okay. Because I am god damned well going to be okay.

I'm still looking for something else to do with my life, at least for a while. I need something. I am looking into ways to afford going back to school, trying to decide what I would go back for, ways to pay for it, work I can do. A suckass economy and knowing NO ONE here makes these things harder. But I'll get there.

In a perfect, dream world, where I could actually afford to do so, and wasn't a 30 year old trying to start from scratch now, I'd go into medical research. The closest I could ever come to punching CHD right in its fucking stupid face is to go fix it so it can't kill anyone else's beautiful little babies.

Elizabeth Edwards

2010-12-09T12:52:00.001-08:00

With the passing of Elizabeth Edwards, whom I unfortunately have learned more about in her death than in her life, I have seen quotes from her all over the interwebs.

This one in particular, I really liked, and so I will pass it on.
(To the unaware, she lost her teenage son in a car accident.)

"If you know someone who has lost a child, and you're afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died--you're not reminding them. They didn't forget they died. What you're reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived, and that is a great gift."

-Elizabeth Edwards

Turkey Day Late

2010-11-26T19:37:00.001-08:00

So we ended up doing Thanksgiving a day late, since that's when company was able to come around.

This is the kind of photo you get of your Turkey while taking a picture as an almost-afterthought, and realizing your settings are all still weird from trying to take pictures of Halloween lights and pumpkins, so you shoot in auto holding the flash lid down.

It works.

The food was amaaaaazing.

Here's how I did my turkey:

Day before, I made a brine:

1.5 gallons water
1 cup salt
~2 cups brown sugar
2 tbsp dried Rosemary
1-2 tbsp black peppercorns
1 tbsp allspice berries
1-2 tbsp dried cloves
4-6 bay leaves
~5 sprigs of thyme, even better if you wander out in the snow, uncover your plant, and THEN pick the thyme.

All the measures above are estimates. I eyeball just about everything unless it's chemically relevant. I don't mess around with proportions in baking. Seasoning? Eh, throw it in! This was also for a 12.5 lb. turkey.

Chuck it all in a big stockpot, bring it to a boil. Remove from heat, and let cool. This took eons, so I tossed some ice in with it when I put the turkey in. Protip: remove the giblets.

I couldn't find brining bags, and was going to substitute with an oven bag, but in the moment, I decided it was actually favorable to rearrange my fridge, drop the bird in the stock pot, and shove the whole thing in there.

Leave the bird in the brine overnight, around 20-24 hours is ideal.

Turkey prep:

2 Potatoes
2 Onions
Carrots
2 sticks of Butter
Random herbs: parsley, thyme, sage, basil, oregano, etc.
Bulb of Garlic

Remove the birdy from the brew. Save 2-3 cups of the brine juice.
Rinse the bird off real good, inside and out to help purge it from being too salty on the surfaces, especially if you intend to eat the skin.

Pat the turkey dry with paper towels. Without this step, slathering the beast with herb butter gets even more ridiculous.

Cut up potatoes and one of the onions into chunks, and put a layer of them on the bottom of the roasting pan. I used baby carrots and tossed them in whole, if you have whole carrots chop them into reasonable chunks. Add the garlic, and you can do other sturdy veggies down there, like the vile celery if you're not a hater like me. These partially serve as a delicious baking rack to keep the bird off the bottom of the pan and drowning in its own juices, and partially to taste a-ma-zing later. Pour in a little of the reserved brine juice, just so you have some liquid down there, barely covering the bottom of the pan.

Smish together 1 stick of butter, 2 if you're decadent or have a giant bird, and some herbs. I used dried, parsley, basil, and thyme. I used probably 1 tbsp of parsley, less of the others. You are going to get butter all over your hands. I am clumsy, and there was herb butter all over the edges of my roasting pan, and I even dropped a blob on the floor.

The best tasting food is the messiest.

Start with the turkey breast side down, and butter up the underside of the bird, in between its legs and wings and whatever else you can reach. Place the turkey buttered (back) side down in the roasting pan on top of the veggie layer. Butter the top of the Turkey liberally. Coat all the surface area you can find, and even rub down the inside of the cavities.

Take the second chopped onion and push the chunks into the cavities at the neck and legs. This helps keep the turkey nice and moist from the inside, without really providing a stuffing that makes the bird take even longer to cook.

Cover with foil, and roast. I followed the directions on the turkey package, and did 325, expecting it to take 2.5-3 hours. It took longer.

When the turkey is getting closer, maybe around 140ish in the deepest parts, take off the foil cover, drizzle a little bit of the juices or some melted butter on the exposed bird, and let it finish cooking all the way uncovered to get the nice golden brown look. If your wing tips or other parts are getting too dark, you can make little foil covers for them. I do not seem to own a turkey baster, so I went with the melted butter route. You can repeat the drizzle if anything is looking too dry, but you don't want to wash it down constantly so that it'll have a chance to get golden.

I have an amazing family stuffing recipe, which I will not share or else I might have to kill you. Or come to your house and eat it up when you make it. I do not put the stuffing in the turkey. That raises your roasting time considerably, which sucks, and can make dry turkey.
I toss all my stuffing in a baking dish and slide it in for the last half hour+. You can also crank the oven heat up a bit, to 350 or 375ish to help push it over safe temp, and golden it up. Roll with whatever any additional sides you are tossing in require.

Turkey needs to get to 160 or above in the deepest thickest parts of the meat. Remove turkey, yoink it out of the pan. You may need to tilt it up to drain juices out of the cavity from the onions cooking down. Set it aside and cover well with foil. The turkey will continue cooking a bit from residual heat and stay moist. It should rest there for at least 15 minutes before carving. When I pulled my turkey out of the oven, its pop up thing was still down. When we were ready to carve, it had popped. Perfect! Carrying over the heat to finish roasting out of the oven is great because it won't overcook your meat. It's also great because it gives you time to harvest some sweet sweet wonderful turkey juices and make gravy.

Strain out the veggies from the roasting pan and keep the juices. The carrots and potatoes will have turned into little nuggets of flavor explosion, and make a great easy veggie side. Whisk the juices into a roux to make amazing gravy. Turn all the juices into gravy. You will not regret it.

MMMmmmmmmm.

I've been refining my turkey tactics for a few years, and I think this is definitely the best so far. Last year I decided I was too lazy to brine, but did the rest of the steps above and it was still good.

Protip: one year I followed Alton Brown's roast turkey recipe. His calls to put a red apple in the cavity; this basically provides the same function as my onion chunks. But here's the thing: the red apple leaked red-colored juices all over the place. It made the fully cooked turkey look raw. It was delicious, but unsettling. Perhaps peel the apple, or go with Team Onion.

Talking Big

2010-11-26T11:18:00.000-08:00

One thing annoyed me about the news coverage I saw for the "Baby Bowen" CHD story. I am minding my own business, watching my news podcast and here comes a story about a baby that almost didn't survive his heart defect. (They never said what it was) He apparently coded in the hospital, the parents got "that phone call" and were expecting the baby to die when--SUDDENLY!--he started breathing and his heart started beating again.

All this was undercut with the song the father had written about the experience, while I sit there willing myself not to think or bawl terribly.

The piece concluded with an interview with the parents, overjoyed. But here's the part that pisses me off. They decided to rattle on about how they're just going to be so much better for this bad experience and it was so terrible and it would be so bad to give in to sadness and bitterness, and they're going to make it MEAN SOMETHING.

I guess that's pretty easy to make sure you touch people when you have the national news covering you.

I guess it's pretty easy to talk big about not feeling sadness and bitterness when you get to declare a miracle and take your living child home.

But it's pretty fucking insulting to the average joe with the dead baby, who struggles with the sadness and bitterness that you can only imagine the depth of, and only felt the first cut of. You sit there so pleased with yourself that you "overcame" these bad feelings. You didn't overcome them because you're some amazing person that still stayed amazing despite tragedy. You don't have those feelings anymore because the reason for them--sick kid--went away. You sit there on T.V. holding your living child and basically imply that I am not as good a person as you because I can't be happy and make lemonade as well as you can.

Don't talk to me about sadness, or about bitterness, or about how I should feel.

YOUR. KID. LIVED.

And I hope to God that you will NEVER understand what it is like to actually lose a child, and the gasping chasm in differences in our experiences, in the feelings and fears and loss we will have the rest of our lives.

Glee Episode "Furt" - In Defense of "Running Away"

2010-11-24T13:02:00.000-08:00

So, if you didn't see last night's episode of Glee, and don't want any spoilers, it's time to run away now. (and read this later, please?)

We good?

K.

In reading people's comments and reactions to the episode, I have seen people criticizing Kurt for "running away" and "playing the victim" instead of standing up for himself, and confronting Karofsky again.

Here's the thing. I will not ever begrudge anyone for getting themselves out of a scary, bullied, toxic environment. Kurt already stood up for himself and confronted Karofsky. But sometimes that's not enough to stop a bully. Sometimes that only makes the bully push back harder, and that happened in the form of Karofsky kissing Kurt, continuing to slam him into lockers with even more anger, and in later threatening to kill him if he told anyone.

Kurt has some great things going for him that many, many, most? bullied kids don't have -- a large group of supportive friends, both some people who are popular at the school (Quinn, Brittany) and guys who are also on the football team with Karofsky, the bullies peers, more or less. And they stand up for Kurt. Then even kind of try to bully back, which I do not necessarily stand for. Kurt even has faculty on his side, who don't just pretend they didn't see it. He had a very reasonable, supportive reaction from oft-antagonist Principal Sue. But sometimes that's not enough to stop the bullying. And sometimes school adminstrations don't have that much ability to do anything, and sometimes the higher ups put a stop to it, and bully stays in school, without repercussions. Sue Sylvester did absolutely everything she could, and her resignation to stand up for what was right, and to better protect Kurt in the halls at school was a beautiful thing that would never happen in the real world.

While watching the episode I was thinking this, and after I remarked that everything up to the school board's reversal of Karofsky's expulsion was the sort of thing that would happen if the bullied kid daydreamed about what would happen to make all of the problems magically go away.

Here's another thing. Sometimes all these supportive actions only make the backlash against you worse. Now Karofsky is sort of in trouble. Now his father has been called into the office. Now everyone knows about him pushing Kurt around. If Mr. Karofsky is any kind of father -- and I am grateful that they did play him as something beyond a raging homophobe that made Karofsky like he is -- he isn't going to let this go. He's going to push to figure out what is eating at kid Karofsky, and from the perspective of a conflicted, self-hating, ashamed teen, that is NOT going to be fun. Kurt's defenders, Kurt's "standing up" has only made Karofsky's life worse, and Karofsky is going to take that out on someone, probably Kurt, possibly himself, possibly anyone else who is nearby.

Even though the Glee club pledges to defend Kurt, to form a perimeter, to protect him, they can't protect him at every moment. They can only take an edge of the fear and victimization, and they can also possibly make Kurt an even bigger target. It can make Kurt feel more of a victim, feel powerless, helpless, and dependent on others.

As I've written about recently, I was bullied and threatened in school. Chris Colfer did a brilliant job of acting and showing the hurt and the fear, and the terror, the helplessness you can feel in that situation. I sat on my couch, watching this episode, in tears for Kurt's situation. And even with support, it wasn't enough to resolve the situation. So he leaves for Dalton Academy.

I also wrote about my own moment where I saw my version of Dalton Academy, and how I got away from the bullies by attending a private high school, and how it probably saved me.

I will absolutely 100% back up Kurt leaving WMHS for Dalton. Is it running away? Perhaps. But in a certain way, it strength to stand up for yourself and remove yourself from a toxic situation. It sucks to go to school every day scared and terrified, and not knowing when something is going to happen to you next.

Kurt deserves to go to a school where he can be happy, and not live in that fear. And he deserves to not be judged for doing so.

We wouldn't judge victims of domestic abuse for "running away". Kurt is leaving the situation where his abuser has control of him. And that is a good thing.

It's really easy to say that he should have stood up for himself more. And maybe he will have misgivings about leaving (see: what Blaine said to Kurt about how he just ran away and regrets it), and I am sure he will miss his friends and the Glee club. Maybe in a vacuum where we can theorize about how Kurt could reform Karofsky by standing up to him even more (how?) but that's not the message we should send to kids who ARE BEING BULLIED. Yes, sometimes if you stick up for yourself, the bully will back off. But when that doesn't work, we don't need to harass them for getting out of their bad situations. We shouldn't tell them they need to stay and get abused more. We shouldn't tell them that they're just "playing the victim." That is essentially telling the bullied kid that it's their fault they are being bullied, and their fault the problem isn't going away. That is untrue and extremely damaging.

Protip: The people getting bullied already are victims. Playing the victim isn't when you remove yourself from a bad situation, it's when you stay there and take it. It's when someone else tells you it's happening because you deserve it, and you believe them.

SNOMG Part 2

2010-11-22T18:58:00.001-08:00

SNOMG

2010-11-22T14:24:00.000-08:00

So it's been snowing here.

The dogs have been playing in the snow, with various levels of excitment. The uh... snow dogs seem overjoyed. The Beagle seems initially confused and then loses himself in psychotic abandon as he runs and chases the big boys. Dixie stays in the house.

So here's a bunch of random snow dog pictures. Note that the accumulation in our backyard is not representative of how much snow we've really gotten, as lots of stampeding dogs keeps trampling it down.

Awesome catch of mid snow-shake. I recently saw a thing about a study of the physics involved in critters shaking their fur off. If I find it again, I'll link it for nerdity's sake.

And this is the epilogue to my garden this year:

The Gleeking out

2010-11-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

I think I got my Gleeking out done elsewhere, on a messageboard for my WoW guild, actually. But I'll repost it here for Rebecca or anyone else interested.

This does contain some spoilery stuff from this week's episode.

In entirely random order, some thoughts!

Terri Schuster is a terrible person. I have never liked her nor had any pity for her. She comes clamoring back to Will and JESUS DAMN THE BABYTALKING JUST MURDER ME and is trying to re-interject herself into his life, and ends up seducing/taking advantage of him and calling herself his wife again. I'm with Ms. Holiday on this one, "Man, your wife is kind of a bitch."

Will Schuster is more often than not being a terrible person this season. He had my sympathy last season because his life went to fuck in an extremely fast way, but he's just kind of been a jerk this year. The whole RHPS thing with Emma was skeevy. It's almost like they can't figure out how to handle him now outside of the fake baby storyline because he's got some Jekyll & Hyde thing going on with flickers of Mr. Schu the nice, if sort of contrived for the plot guy coming out between Mr. Schu the inappropriately interjecting himself into the kids performances, being a terrible teacher, making terrible decisions and being a tool guy. Will Schuster has been such a terrible person that it almost ruined Matthew Morrison's abs for me. Almost.

Mercedes has always been a fairly flat secondary character, who seems to exist mostly as a foil to Rachel and a sidekick to Kurt. His little rant at her had both some tough love and some real harsh shit that went overboard. The Tots plotline was stupid in a show that exists on stereotypes and overblown plot devices. It was senseless. And I think tater tots are kind of gross. So the "You're replacing love with food!" thing was just a bizarre thing that they shoved in there in the stead of Mercedes' lack of self-confidence. It's more sensible and true to her character that she doesn't believe how a boy would be interested in her, and how she really kind of is using Kurt as a stand-in boyfriend still in a way (Remember that she straight up did that in S1, so I don't feel too bad for Kurt calling her out on this. And he's not just trying to give her some fabulous gay sass, he's trying to set her up with a cute guy too.)

Terri Schuster is a terrible person. I have no issues with the way that Mr. Schu stood his ground and made her leave. Good RIDDANCE.

Insensitive as it may have been, I found the Mary Todd Lincoln act to be freaking hilarious. I think it wasn't purely supposed to just be funny, it was supposed to be funny because Holly Holiday was back to her crazy old ways, and showing just how over the top ridiculous she was.

I found the Umbrella/Singing in the Rain mashup to be less bad after rewatching it. It might get some hum time, but it was a musically somewhat awkward number that tried really too hard to merge GOOD OLD FASHIONED SCHUSTER with the hip hop kiddies or something. Theatrically, though, I thought the performance was very cool visually and looked just fun as fuck to do. And I think I may have to be on Team Vests. I would have loved to see the girls dressed up in the newsboy slacks and vests sort of vibe, but that could just be my slightly odd personal preferences speaking. I would have found that hotter than the very nondescript catsuitpants under jackets.

How much I like an episode is indirectly proportional to how much Rachel/Terri time there is, so I liked this one less than others.

Anyway.
Anyone shipping Kurtofsky is advocating for something I disagree with, but hey, they're free to do so. I just don't dig on getting into relationships with people who abuse you!
As I said to a friend earlier too, I think there is guilt on both sides for people who want either Blaine or Karofsky to be Kurt's boyfriend based on what they find attractive, and then trying to also tie it all up in justifications about how it is more meaningful than the other option. I think the two options on the table play to two very different types -- the big muscly manchunk versus the pretty boy. I'd like to think that it's not just Blaine's adorability that makes me root for him, but rather that Kurt actually seems to like him, Blaine is not abusive, and they seem to get along well. But that's also probably me just being guilty of what I said up there. I'm totally down with the motives of anyone who wants to see Kurtofsky for the plotline of Karofsky getting help and being redeemed from being a bully and finding happiness, and the message that can send to closeted, self-loathing teens and adults even, but that can be accomplished without a romantic relationship with Kurt, who has even said Karofsky isn't his type. And hello, unhealthy.

Two Quick Notes

2010-11-17T01:35:00.000-08:00

Note the first! I usually rely on Disqus sending me an email to alert me to new comments here. And so I was having a little bit of insecurity that people hadn't responded at all to my last post. Come to find out that they HAD and I just didn't get the emails. Whoooops. I also missed a few other comments in various places recently, so my apologies. I do try to respond to everything.

Note the second: Oh my god, I will definitely have more to Gleek out about but I want to A. Give people time to catch it, and I know some people rely on the episodes being put up on Hulu and B. Give myself time to think.

More thoughts in the vicinity of this week's Glee

2010-11-16T01:23:00.001-08:00

First I wanted to say thanks to everyone who read and responded to my last post about my self-consciousness and bad experiences at school. So. Thank you. It was kind of hard to get that out, talk about the funk in my past I mostly try to forget, and admit my weaknesses.

I feel like I have more to say about the episode and the infamous Teenage Dream performance (yeah me, and 3/4 of the internet, it seems.)

On the off chance you're the last person on the planet who hasn't seen it:

1. Oh my damn, Blaine is frigging adorable. This is unrelated to everything else I am going to say, but I could love this performance for no other reason that that singing dancing boys are incredibly adorable and look like they're having so much fun. When I grow up I want to be an adorable choir guy.

2. I really like the moment where Kurt stops ogling Blaine and looks around the room in happiness and almost disbelief that such a place exists. I love that they included that moment.

As I mentioned in my last post, I got out of my terribly shitty school environment by going to a private high school. Before enrolling, you go visit the school for a day. I got shown around by a very nice freshman girl and I felt like it was some strange dream world I had entered where there were other kids like me, and I wasn't going to get harassed and slammed into chain link fences. (Man, fuck that god. damned. fence and its poor craftsmanship and the sharp painful glops of metal all over it. Getting shoved into a fence is one thing, getting shoved into a chain link fence that might as well have little metal barbs on it just fucking sucks. That stupid fence actually took out my glasses by putting a huge scrape in one of the lenses when I got launched face-first into it. Grrr. I digress.)

I guess because I had for myself that moment where I realized that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, that "Holy shit, places like this exist?" realization that Kurt seems to experience during the performance is one of the reasons that the whole scene gets me so much.

It was pretty hellish going back to my terrible middle school after that day. The other kids and even one of my teachers set out to make my life even worse after they heard I was going to a private school. I felt so badly for Kurt when he went back and continued to get bullied, even with all the developments with his bully. At the end when he just sort of slumps down looking so sad against the lockers... I just want to reach through the screen and hug the hell out of him so bad.

Given that Kurt Hummel is a fictional character, I will say if there's any real kids out there some crazy lady on the internet is sending you hugs and a promise there's a light at the end of the tunnel, eventually.

3. As a World of Warcraft nerd, I read blogs about that. Mostly stuff that pertains to the character class I play.
One of these blogs wrote a couple great posts about the episode, and even got a twitter nod from one of the actors. Nice! So for anyone who is, like me, a little too obsessed with the topic, here's the posts, which are nice reads:
http://shamanonramen.com/2010/11/david-the-gleeliath/
http://shamanonramen.com/2010/11/bullying-the-bullies/

4. Writing here continues to be amazing cathartic therapy for my disjointed thoughts, and so I should probably do that more. I feel like I really want to focus on other parts of me and my life that aren't about making babies or failing to do so. I NEED other things in my life besides that. So this post is totally part of trying to get me to write more about other things and find my voice.

5. If anyone needs me, I will be listening to the Teenage Dream .mp3 for the #597,048,835th time. Feel free to leave comments Gleeking out with me.

Self-Consciousness

2010-11-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

The other day when I was going to the grocery store, and walking in from the parking lot, I watched a pair of women, probably early-mid 20s loading their groceries into a mini van. One of them was loudly, badly, belting out one of the songs from Grease as she did so.

It struck me how she was just unabashedly enjoying herself, and having fun with her friend who was singing along, less loudly, but still participating. She didn't care that she wasn't a good singer, she was just doing it anyway.

Anyone who saw this week's episode of Glee probably saw the extra in the in the Teenage Dream performance who was standing next to Kurt and dancing exuberantly bad with swinging hands and fist bumps.

While I get that the latter is an actor in a show, doing a fiction, it still captures that sense of un-embarrassed simply having fun and not worrying about it. That kind of "Joie de vivre" it takes to enthusiastically dance or sing badly in public, not care what others think, and still have fun.

I am so not that kind of person. I wallow in my own self-consciousness. Maybe it's just part my intrinsic personality, and the fact that I'm a little on the weird side, who just can't follow the norms society expects of me, but I think in large part it was my childhood experiences. I was harassed, teased, mocked, and bullied in school for being weird, different, maybe just the smallest kid, or an easy target. It was a terrible experience, and after so many years of it, you develop the sort of walls you put up out of sheer self-preservation. You hide everything because when anything can be more fuel for the intense bullying fire, you don't want to give them any thing else to harass you about. Especially anything you don't feel particularly confident about. If you think your nose is too big, you certainly don't tell the bullies that so that they can wail on your sensitive areas.

The bullying got really bad for me. There was a point in 6th grade where I had 8th grade boys punching, shoving, kicking, tripping, and giving me threats of harm, up to and including death. Either they made it up to scare me, or someone started a rumor to get me targeted, they thought I was saying all sorts of mean things about their girlfriends and they were going to make me stop. But the thing is, when you aren't slandering some neanderthal's girlfriend, there's nothing you can do to stop it. I ended up having to be escorted from my middle school over to the elementary school where my mom worked every day by one of her friend's kids. A guy in my class, the type who is 6' at 12 already. And who was a pretty popular guy who had no desire to be seen in the same area code as me. So that was embarrassing. And scary, and terrifying. And of course the administration did nothing.

Public schools were I grew up sucked. The high schools are the kind of place with metal detectors and school buildings that look like castles with no windows. Where people carry sharpened pencils as weapons and poison teachers. Middle school was terrible enough. So I got out. I went to a private high school. Sometimes it was all my parents could do to afford to keep me in the school, but I went. It probably saved my life, either from myself or some neanderthal senior defending his girlfriend. But I'd spent K-8th grades being bullied, and it left marks. By the time I hit high school, I was utterly convinced that I was a worthless person that no one would ever want anything to do with. I didn't put myself out there, or start conversations because I just KNEW that everyone hated me and wouldn't want to talk to me. It took all 4 years of high school and some very amazing people to even begin to put a dent in that sort of persecution complex.

Maybe it might surprise people to know that beneath the veneer of the sharp-tongued little spit-fire there is so much self-consciousness and lack of self-worth... but some times the best defense is a good offense. Don't show any weakness. Keep everyone away so they can't hurt you.

I have come so far from the scared little kid that would get flung into the fence at school every day, or have people specifically aim balls at my head in P.E. (Nothing says paranoia and fear when you have every real reason to expect that a projectile will come flinging out of nowhere at your head, on a daily basis.) But I am still so self-conscious about everything. I wither from so much out of my own sense of shame, and my sense that if I talk to someone, I'm only going to annoy them. That if people know what I really think and feel, who I really am, that they will mock and harass me. That I will be teased and shunned, even as an adult.

I am still sometimes meek and guarded about things even with Josh. Out of a sense of avoiding embarrassment. I wish I had the self-confidence to sing along to a song when anyone could hear me. I find it fun, but I can only do it when I am alone. I've been with Josh for 6 damn years and I will still clam up out of mortification that he might hear me and I might be bad and he might hate it.

The sheer self-loathing does make me clam up and if I do make a sound, I'm sure it is bad because my throat is seizing with my self-consciousness. I think on my own, I'm not bad. I'm not a good singer, I don't always get the note, but I don't think anyone would slam their hands over their ears and run away. But I can't get over the horrible embarrassment to just simply enjoy myself. I don't think anyone ever expects singing along to the radio on a road trip to be a Broadway performance. If I ever do anything, it has to be done as a big horrible parody of "lol look how terrible I am, I dance so white" or "let me belt out a terrible note as a joke." Because if I am making fun of myself, I've beaten the bully to the punch.

I wish so much that I could be the kind of person to sing loudly and fearlessly in a parking lot and just let loose and have fun. Because when I saw that girl, I didn't think "What a terrible fool." I thought "Man she looks like she's having fun."

Veteran's Day

2010-11-11T16:34:00.001-08:00

Thank you to everyone who has ever served.

"Grr, Argh!"

2010-11-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

You know how there's the stereotype of the fat kid in class that copes with humor? That ends up the class clown, because that's their mechanism for dealing with their low self-esteem, and ridicule and everything?

I am completely the proverbial fat kid.

So on behalf of my chart this month looking like a complete "What the fuck" and the... weird patterns my basal temp has been drawing lately...

Come ON, it totally looks like the jaws of some sea monster coming up to bite me in the ass. I think I'm going to change the title of this cycle to "BASAL SEA MONSTER"

P.S. The discarded temps are from when I was sick, and CD 14/15 had crazy high temps in the 98s.

P.P.S. Last's month's 80 day annovulatory cycle that finally was drug out back and "old yeller'd" by a round of Provera's title was "F this BS"

Halloween Pics

2010-11-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

I'm still fumbling about with how to take decent low-light pictures of things and pumpkins and house decorations. I hadn't even touched my camera in months, and had to hastily charge the battery to get some shots done before Halloween night had passed by. I have neither a real tripod or anything but the kit lens, and so there are some logistical challenges to add to my shallow understanding of effective camera settings. In the rain.

So this is my best effort.

The whole house. Overexposed, but you get the idea. Slightly visible: The string of glowing eye lights hidden in the bush in front of the porch.

Inside the truck sits this creepy fellow, whose illumination was actually done via a strobe light, and has eyes that glow shifting colors.

It may not be terribly apparent in the whole house photo, but in order to approach our front door, you have two options: 1. Truding uphill through our wet lawn 2. Walking up the driveway, and taking three steps down to the front walk, while creepyface stares you down.

The cast of pumpkins:

They lit the way up the driveway to the porch.

There was another small strobe light and a fog machine on the porch. It didn't make a huge amount of fog, and it had a tendency to dissipate down the hill rather quickly.

There were spider webs everywhere:

EVERYWHERE.

Josh's costume scared little kids quite effectively.

As the less scary one, I started manning the door for the very tiny kids, who we could often hear being encouragingly cajoled by their parents that it was okay, to go ahead and go up to the door.

My hat was comically small, and did not fit on my head at all. I ended up forcing it to stay in place through creative use of a headband, an earring, and a snap clip on the back of my head. I do not seem to own any safety pins.

My favorite quote from the evening?
"I'm not scared, I have a flashlight.

Halloween Pics to come later, after this Pity Party

2010-11-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

Josh keeps nudging me to blog more. I don't have a whole to say that isn't terribly dark, and so I've been keeping quiet. The Clomid didn't work and I am feeling incredibly down. I can feel the end of the rope coming up very shortly. There's still upping the Clomid dose left, but any further fertility treatment would have to be completely out of pocket, and that isn't in the budget. The crux of it is that three years ago I quit my job and moved 1200 miles away from everything I've known to start a family and it didn't work. Everything for me, my day-to-day life has been about getting pregnant and making babies. And I could start something else, but I could get pregnant at any time! This month could always be "the month" and as month after month goes by, and it keeps not happening, and my cycles get even more unpredictable and irregular, the crush of all the time wasted, all the lack of success, and all the pressing feelings of deep personal failure and lack of fulfillment in life suddenly go over max capacity and come crashing down.

And that is where I am right now. It has all been so long and so hard that even if I were to give up and do something else with my life now, I don't even know what I would want. There is no light shining through the oppressive rubble of the last three years.

The career I had elsewhere simply does not exist here. I am not eminently qualified to do anything else interesting or fulfilling, or even remotely lucrative, and the economy is terrible. My bleeding heart also feels bad about going out to just go get some job, any job, when there are people who desperately need employment and I just need something else to focus on to drag out of this depression. I feel like I should "get over it" because I "need" gainful employment less than someone else.

All the things that I could ostensibly care about, were I able to find any capacity left to care in this deep dark funk I am in all prettymuch pit me against spending way too much time with pregnant women and living children, a prospect which pushes me even closer to mental breakdown; another rope I can feel the end of nearby.

I do not, from this vantage point, have the ability to believe that "it will happen" for us, or any hope that my body will work like it is supposed to, but I am too stubborn to give up, and too lost to find anything else to latch on to.

Logically, intellectually, I know that I need to find something else to do with my life, to derive meaning from. But I can't find it in me to care.
It would be a great thing to actually have any local friends - a prospect that was easier when it was a matter of finding local mom and playgroups, or becoming involved with La Leche League meetings, or other things that were all orbiting around the new life I was supposed to have as a parent. I don't need to make any NEW friends that will all go off and have babies and leave me behind and stop talking to me because their new world where everything orbits around their life as a parent is oh-so-more interesting than me; I've got plenty of old friends filling that role.

It seems to daunting to literally start out of nowhere and try to find a new life. Everyone is busy in all their own stuff and not terribly interested in someone else. And I don't need any more reason to feel like an emotional charity case.

If anyone in the vicinity who does not have children or any immediate plans to make any, wants to be friends with a ~~slightly~~ rather broken sharp-tongued nerd girl who somewhere under the fog likes computers and video games, photography, food, science, and politics, let me know, but I won't hold my breath.

October blog project - Day 21, in a timely fashion

2010-10-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

Day 21 was to post a recipe. In honor of the righteous head cold I've contracted, and the fog that lots of cold meds puts me in, I present the following:

Head Cold Stew

1% Inspiration, 25% Cold Meds, 25% auto-pilot, 49% Apathy

Defrost some beef stew meat. It doesn't matter if it gets defrosted all the way. Chuck some butter in a skillet and let it melt. Throw all the meat in there.

Roughly chop up whatever vegetables are on hand. Be grateful to find a bag of baby carrots in the fridge. Wash too many giant Costco spuds, and chop of most of them. Rough chop some onions, too. Throw all this in a crock pot. The less you care about uniformity, the more you convince yourself that it adds rustic charm. Fuck celery, it tastes like ass.

Jab at the meat occasionally so that it browns, not burns.

Rummage through the spice cabinet looking for appropriate stuff.

Chuck some minced garlic on top of the veggies. Toss in a bunch of paprika, red and black pepper, some mustard, and some seasoning salt. Dash in a couple tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce. Toss the meat on top, with its juices. Pour some leftover beef stock from the fridge and a bit of red wine in to deglaze the pan, and pour it on top of the meat when done. Fling a couple bay leaves in.

Look in the pantry for some beef broth or something. Start to wonder if chicken broth would be okay if you added more Worcestershire to make up for it. Remember that you were supposed to toss the meat in flour or something, and sprinkle some on top of the meat in the pot.

Gratefully find a thing of beef stock in another cabinet, and pour it on top. Put the crock pot on low for 6-8 hours, crawl back into bed.

Edit: Truthposting, don't go to bed, blog about it instead. While re-reading what you wrote to make sure it makes sense, realize that perhaps some herbs are a good idea. Grab bottles that hold green things off the counter and toss some in. Going outside in the cold wind to get fresh herbs is too much work.

It gets better?

2010-10-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

Pardon my absence. This week has been filled with gnarly dental work and me contracting the plague. I've mostly been asleep or trying to keep on top of basic things around here.

I might hop back on the blogging theme bandwagon, I might not. I'm going off the script to talk about something else that's been rattling around in my head about some of the stuff around the world of people who blog about infertility have said; especially the people who have managed to get pregnant after struggling with it.

Witnessing a conversation between some friends on twitter earlier today helped coalesce some of the thoughts I had.

The It Gets Better Project has gotten a lot of attention lately after a rash of gay teen suicides. I think it's a great message and I've teared up watching several of these videos, especially the one from Fort Worth Councilman Joel Burns. Even President Obama has gotten on board. Columnist and author Dan Savage started the project with this video with his partner Terry. I have seen some people criticize Dan Savage's video as being somewhat disingenuous because it's easy for the guy who is a famous, rich, white advocate to speak from his privilege to tell struggling kids that it gets better. For most, no, they won't ever get Dan Savage's life.

Still, I like the message these videos give. But I think the more powerful ones are not the ones of famous writers, though they have a profound place in having the recognition and power to start a project like this, but in the videos and stories like Joel Burns, from Fort Worth Texas, and is just basically another dude, who definitely lives in a less gay-friendly place than Seattle, tell their stories about how it gets better.

So here's the segue, awkward as it is. There are a lot of things in life that could potentially use their own little "It Gets Better" project, and often times people are putting this message out without a big organized project. My friends on twitter joked about how there needed to be an "It Gets Better" for Asian kids struggling with the aspirations their driven parents put on them, like being a scientist or a businessperson and telling them their self-worth is derived from that, and following their own paths which they find enjoyment in. (To wit, not saying ALL Asian parents are like this, but I think it's a stereotype that rings true in many situations, and that this sort of parental pressure doesn't just happen to Asian kids.)

This conversation made me think "Man, there needs to be an "It Gets Better" for people who are struggling to have kids too." And it hit me... that message exists, but I've only been bothered by it before.

The problem is all too often the message of "It Gets Better" comes from the voice of some happy belly-rubbing pregnant woman who can recount the tales of how terrible it was to struggle to conceive, but now that they've gotten what they want, they enjoy telling others how they should feel about their current, on-going infertility.

I find that disingenuous and insulting. The point of telling someone that it gets better isn't to tell them "Man it'll be so great when you're cured/the problem goes away." That goes without saying. Hell yes, it would get better for gay teens if the bullying suddenly disappeared. Infertility would suck a lot less if you weren't infertile! But that's not the point of the original project. The point is to spread the message that who you are is okay, and that this too shall pass, and to accept who you are, even if your immediate world doesn't, because there are others out there who DO.

The "It Gets Better" issued to the infertile is not about finding a way to be okay with yourself and your life, and infertile, it's "You'll get pregnant!" That neither fixes nor empowers. It's demeaning to those who can truly not get pregnant, and not helpful to those who have lost sight of hope while still in the struggle.

I feel like I only marginally qualify to toss myself in the ranks of those struggling with infertility. I do not have some nigh insurmountable diagnosed pathology, nor have I been actually rendered infertile. I've been trying for 9 months with no success. It is more difficult for me than the average healthy person because I ovulate in random, unpredictable, really late, and possibly poor, ways. The view from here stinks; we started trying to have a family just shy of three years ago. We've lost a child, had a miscarriage, and now had to go on fertility meds. It's depressing, it's frustrating, and it's difficult even if I do not have it the worst. I am certain that some could look at me and be annoyed while I speak from the privilege of someone who actually can ovulate on their own sometimes, of someone who has ever been pregnant, of someone who got to hold their own living baby, because all of that is more than what some others get. If someone doesn't want to listen to what I have to say because I "have it better" so be it, because I do the same thing to others. The only thing I can try to do is only talk about how I feel, and not tell how others how they should feel, or how they can be enlightened about it like me.

You know what would inspire me? Or make me think harder about how down on myself I feel? Not someone who has a living child(ren) while they complain about their attempts to have more. Sure, go right ahead, that sucks too. You have every right to complain about it as I have every right to not listen to it. It falls on my deaf ears because at the end of the day, someone is still going to call you mommy. You still are a parent. And you're trying to tell me how I should feel, or that I should just buck up, or that you still "get it".

What would help? What would I listen to? Not some blog post by some pregnant woman telling me how she doesn't define herself by her infertility anymore, and how dark and terrible it was when she did, and how you shouldn't either.

No shit, Sherlock, it's because you're PREGNANT.

That's the kind of message that makes me roll my eyes and close the browser tab. Some people look at that story and see hope. "It happened for her, and it can happen for me!" But for me, that message is meaningless when it comes only after the person got what they wanted. Again, I'm not saying that it's not okay to tell your story. Where it stops being okay is when someone leans down from their position of privilege to tell you how to feel, or what you're doing wrong. Because when you're struggling to conceive, being pregnant is definitely a position of privilege. When you have no living children, living children are a privilege, even if it's not as many as you wanted.

What would affect me is someone who isn't already a mommy, someone who isn't pregnant telling me that it'll be okay. That if I can never have a healthy, living child, I will still be a good, worthy person. That I have value. That I haven't let my husband down. That I am not devalued as a person, as a woman. That it won't be pointless to try to start a new direction in life at 30+.

I don't need some pregnant woman to pat her belly, and tell me that it'll all be okay. I need someone who can credibly say that it'll be okay no matter what.

Because I have no desire to link to some of the bad examples I've seen and be all "Uppity pregnant lady said what?!" I will instead link to one really good example of someone who is doing it right, in my opinion:

Keiko of Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed, is a wonderful advocate and creator of an inspiring video about infertility that wants to help other women accept where they are. There is no belly-patting. No air of "See, it'll get better when you're pregnant like me." Just pure, awesome owning where she is and wanting to help others to be able do the same.

Eff this blog meme for a bit.

2010-10-19T14:26:00.001-07:00

I don't want to write about a piece of art that inspired me. I can write about my wedding any time. I don't want to write about a talent of mine. (And not just because spotting a font at 100 yards is a super lame talent (I have others, also super lame.)) I understand the importance of expressing that there is a person who did things and was happy before the shadow of baby death loomed, and that person still exists. I can get back to that.

I want to write about the stuff that is in your every day life that you don't talk about. The things that make you feel crazy, and second guess yourself about how you must somehow be the only person on the planet who has ever had an emotional breakdown in a pumpkin field. Because you're not. I'm not. Probably.

I want to write about those things because they're real. Because they're the little broken bits sprinkled in your reality. And they're just there now. And they're going to keep being there. Because if it's never happened to you, you probably have no idea that there's just shit like that in your life now. You have no idea how you can get blind-sided by these things. How they happen unexpectedly. How you can't ever simply just go to a pumpkin patch again. Because they happen. Because I know they happen to other people, and every now and then you will read a blog post and realize that you're not the only person who has a physiological reaction to just going back to certain buildings. That you're not the only person who has fucked up dreams about your dead child. And these things are hurtful, or embarrassing, and you don't talk about them. And how does one say things like this in their regular conversation: "So I had this dream where I saw my dead baby again and they had this weird thing where their veins showed through their skin, blue and red and you could see how the circulation wasn't right because of his heart defects. Oh, and then he died again because my subconscious wants me to suffer repeatedly."

Because I'm not the only person that has these things happen. And you're not. And sometimes it helps when you feel like some dysfunctional crazy person to realize that you're not alone, and that you're not that crazy. That this is just what happens to your life when you have had that kind of loss. And at least if you're a little crazy, you're not alone on the boat. That this is just part of the package.

Because man, it's hard to not feel at least a little bit unhinged when you have seen your fill of pregnant ladies and babies and children all over the pumpkin farm, and you're barely holding it together by a thread, and you're hoping nobody cares enough to see some strange lady with a tear on her cheek... And then your husband asks you what's up and you lose it in a blubbery snotty mess as you shove your face into his shoulder and blurt out something about wanting to go home.

I want to write about that, instead of being embarrased about it and hiding it. I want to write about how I am not alone. I want to write about these things because it makes me feel better to hear that I am not alone. And maybe it will help someone else let their breath out a bit and think "Oh my god, it's not just me. I'm not crazy."

Sometimes, I see Caleb when I am out around people. In other people's kids. It's like there's only so many archetypes of people in the world, and every now and then there's just a flash of recognition of a similar feature set or something. It's visceral sense of familiarity. Except it's not. And when you see a tiny little sandy-brown hair boy, in his little jeans and his blue shirt with the trucks on it toddle by as you're standing in line with a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins, and that flash hits you, and you just LOSE YOUR SHIT.

That happens to me. It happened another time last year, when we were at the local zoo with some friends and their kids. A little baby in a stroller went by us, and that flash. It knocks you on your ass. It makes you feel like you're hallucinating. Or desperate, and seeing your child where they very much clearly aren't. Your baby is some dust in a box. 7.5 lbs of your heart that never got to go outside, not even once, and never got to grow that big. Definitely not this child, this life, that's walking in the dirt, under the sun.

And it happens. And I know I'm not alone. You're not alone.

When you feel awkward and simple social introductions because someone is going to ask you what you do (Answer: nothing. No, I'm not "raising babies" either because I SUCK AT MAKING THEM) and you consider making up a fake job just to avoid the issue. Or because you don't know what the right answer to "How many kids do you have?" or you find yourself planning dental work around when you might ovulate, a prediction which all the calculus and crystal balls in the world could never answer, you're not alone.

Then there was the time where I got lost. See, the pediatric cardiologist, the perinatologist, and my current OB are all in the same building. A building that's directly across the street from the NICU, and the children's hospital. The hospital with the window to the room where my son died. This building, this block where so many bad things, so much delivery of bad news keeps happening. I can barely go back there without crying. I start having to fight back the tears just driving down the street to the place. I have to mentally prepare, to gather and gird up what's left of my sanity and stability to do it. To take the offramp we took every day to go visit Caleb.

Or to go somewhere else entirely in the city that requires using that same offramp, but a different branch of it to go the opposite direction. Where you're not prepared to be hit by your grief. Where you're just trying to read the signs, and then you realize the exit you need is off the RAMP OF DOOM, and you just start crying. Let me tell you, I have gotten really good at seeing well enough to drive with tears streaming out of me, but reading is prettymuch off the docket at that point. Especially the small, dark, faded, and hard to see signs in Tacoma.

More concerned with stamping down my crazy, and not hitting anything, I took the wrong turn. As I'm driving down the road, not finding the name of the street I needed, and noticing the high proportion of payday loan places, pawn shops, and bail bonds to normal buildings, I come to the realization that I am definitely not where I was headed. So if you've ever gotten lost on the wrong side of the tracks because an offramp makes you crazy? Or you have a place you can't go back to without being reminded of everything? You're not alone.

If you have to preface every vital signs check with your OB's nurse with "This building makes anxious, please don't medicate me I promise my blood pressure isn't 140/80 anywhere else." You're not alone.

I'm not alone.

October blog project - Day 16

2010-10-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

Day 16: a song that makes you cry (or nearly).

God damnit.

I think I may have missed the distinction between this prompt, and the one for day one. But never fear, there isn't exactly a shortage of songs that can make me cry. Anything that delves too much into minor chords can make me a little misty at times.

When I was looking over the list earlier in the month, I saw day 16 and thought "What, another song?! And I blew it with that honorable mention thing too." So as I thought about what I would choose for the song, a process that didn't take very long, I ended up listening to the song in question. Yeah good job.

I ended up having a massive, sobbing blubbery snot-filled wracking cry in the shower after listening to the song. So. Song that makes me cry? CHECK.

Part of me wishes I would have written this post ahead of time, back when I was already sobby, with the slight headache that a really intense cry always brings. Today I am not feeling particularly weepy. I've been in a little better mood lately. Provera worked, and I feel in a lot of ways that it helped flush out three months of crap of my body not doing what it was supposed to do. I just feel physically better. I think my working out is making progress too, but I feel like it really didn't turn a corner until my fake period got under way.

So I'm not overly in the mood to feel weepy today. I've been willfully ignoring annoying things, like the thought that while we need to go to the local pumpkin farm and buy tons of things to decorate for Halloween, we will be doing so again as a slightly somber couple, not a family, when there will be kids EVERYWHERE. How I will practice my willful ignoring of the things I don't want to see. Where you'll get a flash of a kid, and you'll see your lost child in their face. Or all the moms (and some dads) wandering around with a baby strapped to them in a carrier. That was supposed to be me. I was supposed to have my 18-month old. I was supposed to have a 1-month old, too. I don't think a whole lot about the "should haves" of my miscarriage back in January. The due date mostly went by without my notice, but occasionally a thought will creep up. The "Holy shit, that was supposed to have happened already."

A bad diagnosis. Your baby dying. A miscarriage. Infertility. Man what a load of suck. 2010 was supposed to be better. And I guess it was, on a relative scale. I can't call it a good year. It's just another year of days I didn't live in, and just tried to pass through as quickly as possible until I could get to the part of my life I want to be in, instead of this steady march of disappointments.

So on that.

Another song that makes me cry.

Shattered, by O.A.R.

In a way, I need a change
From this burnout scene
Another time, another town
Another everything
But it's always back to you

Stumble out, in the night
From the pouring rain
Made the block, sat and thought
There's more I need
It's always back to you

But I'm good without ya
Yeah, I'm good without you
Yeah, yeah, yeah

How many times can I break till I shatter?
Over the line can't define what I'm after
I always turn the car around
Give me a break let me make my own pattern
All that it takes is some time but I'm shattered
I always turn the car around

I had no idea that the night
Would take so damn long
Took it out, on the street
While the rain still falls
Push me back to you

But I'm good without ya
Yeah, I'm good without you
Yeah, yeah, yeah

How many times can I break till I shatter?
Over the line can't define what I'm after
I always turn the car around
Give me a break let me make my own pattern
All that it takes is some time but I'm shattered
I always turn the car around

Give it up, give it up, baby
Give it up, give it up, now
Now

How many times can I break till I shatter?
Over the line can't define what I'm after
I always turn the car around
All that I feel is the realness I'm faking
Taking my time but it's time that I'm wasting
Always turn the car around

How many times can I break till I shatter?
Over the line can't define what I'm after
I always turn the car around

Don't wanna turn that car around
I gotta turn this thing around

I know it's another song about a romantic relationship or a breakup or something, but the lyrics just get to me.

God damnit. This was shaping up to be a day I wasn't going to cry and feel terrible!

October blog project - Day 15

2010-10-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

Day 15: what you like about your house.

I like that it's ours. I like that Josh loves his large garage, and the storage shed. I like that it has a porch, and that even though we live on an annoying hill, we're not squashed into a housing development like a bunch of sardines on a postage stamp yard. I like that I can look out my windows and see trees and mountains. I like the island in my kitchen. I like my garden beds and our little baby trees we have planted. I like that we have enough space for now and for the future.

October blog project - Day 14

2010-10-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

Day 14: a non-fictional book that is meaningful to you since your loss.

My Heart vs. The Real World: Children with Heart Disease, In Photographs and Interviews by Max S. Gerber

While technically this book was more meaningful to me before my loss, it was extremely meaningful to me while trying to cope with the idea of having a child with heart defects.

It is a book filled with pictures and the stories of children with various heart defects, of various ages, written by a young adult CHD survivor himself.

October blog project - Day 13

2010-10-14T01:09:00.000-07:00

Day 13: a fictional book that is meaningful to you since your loss.

Oh snap, I almost missed today. It was a busy day. And to be honest, I can't really say that I have a fictional book that's been meaningful. Maybe because I mostly read science fiction.

October blog project - Day 12

2010-10-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

Day 12: something you are OCD about.

I try to keep my neuroticism down to a passable level. I can be OCD about a great many things. Josh suggested that I should say that I'm OCD about deciding what I'm OCD about.

I remember in the days following Caleb's death, I took it upon myself to do some yard work. I spent hours obsessively pulling every weed and every blade of grass that was out of place. It was neurotic, it was menial, it kept me from having to think too much. When I get nervous or upset, I will either fixate on something, and just stare the living hell out of it, or I will find some object and twiddle the living hell out of it. Yanking out every blade of grass that had grown into the decorate rock around the street light was what I needed somehow. I had spent so much time bent over the ground that I developed a nasty sunburn on my back, in the gap between my shirt bottom and pant top. As time passed it developed into an eye-shaped swath of rather tanned skin. I'm lily pale McWhiterson, but I tan fairly well. If I look very carefully, I can still just make it out. It's my tramp tan.

Sometimes I'm obsessive about font choices. I hate seeing the same 5 fonts everywhere (Comic Sans, Papyrus, Impact are the worst offenders.) Josh can attest to how I will grumble font names with disdain under my breath. Probably my low point was standing in the reception area of the PICU, grumbling about their sign which listed all the PICU rules in freaking Papyrus.

October blog project - Day 11

2010-10-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

Day 11: a photo of you recently and how it makes you feel seeing it now.

Man, didn't we just talk about how I hate pictures of myself? Sheesh.

So I manned, (womanned?) up and took a lame-o bathroom mirror self portrait today so that I'd have something recent. Because otherwise it was gonna be uh, the picture of cutting my hair short I already posted? And that's been months. My hair grew.

So there it is, crippling insecurity and self-loathing. Me, in all my pasty whiteness, with my half-wet from the shower hair, and doughy round face, low forehead, widow's peak, double chin, giant nose, one eye that's never as open as the other, in my workout clothes with my lack of boobs, lack of waist, with my creepy talon claw like extra-long fingers making a slightly unimpressed one-sided smirk.

There's a certain cruelty present in the universe when according to the ridiculous fancy scale that measures everything I bought, how I can be apparently 35% fat, and still have knuckly talon fingers and no boobs. I also like Curves' measurement where I was only 29.6% body fat instead.

(P.S. Don't argue about how it's not as awful as I carry on about. My brain is incapable of seeing pictures of myself any other way, despite anyone else's protestations. And I'm not fishing for compliments.)

October blog project - Day 10

2010-10-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

Day 10: a photo taken over 10 years ago of you and how it makes you feel seeing it now.

This space intentionally left blank.

It's not that I'm not participating today, I just don't have anywhere that I can find an old picture of me. There was one from high school that someone had put up on facebook and tagged me in, but it doesn't seem to be there now. Spent all day with a photo for today in the back of my mind. I got nothing.

So I guess it makes me feel sad that I don't have any pictures to look back on. It makes me sad that I feel so bad about myself, and have for so long that I run from the business end of cameras like I'm a witch and someone's pointing a hose nozzle at me. It makes me sad that when I look at any pictures of me, all I can see are a collection of all the flaws screaming out at me, and that I hate every picture of me, ever. EVER. And it makes me sad that I don't have pictures of a happy, carefree, innocent youth. Neither the pictures nor that much innocence exist.

10 years ago, life was hard too. Life is hard now in entirely different ways. One of the reasons I avoided my 10 year reunion stuff at high school (besides not wanting to fork out for airfare so shortly after the expensive venture that medical bills and having a very sick child, and then very dead child is) was that I didn't want to go back, 2 months after my son had died, and see the people from my class who had just had kids. It was a small class, and an even smaller reunion. One girl had a baby 4 days before Caleb was born. Another, one of my closest friends had her second the same month Caleb died. I couldn't go back and look them in the eye. I couldn't go back and not cry uncontrollably. I didn't want to be that perpetually broken person anymore.

In high school, I was the poor kid at the private school. I was the kid from the broken family with the estranged sister and screaming parents, the one who wasn't allowed to go do all the things the other kids did, with the unsure future who wasn't going off to awesome colleges. I was the broken one with bills before I even had a job.
That first fall after graduating there was an annual alumni event. I went. I have a foggy memory of us all having run off to a fast food place, and a friend casually dropping a hand on my shoulder, and being shocked at how much tension I was carrying in my neck and shoulders. I wasn't even aware until he pointed it out. In just a few months I was already bearing the weight of my broken reality. My friends had been worried about finals; I had been worried about paying the rent. Finding time to go to school around my work schedule. Finding a way to afford community college.
The last time I had seen any gathering of high school friends was at a wedding. Everyone had just graduated, many had jobs and were at a high point of their lives. I had already dropped out of college more than once. I had been very sick and on disability, with a weird relationship in the process of failing. I was an explosion of stress and about to be unemployed.

I was still the broken one.

I didn't want to go back and be the broken one again. The one with the dead baby.

Whatever other excuses I may have made from time to time about not going, that is the real reason.

I am the broken one, but I don't feel that broken. I haven't gone through the past 10 years being perpetually miserable. I have had good times. I have done well for myself, especially considering the circumstances. I may not have done anything prestigious, or graduated from anywhere, but I made it through everything life threw at me, and I'm still here. Some days, I'm a lot more down than others. But I'm still going. I had a good job, I met a good husband. I have a nice house in a pretty place. And a dead baby.

But I'm still here.

And despite my joking, I'm not that broken. I don't see myself that way.

That didn't fit with me in my head, my image of myself, the image of who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to overcome my loss, to go back and be the broken, unsuccessful, failing object of pity, again. How I see myself in my mind is not the image I see in the photo. How I feel is not how others see me. I have become so much more than the scared person 10 years ago, who could not see the light at the end of the tunnel, but who was also without the comprehension of how many more challenging, heartbreaking, and terrible things life can throw at a person. I didn't know my own strength. I could try to look back at an old photo and lament a better time. But it wasn't better.

So that is how I feel about the imaginary picture from 10+ years ago.

October blog project - Day 9

2010-10-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

Day 9: a photo you took since your loss.
Yeah, uh. About that. I've taken about a jillion. I didn't even get my DSLR until after losing Caleb, so every nice picture ever has been taken since my loss.

Given the common use of the rainbow metaphor in pregnancy and infant loss circles (i.e. people refer to subsequent pregnancies as their "rainbow after the storm") how about a photo of a full double rainbow over suburbia?

October blog project - Day 8

2010-10-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

Day 8: a photo that makes you angry/sad.

This photo was taken the day we had to put the cat day after he had been poisoned by getting into some lilies I had gotten for my birthday, that unbeknown to us, are extremely toxic to cats. It was also 3 days before Caleb's shunt surgery that did not go so well.

I was so sad that day. I was losing my beloved kitty, and I felt guilty about it. I was a little worried about my beloved baby going in for some pretty serious surgery. I was feeling loss, and hurt, and yet so unaware of how much worse it could get.

I just remember holding Caleb close, and it being about the only thing that got me to stop crying since we had rushed the kitty to the vet.

October blog project - Day 7

2010-10-07T11:45:00.001-07:00

Day 7: a photo that makes you happy

I looked through Flickr. I had to choose through a myriad of food and dogs, both of which make me happy.

On that, when Josh got home yesterday, the first word I hear is him shouting "ELEVEN?!"
"What?"
"Eleven?! I'm only eleven!?"
"...What."
"I read your blog! I'm number eleven, gee thanks."
"It was in no particular order."

Anyway. I love this photo. I love my beagle dog, and I love the way he was running and playing and being crazy, and then just flopped himself in the grass to stretch out and laze in the shade.

October blog project - Day 6

2010-10-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

Day 6: twenty things that calm you.

1. The ocean
2. Driving
3. Gardening
4. Walking barefoot in cool wet grass
5. Stepping out on the front porch warmed by the sun
6. Doodling
7. Photoshop
8. Long, hot showers
9. Sleep
10. Writing out my thoughts
11. Long hugs from Josh
12. Petting and/or hugging the dogs, especially the big ones
13. Reading a book
14. Listening to music
15. Cooking. Eating. Food. Gluttony. Mmmm.
16. Trees
17. The rain
18. 2am
19. Blogging. For reals.
20. Getting lost in another world, be it a book, a movie, my imagination, video games, etc.

October blog project - Day 5

2010-10-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

Day 5: your favorite quote.

So my favorite quote is from Bablyon 5. (Dear internet, I am a nerd.)

"I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?

So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."

The character in Babylon 5 that utters this quote is Marcus, one of the human rangers. He has had a pretty unceasingly shitty life.

I like this quote because it wraps up very neatly how I feel sometimes. My life has usually not been very fair. I used to get very freaking pissed off when life was unfair. Injustice was a massive irritation to me. And I got myself into a lot of extra shit by trying to stand still in the stream and stubbornly dig in my heels and rage against unfairness.

But what up. Life is still ridiculously unfair. Some people just seem to have it all so easily, like life just keeps throwing golden coins in their lap, undeservedly. And others keep getting way more than their ration of shit.

Having a child with a really fucking rare condition that ends up killing them sucks. It's not fair. But I didn't do anything to deserve this. Caleb didn't do anything to deserve it. I didn't deserve to go on to have a miscarriage followed up by fertility issues. This isn't my karmic reward for being a fucking jerk, and I refuse to accept that this is some sort of plan by some ~~cruel~~ benevolent deity.

This is sort of the realist's acceptance of the "Why me?!" question.

Sometimes shit is just really fucking unfair. Sometimes all you can do is get up and just keep going. That's just how it is, and it's nothing personal.

October blog project - Day 4

2010-10-04T17:55:00.000-07:00

Day 4: your favorite book. has it changed since your loss?

I'm a weirdo. My favorite book is probably Fahrenheit 451. I'm not very good at having a ZOMG MY FAVORITE of anything. I find it hard to pin it down to just one thing. Either I'm immune to being so deeply affected by a single song or book or something to feel inherently drawn to it as a favorite, or because I just fail at having a single, identifiable work stick out to me above all the others.

So given that, it hasn't changed, either.

I remember over the summer preceeding my Junior year in high school, we were given a list of books from which to do our obligatory book reports for the year, one for each quarter. The standing offer at my school was that if you did your book reports over the summer, and turned them in at the beginning of the year, you could only do three, instead of four. Nearly everyone took this deal. I don't know why I don't remember the book lists of other years. Maybe it was because in Junior year we had to do some sort of presentation, or read our reports, and this is why I noticed what others read. But I remember Junior year. Watching the books people chose were interesting. The girls were all doing reports on Little Women, Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility. The boys had a much wider splattering of book choices. It was hard to discern a theme, but Jane Eyre was definitely not among them. The gender divide was obvious, palpable.

I did my book reports on Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse Five, and Catch 22. Only later noticing that there was some sort of number theme in my choices. These were just the books that were interesting to me. My MO was to take the book list to the library, look at what was available and just pick the interesting ones. With a choice like Catch 22, I definitely wasn't going for the shortest books, or easiest subject matter.

I was definitely the only girl to choose any of those books.

I was always a little odd.

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month

2010-10-03T23:37:00.000-07:00

All officially recognized by Congress n' shit, apparently!

I am slightly late to this meme (apparently I miss the original memo on this stuff and only catch on when other people start doing it, but since I've been light on inspiration to blog lately, I'll participate.

So here's the program for the month:

Day 1 - a song that reminds you of your child, or one that you can't listen to anymore and why.
Day 2 - a movie that helped you get through the hard times, or one that jumps out at you after your loss.
Day 3 - a television program that helped you either get through hard times or that moves you.
Day 4 - your favorite book. has it changed since your loss?
Day 5 - your favorite quote.
Day 6 - twenty things that calm you.
Day 7 - a photo that makes you happy.
Day 8 - a photo that makes you angry/sad.
Day 9 - a photo you took since your loss.
Day 10 - a photo taken over 10 years ago of you and how it makes you feel seeing it now.
Day 11 - a photo of you recently and how it makes you feel seeing it now.
Day 12 - something you are OCD about.
Day 13 - a fictional book that is meaningful to you since your loss.
Day 14 - a non-fictional book that is meaningful to you since your loss.
Day 15 - what you like about your house.
Day 16 - a song that makes you cry (or nearly).
Day 17 - an art piece (drawing, sculpture, painting, etc) that moves you.
Day 18 - my wedding/future wedding/past wedding.
Day 19 - a talent of yours.
Day 20 - a hobby of yours and how it changed since your loss.
Day 21 - a recipe.
Day 22 - a website that has been meaningful since your loss.
Day 23 - a youtube video that makes you laugh.
Day 24 - where you live
Day 25 - your day, in great detail
Day 26 - your week, in great detail
Day 27 - your worst habit since your child's death.
Day 28 - what's in your handbag/purse
Day 29 - hopes, dreams, and plans for the next 365 days
Day 30 - a dream for the future

I wonder if anyone let the meme author know that there are 31 days in October?

So here's my playing catch up for the first three days:

Day 1: a song that reminds you of your child, or one that you can't listen to anymore and why.

Closer to Love, by Matt Kearney

This is something I've written about before. You can follow the link for the lyrics and the words I had about it back in June 2009, but I'll keep it short here.

I still can't hear the song without crying helplessly. The combination of the lyrics and "the phone call" from the hospital that Caleb was in trouble, and the fact that it was all over the radio at that time so I heard it while going to and from the hospital means it's indelibly written in my memory as part of the whole crappy coding, ECMO and dying part of his life. Of my life.

An honorable mention for the oddest song that makes me remember Caleb, but will make me cry your eyes out goes to Kids by MGMT. Again, it was on the radio, but just slightly earlier. I remember going into the NICU one day with the song stuck in my head, and humming it quietly, where I hoped the nurses wouldn't overhear my offtune ineptitude while breastfeeding Caleb. So it's got a bittersweet connection for me.

Despite the title, I'm not sure how it relates to kids, exactly. I'm also not entirely sure how the lyrics make sense at all.

Day 2: a movie that helped you get through the hard times, or one that jumps out at you after your loss.

The one that jumps out at me is the new Star Trek movie. Not that it helped me get through my loss in any way. I'm sorta foggy on the exact timeline, but extremely shortly after Caleb died, our dear friends came to visit, to help us deal with the funeral home arrangements, and to try to make sure we kept moving. Something I'm very grateful for. Especially the funeral home arrangement part, as when we went there we had to deal with a very pregnant lately and I was completely non-functional. I only remember obsessively fiddling with a calculator that was on the table; one of the ones with the spring-loaded cover on the screen. I flip-flapped that thing neurotically the whole time I was there. It kept me from having to look at anything else. Like pregnant ladies.

ANYWAY.

One of the things they did was take us out to see the new Star Trek movie. We had been planning on it, but we were pretty damn preoccupied. I wept pretty hysterically through the whole Kirk-being-born part of the movie. It was a dense moment of pain and hurt and embarrasment and completely over-empathizing with the grief in the scene, and of the vast blur that was that time period, the calculator, the movie, and being FUCKING PISSED OFF at how gorgeous the weather and the world was when my baby was dead are about all I remember.

I kicked a tree in rage, people! Have I mentioned that? There didn't seem to be a day of the meme to blog about your vengeance against nature, so I'll slip that in here.

Day 3: a television program that helped you either get through hard times or that moves you.

I honestly can't remember a TV show sticking out that helped me through. Probably because late May is not the best time for TV, or because I don't watch a whole lot of TV in the first place. I learned pretty quick to avoid the crap out of media, because there's lots of being born, getting pregnant, and dying in people's plotlines.

Okay.

2010-10-01T16:43:00.001-07:00

Today at Curves, a couple of the older ladies were talking about all their grandchildren and when more of them were due.

And I was okay.

Is this thing on?

2010-09-29T23:39:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted in a while. Sorry. I fell off the daily photo wagon, and I basically can't find it in me to care.

I saw my OB again and did a big ol' exam again and heyo, still not ovulating for no real reason.

So here yet another thing begins, I guess. I'm taking Provera to make me have a fake period, then I start taking Clomid. Provera works by dumping a bunch of progesterone in you, faking your body into shedding the uterine lining when the progesterone level drops. I'm starting with 50mg of Clomid, and hoping it makes me ovulate. Then I go get more bloodwork done to confirm that I for reals ovulated, and cross my fingers and hope I actually conceive. Then hope I don't miscarry. Then hope the baby doesn't have heterotaxy. Or anything else wrong. Or find some other reason to die.

It's all so very complicated.

Clomid apparently can have some gnarly side effects, not the least of which is mood swings and emotional volatility. I am alternating between affectionately referring to Clomid as either my "kick in the ovaries" or my "crazy pill."

I find that I am having a hard time being optimistic. Like this is some dismal thing I'm stuck in desperately trying the Clomid before I get put out to pasture and turned into glue for not reproducing. My OB said people who are gonna conceive on Clomid usually do so within 3-4 cycles once you get on the right dose for you to ovulate.

Sometimes it's just hard to believe that things are going to stop sucking. Sometimes it's hard to let go and have hope again, because it really fucking hurts when you do and things go wrong.

The irony

2010-09-20T22:43:00.001-07:00

I went and did my second workout today. There were quite a few other people there, and they mostly talked about the fair and all the food there. At one point I heard the words "fried cheese curds." I am somewhat concerned about the level of self-flagellation required to talk about such foods while you are working out. But it went well, and I had gone to the store also to grab a few things. (Nothing says celebrating a workout like a wad of meat wrapped in bacon. And I needed bacon.) By the time I got home I felt good. Energetic.

I decided to go play with the dogs in the yard with my workout-inspired energy. I had let them run about while I put stakes up for my sunflowers, since they had bent over in the wind that's come with the crazy rain we've had lately.

Having finished that, I went to go play with them directly, chasing and running around the yard. Dale charged away from me, running up the slope to the upper part of the yard, and I followed. Just as I got to the slope-iest part, he turned and tried to jump up on me. Mid-step I shifted to brace for the incoming 100 lbs of flying dog, and twisted my ankle on the uneven ground.

Oh owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

It is just like me, to get all energetic and excited about exercising just to sprain my ankle.

(P.S. My sincere apologies to anyone who uses an RSS reader that shows edits. I should proofread better before hitting submit about 5 different times.)
(P.P.S. OH MY FLIPPIN' SHIT I TYPOED THE ADDENDUM TO APOLOGIZE FOR EDITING SO I HAD TO EDIT AGAIN SDKLFJSLDFJSLER.)

Curves

2010-09-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

So I've been feeling really down on myself this year. I've gained about 12 pounds since the miscarriage in January, which doesn't do a whole lot for my generally mediocre self-esteem and horribly inaccurate self-image. I'm sure it doesn't actually look that bad, because I have always been incapable of looking in the mirror and seeing anything but an eldritch horror, but when I look in the mirror, I see the extra 15 pounds of belly fat, and I see someone who looks about 3-4 months pregnant.

And I'm not.

And accurate or not, the mental image of myself looking like a pregnant woman when I'm not, but would dearly likely to be sucks about a billion butts.

I've tried yoga DVDs, and I don't keep up with it. I've tried walking and jogging, and my knee screams in terror. I've tried riding a bike, and I find it boring, while my butt screams in terror.

It's also getting up on being fall and winter, and around these here parts, that means a lot of rain, and cool weather. Which I like, but do not overly relish the idea of riding a bike around circles in the rain when it's 45 out.

There's a Curves place closeby. I peeked in and asked some questions. It has a monthly fee, but I figure the concept of wasting money by not going, and by cheerful adorable little Curves ladies calling to remind me why I want to exercise might keep me going. I'm contractually obligated to.

So I signed up and did the little fitness assessment thing. In my head, I think I need to lose 15-20 pounds to get back down to the 125ish I was before and after Caleb. I was 127 before I got pregnant in December. I wasn't underweight then, I probably had another 5ish pounds of extra padding, always in my stomach because of course that would be the least feminine and most detrimental to my health place to collect weight, of course that's how my body'd do it.

After all the measurements, I was 140 lbs. on their scale, have 29.6% body fat, and should lose 11 lbs. This is based on a little machine with handles I had to grab while it calculated my fattiness, and an average figure that women should carry about 30 pounds of body fat, and I have 41.

Between their scale being kinder than my home scale which declares I weigh 144, and my birdlike skeletal structure and far less than average boob quantity, I can roll with the disparity between my number and theirs. We'll start there.

I have my first workout scheduled to learn the equipment, after that I can go on my own, with a goal of 30 minutes 3 times a week. If I get knocked up eventually and my doctor doesn't want me to work out, I get a medical note, and can put my membership on hold.

Feeling inspired, I decided to take a spin on the bike when I got home. It was mostly not raining at that point. I did my typical once around all the nearby neighborhoods. As I was approaching a corner in one of the developments, there was group of kids playing in a front yard. I watch as a curly blonde-haired little girl in a blue flowery dress, probably no more than 6 or 7 years old, leans over to her friends and points at me, saying something behind her hand she's raised to her mouth, and they both giggle while staring at me.

"Don't fuck with me, little girl, I'm old enough to be your mother." crossed my mind.
Yeah, you start thinking thoughts like that and you're definitely old, at least in mindset.

Then my iPhone switched to the next song, and I pedaled down the street listening to The Smiths in increasing amounts of precipitation.

There's something appropriate, even if it is incredibly pathetic, about listening to The Smiths in the rain after being laughed at by small children.

This post made me add the word "mindfuck" to my spellcheck dictionary.

2010-09-16T00:41:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted any pictures.
I haven't taken any pictures.

I am a depressive little monkey right now. I'm alright, but I just can't find it in me to pick up the camera and take pictures.

I'm getting out of bed in the morning, I'm bathing, I'm feeding myself and Josh and I'm doing what I need to do. I am working on ways to get out of the house and do other things. But I can't find any "give a shit" in me to take pictures right now.

Somewhere in my head I have more posts rattling around about Clomid thoughts and what scares me, and what makes me feel terrible about myself, but I am not sure I will get into it right now.

I am going to get into some of the extremely fucked up dreams I have. They're probably not for the faint of heart. Or anyone who doesn't want to feel awkward and cry a bit. Or for Josh to read at work like he does often does with my blog on his lunch hour.

It's disturbing. I warned you.

Sometimes I have interesting dreams that make me want to sleep more to see more. Sometimes I have really terrible dreams.

A recurring theme to my dreams is one where there's some Caleb-representation around. One of these recurring themes are the dreams where somehow he's been alive all this time still in the hospital. It wasn't that he had died, it was that I had given up. Often the details are not clear. Often a lot of disjointed things that don't make sense happen. But the usual jist is that I gave up on him, and left. Sometimes it's that he's been taken and hidden from me, that it was all fake somehow. Sometimes it was nefarious. Sometimes it was because I was so terrible that I wasn't allowed to keep him. Sometimes there's no explanation, sometimes he's just there. A I go back to the hospital to see him, and people, random unaffiliated dream people, or hospital staff, or people I know are judging the hell out of me for being gone all that time. I suppose that's a reasonable judgment. Sometimes it's just benign things where he's in the hospital, sometimes it's completely not-benign revisits of medical horrors. Have I mentioned ECMO isn't pretty? ECMO isn't pretty. And my brain can invent all manner of freakish, not pretty things to throw in the mix just to be horrifying, too.

A terrible dream where your son-who-is-supposed-to-be-dead is alive, and you abandoned him, and/or you're unworthy and everyone hates you, and at the same time the part of you that realizes that it's a dream is trying to scream out that this isn't right, this isn't what happened, this sucks, can I please wake up now can really do a number on you.

Another recurring theme is either one that builds off the above, or is standalone where I have had another baby, and I am actually taking it or the bizarre Caleb-representation dream baby. In my dreams this baby is usually impossibly small. Caleb was small when he was born at 4.5 pounds. These weird dream-babies are smaller. They don't fit in the car seat, or I'm otherwise responsible for their care in which they end up dying under my ineptitude. Often, it's because their chin falls forward, cuts off their airway, and suffocate. The one I had the other night, this tiny dream baby died in my arms because I was holding it wrong.

I never have non-fucked up dreams of pregnancy and babies anymore. The days where I wake up after having dreamed of babies, having dreamed one of these mindfucks are the bad days.

Thank you, my subconscious, for this wrenching bullshit.

The strange part is, in my waking thoughts, I do not feel guilty or responsible for Caleb's death. As someone who has never been around babies much, I was a bit intimidated by the idea of caring for one before Caleb was born, but I do not consciously feel that way any more. I'm not sure why this shit stews around in my head. I'm not sure if I've completely gone off my nut and the crazy is coming out in dreams sometimes.

Maybe my self-loathing and feeling down about myself and needing to go on Clomid is coming out in these dreams, since they've been more frequent lately. There is a lot of failure, and loathing, and horror in there. Watching your kid die once is already overdose for one lifetime. I don't need inventive replays in my sleep. Why is my brain doing this to me?

So I don't know.

I'm not entirely sure why I felt compelled to share. It was not last night but the night before where I had a long slew of shitty baby dreams. Maybe I'm hoping that by writing it out it will figuratively exorcise the terrible dream demons. Writing this out is as good as I can do. I don't like talking about my dreams. A funny snippet about the entertaining weird things that can happen, sure. But not this deep, disturbing, mindfuck stuff. I don't want to talk about it out loud with words. This is as good as it gets. But maybe if I write them out here, they'll stop digging into my skull. Maybe putting this out there will help me. Maybe it will help someone else not feel so scared and embarrassed and betrayed by their own mind.

Clomid.

2010-09-12T22:23:00.001-07:00

Clomid.

That's a word that just sits there in my mind, heavy, looming. Like it's a boulder in the tide of my thoughts, with sand and water and rushing around it.

It's like this is one more landmark of how things went so very differently than we had planned. How almost three years ago we had decided we were going to try to have kids. How much time has passed. How much sadness, failure, heartbreak has been between then and now.

I guess I should be more positive about it. I have a very good chance that taking Clomid will make me ovulate. Not any more likely to actually conceive, but ovulation is the first step of the battle.

"Battle."

Having kids is no longer this simple, inevitable thing you do. You don't just have lots of sex until you pee positive on a stick. It's a fight. It's a struggle.

You have to swallow the reality of your failure, your insufficiency, your dependence on taking a drug to have a possibility of getting pregnant.

Taking Clomid is like me officially accepting that this sucks. That we're no longer on the easy path, or even desperately clinging to the rail.

And it's not a magic pill. 20% of people who take Clomid still won't ovulate. 55% who take Clomid won't conceive in the 6 month time limit.

Then what? Then nothing? Is that a lifetime limit? I can't even think that far ahead. Right now I just want one living child.

Ugh.

Where am I? How did I get here? Why do things have to be like this?

I don't have to take it. My alternative is to do nothing. I didn't think I was "there" yet not too long ago. But time has passed. It's been two months since my last period. It's a little easier to think that you can have patience and you're not ready for drugs when your body is actually capable of getting pregnant. I can't stand any more of this interminable waiting around. Wait until it's not too soon to Caleb's c-section to get pregnant again. Wait to ovulate. Wait to heal after the miscarriage. Wait for it to work. Wait to ovulate again. Wait. wait. Wait.

It's entirely out of my control, and it's maddening. There's no guarantee that waiting will get us anywhere. Patience can tick away even more time, more years with nothing. I don't have three more years in me before I give up.

So while Clomid represents acceptance of my failure, I suppose it represents some measure of control I can take back over my future, my plans for life. My futile stranglehold on the cruel twists of statistics.

So I will take the bitter pill because doing nothing feels worse*.

* I reserve the right to eat those words when I am being wracked with side-effects.

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-11-10 - Josh and Dale

2010-09-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

Sorry, grainy phone photo.

9/11

2010-09-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

Where was I on 9/11?

Back in September of 2001, I had a job that was 76 miles from where I lived. It was a hell of a commute. I literally had to put gas in my car every single day. Not terribly unusual for the area I lived in, with roughly half the workforce doing the hour minimum commute in to Los Angeles for their job. I was no exception. Since I had a hell of a drive, which was made even worse if I was scheduled for the early shifts, I had a habit of crashing at a friend's place.

It was one such night where I was sleeping on someone's living room floor on 9/10.

Sometime early in the morning, I woke up to the sound of my friends' phone ringing. The girl had already left, as she has a super early appointment, and the guy was probably still asleep. 9/11 happened pretty freaking damn early when you're in Pacific Time.

Half asleep, bleary, and not really trying to butt into someone else's answering machine messages -- this was back in the day where people had answering machines and not voicemail, and the caller's message would emanate out from the phone's speaker -- I wasn't really clear on what was being said.

Have I mentioned I'm not a morning person?

One of their friends had called, introduced herself, and said, I mean as far as my sleeping brain could parse, "I'm just not sure what to think about this Paris thing.

I turned over and tried to go back to sleep. Through a series of events that are foggy at best, the next concise memory I have is standing there with my friend A, watching planes fly into buildings on his television.

Yeah, she wasn't talking about Paris, she was talking about terrorists. This goes to illustrate how, in the parlance of a pre-9/11 20 year old, the word "terrorist" really didn't come up much.

Stunned, I didn't really know what to think about this terrorist thing, either, but I did have a job to go to, so I got ready, and hopped in the car to make the not entirely short, but certainly shorter drive from one end of the San Fernando Valley to the other.

After getting on the freeway, I got a phone call from a coworker. The mall had been closed, no one was going to work. I was slogging through traffic, and listening to news on the radio, and so I just turned around to make the long drive home. I think I got about halfway there when I get a call from my boyfriend at the time, who also didn't have to work that day either.

Being a 20 year old with a relatively new boyfriend, I made the decision that the better course of action was to turn around and drive about 50 miles in the opposite direction to go to his place near UCLA. So I spent 9/11 there with him, being stunned and scared and watching news on TV, wandering out to get some food, and fooling around. I mean that last part literally.

I remember my mother being entirely irritated that I had decided it was a better idea to drive around L.A. and end up staying close to some Federal building that's in Westwood. I have a feeling it wasn't terribly high on the terrorist's priority list.

So my story isn't terribly interesting -- the high point really was the "that Paris thing." line.

The next day, I had to go back to work in an entirely deserted mall. Not everything was open and there weren't really any people who thought shopping or going to a prominent public place was a great idea on 9/12. I remember as I was walking to my store*, two mall cops were walking together, casually, towards the escalator, and an older lady freaked out when she saw them. Utterly convinced that their presence together meant that something terrible was happening and that they knew something about it, she followed them up the escalator in histrionics.

"What's going on?! Where are you going!? Is it the terrorists!?!"

No, I don't the mall was terribly high on their priority list, either. Us Americans and our infidel Cinnabon.

I think it took about 4-5 days before we actually got a real, live, paying customer back in the store. We had some pretty long, boring days that involved paper airplanes, watching movies on the big screen in the back of the store, and browsing the internet.

Josh was a Marine, stationed in Okinawa on 9/11. He could probably tell you where he was and what he did that day, but then he'd have to kill you.

*In 2001, I worked in the very first Apple retail store that had just opened in Glendale. I don't care if time zones made the one in Virginia technically open first, we were store #1.

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-10-10

2010-09-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

This photo basically sums up my life.

Or at least it does in a vague sense in that it represents what I try to occupy myself with amongst all the petty unimportant but slightly chaotic things that buzz around me.

In a sense, it sort of started last night at some wee hour when I realized those books I ordered from Amazon hadn't shown up on my porch yet. I tracked my order and discovered that they had in fact been delivered on 9-4. WHAT.

Oh, by USPS. Bargle. I have some interesting mental instability when it comes to checking the mail. I haven't yet managed to thoroughly convince the little completely batshit voice in my head that medical bankruptcy is not going to explode out of an innocuous letter at any moment. Not that refusing to check the mail changes anything were it to happen. Nobody said neurosis made sense. Point being, I hadn't checked the mail since then.

Having discovered this somewhere around 1am, I was disinclined to make a lot of noise turning the alarm off and back on again so I could walk down and get the mail in the dead of night. Then I proceeded to play Mass Effect until 3am. As a result, I had bizarre dreams about fighting aliens and various people I know being my neighbors and bizarre landscaping decisions and other weird things and people taking my books. Nobody said my dreams made sense either.

I woke up this morning to my phone ringing. I've been crabbily, vaguely alluding to my incredibly reliable and incredibly punctual (pffffft hahahaha) ovulation and reproductive system. I had gone to get some blood tests done to test 5000 different hormones to see what was off. The answer? Apparently not a damned thing. Everything is at normal levels, I just don't ovulate worth a shit. Ovaries have hung up the "OUT TO LUNHC" sign indeed. More on that later. We're talking about my weird day right now.

This wasn't the best start to a morning, as it's simultaneously incredibly enlightening and disheartening to find out there's nothing wrong with you, but you don't work right, and there's really nothing you can do about it besides cross your eyes and go for the really crappy carnival ride or guzzle down some Clomid.

I get downstairs and see that Josh has left me a note reminding me to call about the heater which hasn't been running -- and in WA state, and central air system is supposed to run intermittently throughout the day if for no other reason than just to circulate air, and Josh said it hadn't been coming on to do that, either. This has gone on for a few weeks, but it hasn't exactly been the "Oh, it's cold, turn the heater on." time of year, especially when you're the kind of freak that thinks 63 is a perfectly reasonable indoor temperature. (This might be related to why I weep when it hits 80.) I've been really good at remembering that the heater needs to be looked at around, say, 5:04pm, but not at any useful, business hours time of day.

So I called the heater people, and they said they'd send a tech out between 1 and 4 today. I had a terribly awkward conversation with the girl on the phone about this.

"We can send someone out between 1 and 4." She says.
"Okay, which day?" I ask.
"Uh, between 1 and 4."
"I got that, on what day?"
"1 and 4."
"So you mean today?"

I scheduled an oil change for Josh's car, another thing he'd asked me to do, and went on my merry way being crabby about by un-abnormal brokenness, and grabbed some breakfast, checked the mail to get my books, and took a picture of them. After meandering back upstairs, I decided "Hey, I'll just use this picture for the blog today." So I start up Photoshop, plug my phone in and...

Photoshop crashes. Refuses to start up. Stops responding. Oh, right. It did this a couple days ago, when I tried to add a new font. It is so hosed that Windows can't even force it to close. Well, screw this, I've decided I'm having a crabby day, and I'll deal with it later. I minimized Photoshop, and went to go do something entirely meaningless in FarmVille.

But then Windows wigged out, possibly related to the fact that I had merely minimized an incredibly angry piece of software from literally 10 freaking years ago, because I live in the past and I used 6.0 the most and it's just comfortable I don't care what features have come out in the last decade. This does, however, leave me without Photoshop, and that makes me crabby and uncomfortable.

Then the heater place calls. "I'm sending my tech out now." the lady says. "Is that okay? He'll be there in about half an hour." It's like... 11:15 at this point. I haven't finished breakfast, I'm still in my pajamas, and Photoshop is broken. This isn't overly okay but sometimes I am a pushover so sure why the fuck not, it's fine. I hang up and dash in to take the world's fastest shower.

As it turns out, the heater is working juuuuuust fine for the guy. I'm not clear on what the problem Josh had with it was, I was just doing the "call the guy, cause I'm the one home for it" thing. If I don't have to bother thinking about things, I don't. I did have the presence of mind to pop the cover on the heater and see that the LED on the control board was flashing a "normal operation" code before shrugging and calling the repair guy anyway. I took the normal light as a good sign, as last winter when the heater didn't come on, the control board was shorted out and had to be replaced.

So I'm feeling a little self-conscious about my "Well gee willickers Mr. Repair Guy, I just don't know a gosh darned thing about what the little ol' problem was! I am completely helpless and called because my husband told me to!" To be fair, I did communicate more intelligently than that, and I stopped short of protesting to some strange guy that I'm really not that stupid and 1950s. Sometime in the last year or so my sense of embarrassment has completely died, but I took it in the ego a bit.

I finally finished my breakfast. And I managed to fix Photoshop. So that's why you have a picture. Hooray.

Oh snap. I should probably go fix the thermostat so it's not trying to make it 75 degrees in here now that we're not testing the heater anymore.

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-9-10, ANTS

2010-09-09T23:16:00.000-07:00

When Josh saw that I had not yet posted a picture today, he gasped, spun his laptop screen around to face me, and yelled "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo......"

He is my inspiration. :P

I really need to go take new pictures. I've been lazy lately. I'm also tired. Can I blame it on ovulation? I may have finally ovulated. Maybe. The charting software says I did, but the temps are weird and it's only took like 7 weeks, and so I'm no really buying it. So whatever. I'm sure you all desperately wanted to know that. I'm mostly making excuses. I am tired because I was up until 5am reading Pioneer Woman's blog and doing some writing of my own. That I hope to finish at some point and post.

The dogs have been special. We've had some rain, and they seem to have decided that being out in the rain is thoroughly miserable, and so when we put them out, they refuse to leave the deck, then do their business in the living room after holding it for somewhere around 16 hours.

Have you ever seen a 100 lb. dog whiz on your carpet? Have you ever heard a 100 lb. dog whiz on your carpet?

So I was crabby yesterday about that. Especially when I found more pee in the kitchen. WHAT THE HELL DOGS. This is the Pacific Northwest. You have all lived here if not the entirety, the majority of your poochy lives.

It rains here.

You are going to have to go pee in the rain.

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-8-10, Sage

2010-09-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

Raindrops on sage leaves. It's almost texture overload, here.

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-6-10 - RIBFEST

2010-09-06T23:47:00.001-07:00

Sorry for missing yesterday. Was busy busy with Labor Day BBQ and company and fun.

I didn't take any good pictures of the food. Again. Stomach > Camera. I fail. So here's a couple phone photos. Try not to drool on the keyboard.

The ribs were awesome, even though a miscommunication in the directions sent to me made us expect them to cook a lot faster than it actually took. BBQ corn on the cob and potato salad were also had.

Super awesome tactic to the BBQ corn? Peel the husks off, keep em. Butter liberally, sprinkle pepper and garlic powder, or any other seasoning that pleases you (red pepper or chili powder can be used if you want more kick, or salt, seasoned or otherwise if you want to die in tasty unhealthy cornbliss. Fr'example.) Wrap the husks back around the cob, and then in aluminum foil. Corn will be super juicy and moist, with no burny parts or metal taste like straight in the foil can give you. Toss 'em somewhere out of the way on the grill, like on that little upper shelf you can see in the first picture. Super easy.

You can also do this in the damned oven, as we learned somewhere around 9pm when the propane tank was petering out on the grill because we were expecting baby back ribs to need 90 minutes of cooking, when it was more like 4 hours.

Learning the easy way is so boring.

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-4-10 - Labor Day Food

2010-09-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

Busy day today. I am too lazy to even plug in my phone to try get better pictures, so I'm just gonna repost what I was spamming twitter with earlier in the day.

So, on the docket for Labor day BBQ are a bunch of baby back pork ribs. This is 8 lbs of MEAT and more meat from Costco:

So, prepping the ribs for tomorrow, first I had to boil the ribs in a pickling spice mixture. Couldn't find pre-made pickling spice at the store, but after some googling, I had nearly all the components anyway.

Including corriander seed, which I got out of the garden.

The boiling:

After the boiling came the rubbing of spice, and the sitting in the fridge for a day. My fridge is freaking packed.

After that, I boiled a ton of eggs and made this Pioneer Woman recipe. I've made it before and it was really good. I found a way to stuff it in the fridge, along with some extra eggs for the potato salad that will be made tomorrow.

This is my first attempt at making ribs from scratch. I wheedled a SEEKRIT AWESOME BBQ RIB recipe from a Texan friend. Hopefully it'll be good.

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-3-10, Taking Care of Tomatoes

2010-09-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

Lots of green tomatoes growing all over my plants. Some are starting to get heavier and weigh the branches down.

Now, I HATE the smell of tomato plants. Can't tell you why, and I know some people love it, but it's way not for me. Maybe it's because I have memories of having to pick stinky tomato worms off the plants in the garden as a kid, and tossing them at the chickens to eat. This was a treat for them, but man, not my favorite task. (I grew up in the sticks.)

I placed tomato cages, but some of the crafty buggers were growing outside of the cages, so I had to crawl in between my plants and touch them (they feel as weird as they smell!) and tuck branches into the cages, and make sure the heavy t'maters were supported.

Gardening!

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-2-10 - Ravioli!

2010-09-02T17:38:00.001-07:00

So after making my own pasta sauce from the coworker tomatoes last weekend, I decided to try my hand at making my own pasta, too.

I decided on ravioli, and stole a basic pasta dough recipe from Food Network. I didn't want to follow the stuffing part, so I just made the dough, and made up my own filling. I've made Alton Brown's meatloaf before, and it is very good, it's just not what I wanted for my ravioli.

Yeah, another iPhone photo. We're lucky I even remember I own photo devices when I am eating tasty food.

Here's what I did for the stuffing:

1 Package of Mild Italian Sausage
1 15 oz. container of Ricotta cheese
1/4ish cup of Parmesan
Handful of fresh herbs: Oregano, Basil, Sage, Thyme.

I peeled the skins off the sausage, and cooked them up whole. Once cooked, I sorta cut/chunked them up into smaller manageable bits. Dumped in the container of Ricotta, and tossed in some Parmesan. 1/4 cup is an estimate.

I snagged the herbs out of the garden. I cut the Basil and Sage up, but just tossed the Oregano and Thyme in as-is after stripping it off the stems. I loving using Thyme and Oregano because they're so easy like that.

I stirred the filling all together, and put it in my squares of pasta dough.

The recipe didn't say how long to cook the ravioli, so I winged it. Josh said that at around 5-6 minutes his were "too chewy" and not cooked enough, but cooking longer (about 12 minutes for the longest ones I sampled) didn't make any change to it. Boy doesn't like his pasta the least bit al-dente, I didn't find any issue with them.

Since my filling was already fully cooked beforehand, the meat wasn't a concern.

There was more filling than there was dough, though I suppose I could have rolled the dough a lot thinner, and gotten more mileage out of it. I stashed the extra stuffing and I'll either get motivated enough to make a second round of ravioli, or toss it on some other kind of pasta with the last of my sauce.

It was incredibly flavorful and filling, though by now I suspect I have a slight garlic reek aura about me.

The tomatoes that went in the sauce, in their MSCE book box, photo as previously promised:

Photo-a-Day Project, 9-1-10

2010-09-01T16:26:00.000-07:00

Belated pictures of my giant yellow squash.

That's a quarter, again.

I need to pick my own zucchini. Probably make more bread. Got more giant yellow squash awaiting devouring. The rind was kind of thick and sort of unpleasant to eat, but the flesh was delicious. I just sauteed it up in an olive oil/butter combo with a tiny bit of sea salt.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-31-10

2010-08-31T17:56:00.000-07:00

Our tree is turning colors in hilarious and incomplete ways.

Sorry about the crappy "through the upstairs window screen" photo, it's raining.

Facebook

2010-08-31T00:51:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned this before, but I have a hard time using Facebook like a normal person anymore.

The problem is that I am 29 years old, and everyone I've met that is anywhere near my age is shooting out children like that's biologically what people DO or something.

This makes Facebook the minefield of "Look at how everyone has kids but you." It's barely a day that goes by without someone posting their ultrasound image, announcing a pregnancy, having another kid, posting pictures of their kids, or gooshing about how being a parent is just the most effervescently wonderful thing anyone can ever do with their lives.

You get the idea.

Isn't that fucking fantastic. I would love to realize how every day my child makes me a better person. Maybe it's my brokenness, but so often there's this air of... superiority to it. Look at this amazing thing I've done with my life, and I'm better than you because I've experienced all these days of being made a better person by my kid. I don't get that sort of luxury. I mostly get to think about how my failure to reproduce a living kiddo makes me dance around on the precipice of my sanity.

The really hard ones are the people that had kids around the same time I had Caleb. And there were a lot. If you plant a flag in the ground at Caleb's birthday, and go six months in either direction, there were no hyperbole, there were over a dozen people I knew pretty well who had a kid. I stopped counting at 12.

A good friend had her second somewhere around the my fog of ECMO. I sort of registered it happening. I don't remember if I managed to congratulate her; I'm sure she understood. I'm happy for her and her husband. These are people I've known foreverrrr and who have always been great.

Her little boy is not a baby anymore, and it is really obvious in the pictures. I look at this little boy, who is playing with his brother and being... a kid. And it's weird.

I'm supposed to have an 18 month old running around.

I'm not even sure how to fathom that. Caleb is forever in my mind a tiny baby. Stopped. He will never grow, age, be a kid.

It's hard to see the ones that are close to his age especially. It's like looking at bizarro-world of what I could have had. Should have had. These... no longer babies. These kids. Walking around, being so...

Alive.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-30-10

2010-08-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

Per Jenni's request, here are some overall view pictures of the garden.

From left to right, yellow squash, zucchini, pumpkin, gourds, strawberry, lavendar, mint, and japanese maple, tomatoes, my failed salad section, peppers, and the herbs in the diagonal front section.

These are the squash, zucchini, pumpkins, and gourds. Between the squash and zucchini is a sunflower; it hasn't bloomed yet, but I started late.

You can see the orange pumpkin on the right, and where the vine climbs and over the wall to the next level up.

Middle section:

The herbs are across the front. I cut down the giant main stalk to my parsley, so it's being short again. Tomatoes on the right. The poor maple is being dwarfed by the lavendar, which are still in pots so that they don't compere for the tree's resources. The mint in the middle is also potted, so that it doesn't go all Little Shop of Horrors on us.

Salad and Peppers.

The salad section mostly got relentlessly devoured. The carrots got gophered, and the arugula never really leafed out so much as made these giant stalks with flowers, and now seed pods. I have one mesclun plant I could get a salad out of. Back left of the salad section is a shoot from the big tree on the other side of the fence I haven't killed off. Back right is another sunflower.

The peppers probably needed to be in a more full sun spot. I've got a few anaheims growing, and a few new blooms.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-28-10

2010-08-28T22:39:00.001-07:00

This is my pumpkin. It put itself there, not me. I just take the pictures.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-27-10

2010-08-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

"You are a brave woman!" Josh said upon seeing this picture.

The truth is, I was already down in there trying to take a close up picture of a marigold when I see a frigging wasp flying around nearby. My general rule when encountering things that I do not want to bite my shit, is just to be REALLY STILL until they go away. This may have been one of the things they taught us in snake lessons at school in the infernal desert.

This time, I carefully swiveled myself around, zoomed in as far as the camera would go, and took a picture.

Note: Wasp is perched on top of a pile of gopher dirt.

*sigh*

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-26-10

2010-08-26T15:29:00.001-07:00

At least when he runs away, he's loud about it.

P.S. I am not dead yet, though my lungs still burn and I my head is exploding and I am still coughing like I should be admitted to a pulmonary ward. It's been so windy here today that I, former resident of the relentlessly windy desert actually noticed.

I noticed because the wind was slamming doors and flinging about objects inside my house.

I have to pretend to be alive now, because I have some chicken that's been marinating that I need to make. And a giant yellow squash I picked. Someone remind me to take a picture of it before I eat it. I would never be any good as a serious food blogger; I am much better at eating things than photographing them, and by the time I am half done with my meal, and Josh asks me "Did you take a picture?" I figure no one wants to see my half-eaten food.

Related to squash, yesterday I actually caught a giant slug in the act of eating its way into the side of one of my smaller squashes. I may be a terrible person, but I took great joy in running into the house to get the container of salt, and gleefully pouring it on the slug.

Do not get between me and food.

Especially if you're a plant-munching garden-wrecker.

I think the only thing that stopped me from shouting "BURN MOTHERFUCKER!" was that our neighbor's elderly mother was sitting out on their back deck, looking down on this all. But it was a close call. There was still some disturbing cackling.

I also have a box of several large tomatoes from the zucchini-coworker of Josh's. Not just any box, mind you, we're nerds here. My husband works in IT. I have several large tomatoes that he brought home in the outer box that holds a series of MCSE books. I should take a picture of that before I eat them, too.

Howdy Neighbor!

2010-08-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

So when I get up in the morning, I let the dogs out, then go to the bathroom myself. I have done so this morning, and I'm still sitting down for the latter part of this routine when I hear Buster. Beagles, as a breed have a tendency to make a loud (oh god so loud) high pitched alert bark when they have found their quarry. Buster is the poster child for this behavior, as he will do this in just about any event he is chasing something. Like one of the other dogs down the stairs.

So, I'm sitting on the toilet (no good story EVER starts this way.) and I hear Buster let off an amazingly loud, unusual "I FOUND IT I AM CHASING IT BARK!!" and it... rapidly gets a lot more distant. Our yard is NOT that big. The kennel is REALLY not that big.

Shit.

I fly into action, doing necessary things to make me both mobile and presentable, and run outside. (You know, barefeet, pajamas, that sort of thing.) and call the dogs which are nowhere in sight. I run downstairs, calling the dogs and see that the gate is open, the entire neighborhood peeking through the gap like "LOOK AT THIS ENTIRE WORLD YOUR DEAREST DOGS HAVE DISAPPEARED IN."

Shit! Shit.

I run upstairs, fling my feet into the first compatible pair of shoes I see in the closet, grab some leashes, and run out the front door. I can hear the dogs, so at least I have a direction. I can also hear some neighborhood dogs they have set off. So I run towards the disturbance.

Fortunately, the big dogs are obedient enough to come at me when called, and aren't being enough of the pain to only come nearby to bolt off to get me to chase them. I get Dale on a leash, and the rest of the dogs are nearby. Fortunately, Buster is still following the big dogs with his blinders-on Beagle determination. I get Chip on a leash and literally pounce on Buster while he's sniffing something so he doesn't have the chance to bolt.

I loop a leash handle through his collar until I can get things more organized; I trust Dixie, though this is apparently becoming misplaced, and let her just hover around, piddling on people's lawns, because I am currently wrestling with twice my weight in very excited dog.

Then the wrench gets thrown in. My dogs have acquired the attention of a very unimpressed sounding Pitbull on the other side of the fence a few feet away. I know what this dog is because I can see it looking and snarling at me through a gap in the fence that Buster could fit through, and that would not contain any thoroughly pissed large dog. My dogs are not the least bit interested in listening to me, they want to go shove their noses in the fencegap of a big angry dog.

Shitshitshitshitshitfuck.

I'm not 'racist' against Pitbulls, assuming that they're all rabid beasts waiting to bite my shit, but currently I am about 8 feet away from one that is growling at me and my entourage of fail, and being dragged towards it.

And I don't mess with dogs that are growling at me.

I do manage to get Chip and Dale hooked onto one leash, and the other leash on Buster (If you are going to have two collars clipped to one single leash, you go with the dogs that are the same size.) But not before having to forcibly drag all the dogs out of sight of the neighbordog, losing grip on Buster's leash in the process, and having to repounce on him on someone's porch.

After several minutes of running around, dog wrestling, and yelling profanity at random, I grab my leashes securely, yell at Dixie a few times, as she's bolting off in random directions, and look up to see one of the neighbors one house away in his driveway.

Neighbor is wearing a suit, and fiddling around with objects in the trunk of his very nice car. He says "Hello!" to me, completely nonchalantly, like I'm having a perfectly unremarkable morning, and he is issuing a normal polite greeting to a passerby.

I, am breathing heavily, wrestling with three dogs that want to be going the opposite way, or at least any direction so long as they're running full speed, yelling at another one, wearing my pajamas, mis-matched flip flops, my hair is a wild nest of crazy bedhead and wind and sweat.

The juxtaposition of refined control, and my chaotic failure hits me right in that moment.

I look right at the neighbor, smile, and happily declare "Good Morning!"

It was noon-thirty.

There's also a fire somewhere, I can smell the smoke on the wind. My lungs are likewise on fire, and since my 'morning' excursion, I have been hacking and coughing like I've got the consumption or something. I never had very good lungs. SUPER AWESOME DAY.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-25-10

2010-08-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

I love my giant fluffy teddy bear of a dog.

Look at that face. I just want to hug him forever.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-24-10

2010-08-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

Anaheim peppers in progress...

I think next year, I'm going to plant my peppers in a different part of the beds. I didn't really think about it, but there is sort of a neighbor's tree that hangs over our fence a bit, and a couple of the beds lose a few hours of sun because of it.

We are also going to move the location of the soaker hose timers, because as it stands, one end of the garden is a lot more wet, and the other end doesn't get much from the hose.

It's all fun and games until the garden draws blood (Photo-a-day project, 8-23)

2010-08-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

So I drug my camera out to the garden to take some pictures. I have a ton of green tomatoes growing, the yellow squash are getting big, and have attained their bright yellow color. (Still having the last of the coworker zucchini in the fridge, I'm letting mine stay on the plant for now.)

I've got a few anaheim peppers growing, the jalapeno is blooming, my basil is starting to look good, and the pumpkin is starting to yellow up at the base. I took pictures of all of this.

I felt vindicated by my rather lackluster garden success this year when we saw a bit on the news about how the weather has been hard on local farmers. They had people who are supposed to be good at this sort of thing, you know, for a living, showing their tiny green tomatoes, and talking about delayed harvests. They listed off a bunch of things that are most affected, and it was like reading off a "Melissa's biggest gardening failures!" list. Tomatoes, peppers, basil in particular.

Then I tried to play ball with the dogs a bit, after taking their pictures some, mainly of them being utterly fascinated with this one spot in the grass, sniffing at it, and rolling their faces on it in interesting, contorted ways.

The boys don't do fetch. They will happily chase the ball when thrown, they will chase other dogs carrying the ball, but they have little interest in actually picking up the ball, and absolutely zero in returning it to you. So I tried to engage Dixie in some catching the ball. Got her attention, and tossed it to her. I guess I threw it too fast for her oldness, because she just stood there while it hit her, and bounced into my peppers. I walked up the hill, leaned my hand on one of the boxes to lean over and re-acquire my ball. As I was standing up, my hand slid and I gouged part of my palm on the wood.

Ow.

It is still throbbing. As far as I can tell, there's not actually any wood in my hand, but there is a nice, narrow, almost knife-like deep little line in the middle of a 1/4" bit where the skin came clear off.

So.

It's all fun and games until the garden draws its first blood.

P.S. From riding my bike yesterday, my buttbones are ridiculously sore. I also need to find a more interesting place to ride my bike, besides doing loops around various neighborhoods. We're sorta in a little swath of housing developments, with not entirely connected sidewalks in between some narrow, two-lane main roads that are very not bike-friendly. I am too much of a newbie at this bike thing to brave riding down one of these roads to actually get anywhere else.

I might huck the bike into the back of my car, and go to the park by the lake. Later. When my butt hurts less. But I did manage to not careen into anything, especially traffic.

The Funk

2010-08-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I am quiet just because I don't really have anything pressing at me to say. This is a neutral, content sort of quiet, a way of just being that needs neither silence or noise, nor to be alone or to have others hear your words. You just are, and that's okay, and that's all you need, and so you're quiet because that's just what happens. It's the sort of quiet you can have on a long car ride with someone where it's not awkward, you're just both there, enjoying the ride, and acknowledging that there is no need to always fill up the space with words.

Then there's the funk quiet. The sort of quiet where you're not content about it, but the alternative is a jumble of funk and unhappiness and slightly depressive pessimistic ramblings and you don't really have anything of substance to say because you're mired down in your funk, and you haven't done anything worth sharing, thought anything worth sharing, and certainly don't care about sharing anything either...

I am in the latter kind of quiet. I am feeling marginally depressed and in a funk, and generally unhappy. The kind of way you feel when you really rather desperately would love to have a kid, but you can't even manage to ovulate. The kind of pessimistic grumbly way you feel when it seems like everything you try to do blows up in your face, or just sort of quietly fails in a miserable, annoying way that is truly irrelevant, but after enough of them stack up you get REALLY irritated at the fact that you were half a cup of sugar short of the zucchini bread you'd put off making for about a week, because you're in a damn funk and don't have any motivation to do anything. And you were literally at the store an hour ago, and didn't get any damned sugar. Or the kind of funk you feel when you try to exercise and your knee fights back.

It's the kind of funk where it's like there's curtains of not giving a shit that surround you and all the things that you should do just can't get through the fog, so you sit on your butt and decide that you're too lazy or can't be bothered, or it's really altogether way too much effort to pick up the camera to take a picture for your blog, because you give no shits about it, and really the only person you're letting down is yourself, and you just don't care about yourself that much.

There's also the kind of funk where you look at the date, and realize that your woulda-shoulda-coulda-been due date is flying at you with rapid disregard for your grand plans or your mental state, or the fact that your ovaries have just sort of hung up a sign that says "OUT TO LUNHC"* and you remember that you had just sort of assumed that you'd manage to have gotten pregnant again by then and it wouldn't matter. It's the kind of funk when you realize that things just don't work out that nicely, ever.

That is my kind of funk.

*misspelling intentional -- I imagine that my ovaries don't even have the reliability to correctly author a sign before they leave me hanging.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-21-10

2010-08-21T22:18:00.001-07:00

I am alive, I am just sucking at taking new pictures to post.

I bought a bike at a garage sale. It's like. A bike, with speeds, and it goes. Then I had to get a new helmet because the one they threw in with it was too small for my ginormous, misshapen cranium. Hooray.

So maybe tomorrow I'll try riding it. I've never ridden a bike with gears and handbrakes and stuff.

Also, here's a picture. Slightly use, but not posted before!

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-19-10

2010-08-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

Today's picture is an artist's rendition of this afternoon:

Join me for a moment in honesty theatre. I want to lose about 10-15 pounds. I've gained the vast majority of that this year. It stops here before it gets worse. But I am having a hard time finding something to do for exercise that doesn't fuck up my fucked up knee.

I tried walking and jogging with a dog again. Real careful. Stretched, warmed up, wore my best shock-absorbing shoes. Wore the knee brace. Was real careful with my stride to reduce impact.

Yesterday was okay. Today, my knee mutinied.

There is nothing quite so effective at utterly neutering your motivation to be active as your knee giving up about 300 feet from your house, stabbing knife pain with every step. While you sit in the middle of the sidewalk, look up the hill, like your house is looking down at you, taunting yo,u saying "Haha neener gimpy, you caaaan't make it!" and contemplate how much everything fucking sucks.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-18-10

2010-08-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

Phone photos of baby tomatoes:

On a completely unrelated note, my 2 cents on the "ZOMG MOSQUE AT GROUND ZERO!" thing:

I think at, near, around, in the vicinity of, a few blocks away from ground zero is a great place for a mosque. And it's not even an actual mosque, it's a community center, there's a difference.

It's not just about upholding religious freedom -- and that is really all the reason that should be necessary. Freedom isn't just about only allowing what you agree with; that's prettymuch the exact opposite of freedom, don'tchaknow. And religious freedom isn't about feeling super open-minded and tolerant just because you'll allow all the various denominations of Christianity, and you're not tossing the Catholics or the Lutherans out of the union.

And it's not about freedom in the private market, and the ability of a private citizen or group to purchase real-estate and use it within zoning restrictions. I'm not a big ol' raging free market type. At all. (File me under socialist communist fascist heretic Nazi Marxist.) But I get that it's generally a working system, and it's the system this country operates under, and so they have just as much right as anyone else to buy that building.

But what about the wisdom of deciding to put a Muslim community center there? Is it an insult to AMERICA and our freedoms and the people who died on 9/11?

Hell no.

It's the exact opposite. Building the "Ground Zero Mosque" is upholding our freedoms, it's overcoming adversity and differences. It's just another example of the great melting pot of America. It's about coexistence.

See, because there's the thing, that clearly a lot of people don't realize: It's not the fucking Taliban putting up a monument at ground zero. It's not their freaking victory dance. Because there's a difference between "a Muslim." and a whacked out crazy extremist group that spun off from that religion.

Just like there's a difference between Christianity as a whole, and groups like the KKK, or the Hutaree militia, and people who bomb abortion clinics.

If you don't want to lumped in, classified as, and blamed for every shitty thing anyone has ever done in the name of your religion, you can't do the same to others.

And if there's one thing that can help solve the problem (you know, besides old bigots being old and dying out so the next generation can be better) is for Muslims to do their thing, peacefully, in plain sight. To build a community center, to be a positive part of their communities, to exist a few blocks away from ground zero and say, figuratively, if not literally "Look, that's not us. That's not what we believe in. That's not what we support. Look, we're part of this country, we lost friends and family there too." and to keep repeating it until it sinks in, and showing stupid scared white people that there is another kind of Muslim besides the caricature of the crazy bearded guy strapping bombs to his turban.

Because if we're going to come back on our ideals, if we're going to start discriminating, if we're going to start applying guilt by association to an entire people, an entire religion, and making poor decisions out of fear and ignorance, then, not to be ridiculously cliche on purpose... but it's true: We're letting the terrorists win.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-17-10

2010-08-17T12:36:00.001-07:00

I really need to get on that making revenge food with the zucchini because I have a bunch of yellow squash that is ready to be picked.

Sorry, more phone photos. I decided that it was way too hot to go back upstairs and go get the D40.

Completely unrelated:

Lamb.

The use of the word lamb to connotate "meat which comes from sheep" is weird to me. I like eating lamb, I find it tasty, but. Lamb. Why do we use that word? A lamb is a cute little fluffy baby sheep. I don't want to eat cute little fluffy animals. Eating "lamb" makes me feel a little evil, and and I am an unapologetic meat-loving omnivore.

Calling sheepmeat lamb is tantamount to refering to bacon as "fried piglet strips." I don't want to eat "fried piglet strips"!

CUTE LITTLE PIGLETS, NOOOOO.

*ahem*
Carry on!

(P.S. yes Josh, this means I am washing your pants.)

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-16-10

2010-08-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

It's really hot, and I'm crabby about that. I'm crabby about a lot of things lately. I really feel that my crabby quotient is extremely elevated. I am mostly just stewing about in my own bullshit and not unleashing it on people, but that's probably mostly because I am a giant wuss, and I have limited contact with random humans.

I've definitely been acclimatized do the weather of the northwest. I whimper and melt starting around 80 degrees. It is a lot more than 80 today. I watered the garden, but I didn't take any pictures. I am not going out there to get pictures, I might combust.

So, I am again living in photo denial on a hot day by posting some rainy plant pictures. I don't think I posted this one yet.

When the weather isn't being cruelly hot, we often get rains that are more accurately classified as EXTREME MIST. It's basically like living in a giant spray bottle. So there are not raindrops so much as it's just become so freaking wet that tiny water droplets leap out of the air and fall on things. This results in the fine droplet pattern you see on my pumpkin bloom above.

I've got a few yellow squash about ready to be picked. I am going to leave them on there a bit longer, because I've still got coworker-zucchini and some farmer's market squash to go through. My squash this year are pretty pale yellow; I don't know if that's because I am apparently a rampant failure at productive gardening, (I blame whatever's eating my shit, though I'm sure the late start and my colossal nubbery doesn't help) or because the squash is all growing completely in the shade of the leaves of the plant, and it's not getting color from direct sunlight, or something.

Assuming there's a point where I feel like doing anything but hovering near the A/C unit and whining, I am planning on taking the giant mutant coworker zucchini and making a boatload of zucchini bread or something that I can send back to work with Josh. SQUASH REVENGE.

I also found a recipe for zucchini brownies; I may try this as well. So if anyone has any good zucchini bread, or other baked good recipes they like, do please share. For the bread, I've just snatched a random recipe off Food Network's site.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-15-10

2010-08-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

The last of my berries were desperately needing to be used up, so I made a berry crisp from a Pioneer Woman recipe. I alluded to this yesterday.

I didn't have enough raspberries, so I did a combo with the blackberries.

Preping for the filling:

The finished crisp.

The picture doesn't really do it justice.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-14-10

2010-08-14T16:30:00.000-07:00

One of Josh's coworkers has a garden, which is clearly far more effective than mine. I mean, I have like, one zucchini, which last I checked looked like something had munched on the end of.

This coworker brought in a bunch of zucchini to share (foist, oh my god someone please help eat these) and I got some. These things are huge.

Let's be clear: That is a quarter I slapped down on the cutting board for a sense of scale to take the picture.

What does one do with a giant zucchini? Well, Josh and I had rounded up various kinds of meat to barbecue over the weekend, so I figured, hey, I'll grill zucchini.

So I made big thick slices, about 3/4" thick.

Then I put the slices into a ziploc with some Italian salad dressing, and supplemental dry herbs. (Basil, Oregano, Rosemary, Thyme).

It's been marinating about 4 hours now, and you can marinate them overnight as well, before slapping them on the grill.

I've also got some chicken in a brine, ala Alton Brown style to grill up. Maybe tomorrow I'll post about the berry crisp I made, ala Pioneer Woman style. I may not be an amazing, original cook, but I can provide links to amazingness.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-13-10

2010-08-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

My little pumpkin is still growing along nicely. It's large grapefruit-sized at this point and is developing a nice heft. There's another little pumpkin growing up on the top of one of the box borders where my pumpkin vine has spread. I'm leery of moving it, but my plant has decided that instead of making vines, plural, it would rather just make a single vine and shoot it out in one direction for about 12 feet.

I also decided to prune my parsley tree. It was taller than me, and I couldn't have that.

"Just Relax"

2010-08-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

Beautiful post up by my babyloss friend, "B":

http://nongeordiemum.blogspot.com/2010/08/2-of-3-stress-just-relax-and-getting.html

Wherein she discusses a study about stress levels and chances of conceiving, and how people love to tell people to relax, like it's some kind of solution.

"see, telling people to 'relax and it'll happen!!!!' is not helpful. telling people that support groups, meditation, exercise, counselling and nutrition advice might increase their chances of conceiving, and will aid their mental health anyway so that they are more able to cope even if they do not fall pregnant, is far more useful. what does 'relax' mean anyway? 'trying to relax' is an oxymoron, and telling people to relax is not only counterproductive but also blames those having difficulty conceiving, or those post-babyloss, for the stress and anxiety and depression that are an absolutely normal response to the circumstances they find themselves in through no fault of their own."

YES.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-12-10

2010-08-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

It is hot and lousy today, and so I am going to live and denial and post a picture of raindrops on lemongrass.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-11-10

2010-08-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

TEENIEST ANAHEIM PEPPER

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-10-10

2010-08-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

So I made this:

I didn't get the camera to it before Josh had cut it up and taken a piece. He even dove into it through my protestations that it was supposed to sit and cool for at least 10 minutes first.

Edit: Recipe from here.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-9-10

2010-08-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

I have this:

And this:

And these:

Something good will come of this.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-8-10

2010-08-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

Today we went to a local Farmer's Market. I got some squash, and some berries, and some fresh raspberry honey.

I also saw this:

BONUS FEATURE: My shoe.

So. I googled. The Klingons of IKV T'Mar are a local cosplaying charitable works group. Man, I am a giant horking nerd, but I'm not sure if I can go so far as a dressing up as a Klingon and doing events.

Mostly, because I don't really like the Klingons. I also don't have enough cleavage for the Klingon armor. But we'll pretend it's because I have more dignity and normalcy than that.

I'm also not sure if I can be associated with people who have a website that is white Times New Roman on a black background. Because I'm a nerd. And uppity font nerd. And it's TIMES NEW ROMAN.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-7-10

2010-08-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

Whoops. Missed yesterday.

Some red marigolds from my garden.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-5-10

2010-08-05T12:39:00.000-07:00

I was lazy when I saved these, and didn't edit them at all besides running my action that sizes them down and saves them in a folder for uploading to Flickr. So this is what SOOC looks like.

These baby squash are so pretty. I can't wait. The storebought yellow squash often looks so awful, pallid, and battered and bruised. I bought some last week to go with some ribeye steaks I made, and they made me sad. I can't wait for my own, beautiful, squash-flavored.. squash to come off the vines. Mmmm.

I did the yoga thing two days in a row, now. Everything but my abs are sore, so I think I did something wrong. But, it still feels like good exercise, and I can feel some small improvement in being able to do the moves already.

And! Hooray for Prop 8 getting overturned yesterday. The judge's written decision, while freaking long, has some really good excerpts that I've read. Like the following:

"The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. FF 21. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.

"The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. FF 19-20, 34-35. Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. FF 33. Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’ obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. FF 48. Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals."

Emphasis mine. This such a great, profound statement, not just for the support of gay marriages being deserving of equal rights, but of establishing how far we have come, and how marriage between anyone should be a partnership of two equals.

In addition to being eloquent and awesome, the judge's decision was done in such a way to make it really strong against further appeal (and it's already been appealed). This may well go all the way to the Supreme Court, because unlike prior cases brought through the California Supreme Court, this is a Federal case. Its next destination is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and people who are better at law than I am think that some parts of the decision are likely to be narrowed, especially by the Supreme Court, but it is realistically expected to be upheld.

YAY!

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-4-10

2010-08-04T02:21:00.000-07:00

I think this may be my favorite picture of Buster.

Taken on my phone, while I was hanging outside with the dogs.

We built the kennel area so the dogs would have a (secured against their digging) place to be outside. It was also to protect my garden from the dogs. So when we let the dogs outside on their own, they have a small portion of their yard. They play and such there, and friggin' dig at the edge of the cement scattering dirt all over, but they truly love to run in the whole yard.

See here for an example.

When we can be outside to watch them, mostly to yell "[Name], get out!" when they snoop into the garden beds, we let them into the big yard to play. And play they did this afternoon.

They're not so great with the whole "fetch" thing, though they will happily chase a ball, they are more interested in chasing each other, and in making sure one of the other dogs doesn't have the ball instead. Buster will pick up the ball briefly, so as to get one of the others to chase after him. So after a good bout of running and chasing the big dogs, rocketting around the yard on his own, and chasing a ball, Buster was worn out. He grabbed the ball, tottered off nearby, and stretched out in the grass.

Buster swings wildly between two modes: Lazy Hound, and Rocket Beagle.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-3-10

2010-08-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

Look, plant. Where's my tomatoes already. We need to have a chat about your productivity lately. I'm afraid you're not quite performing up to expectations. You still have a quote we are going to require that you meet, and you'll be expected to work overtime until you can reach the goals we've set for you.

More unrelated, I've been trying to do yoga lately. I have intermittent vacations, and intermittent success. I started last week on a core and abs focused DVD.

OH MY GOD, THAT SADISTIC LITTLE BENDY YOGA LADY.

As I mumbled in an earlier post, I feel like I look about 4 months pregnant, all the time. I'm sure a good chunk of that is my own-self loathing and inability to see anything positive when I look in the mirror, but part of it is having had a kid, a c-section, and having gained 10-15 pounds. My abdominal muscles have all the integrity of the waistband of an old ratty piece of underwear. You know, once it's gone past the old and baggy stage and straight into the stage where the elastic just cracks into bits instead.

Convinced that my fragile hold on sanity couldn't actually handle someone thinking I was 4 months pregnant (Instead of just a fatty-fat. The problem really is that my belly pudge doesn't look like it belongs with the rest of my spindly, knuckly butt.) and not being overly happy with my apperance, nor Josh's new hobby of poking me to make my fat jiggle...

I did the abs thing the first time on friday. I got through the whole thing, although I was panting like a dog that just ran a marathon in the Sahara, wimpering as the chapter changed, expecting more sadistic stomach-wrenching exercises directed by a woman who folds in way I am utterly convinced are not the least bit human, but it was the end of the exercise program, instead. Roll credits. Slightly encouraged that I didn't have to give up partway through like a total losery-loser, I still got my ass kicked, and my muscles were sore for a few days. A break was in order.

With my muscles still screeching their discontent, I took it easy for the past few days, with some light stretches and stuff. By yesterday, I felt more normal again, so today was yoga time again.

We'll see how much pain I am in later.

I am being somewhat hyperbolic here; I am a whopping 135 pounds, but I spent the first 27 years of my life or so being the 98 lb. weakling that people were always trying to feed cheeseburgers to, or accusing me of anorexia or bulimia. This having jiggly parts is sort of a new paradigm for me. I weighed around 120-125ish when I got pregnant with Caleb, and that was after my 98 lb. weakling status had been softened up a bit by a few years at a desk job with lots of fast food, and a bum knee that made me a lot less active. The intervening reproduction attempts definitely didn't help matters any. Enter the doughbelly. Also enter something that I can do to feel better about myself, and can control my own destiny about.

Oy vey, I'm gonna be sore again.

Photo-a-Day Project, 8-2-10

2010-08-02T23:51:00.000-07:00

Whoops. Missed yesterday.

Tiny pumpkins are starting to grow.

Unrelated, last weekend when we barbecued, we ended up getting a bunch of flies in the kitchen. We have a fancy blue light flycatching fan thing, which is largely ineffective. Frustrated, I picked up some basic, 25 cent flypaper rolls from the store, and have promptly caught a dozen flies since I put it up this afternoon.

Sometimes, low-tech just WORKS.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-31-10

2010-07-31T14:48:00.000-07:00

Since I was a negative-nancy about shoes yesterday, I figured today I'd share something I do like. (Besides my boy shoes.)

So this is a shoe I own, and think is freaking adorable. It has enough of a heel to make me feel fancy and make satisftying and annoying clicking sounds, but not enough to completely make me trip all over myself.

It was also an experiment to take a nice white-background photo. Which I sorta failed at. I didn't have a large enough white piece of something to use as a backdrop, so I had to do some correcting on the edges, and a lot of fixing of the whiteness of the background in photoshop.

But the end result was good.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-30-10

2010-07-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

TINY BANANA PEPPER

Mmmmmmmmm.

Okay, let's talk about shoes.

2010-07-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to write more lately, instead of just leaving random thoughts rattling around in my head. So here's one:

Shoes.

I like shoes. I like them in a special, I'm-really-kinda-butch-and-have-a-bad-knee love/hate kind of way. The last pair of shoes I bought were these. I'm not even kidding. I'm a butch girl with small feet. I bought boys shoes. It happens.

So, we've established that perhaps I don't have the most forward, cutting edge fashion sense. But I still like shoes. I like cute shoes, and I wish sometimes that I were both not packing a knee with some serious opinions about supportive footwear, and the complete inability to compose myself like a graceful human being in a pair of heels. I mean, I can fall down stairs completely on my own, I don't need any help. (Maybe I'll tell the story of how I should have broken my arm, but I guess I drink a lot of milk and come from some stubborn genetic stock, later. It made an incredible bruise.)
So nobody should really listen to me about fashion sense. And if you like, or own a pair of shoes like these, you're being more stylish than I am.

But let's talk about aesthetics.

Let's talk about shoes that look like this. This... sandalboot phenomenon.

I'm pretty sure you're doing something wrong here! Maybe I don't "get it" but this looks dumb. They're backwards. This is the footwear equivalent of the chainmail bikini. The toes are all hanging out, but there's this big thick thing covering in the ankle. All I can see in my mind is someone stepping on the exposed, unprotected toes.

Look at that middle one. Augh. It's some Eldritch Shoe God. A combination of fringed leather boots that should have died in the 70s, and the kind of sandal that just has the strap up the middle with the sides of your feet all hanging out.

You know, these kinds:

I never got the appeal of that look, either. Maybe it's because it always seems to be worn by people whose feet are way too big for the sandal they've chosen, making that "feet flopping around everywhere uncontained" look that bothers me even worse.

Then there's shoes that are not being all "Look at me, I'm a boot... BWAH! SURPRISE TOES! Mwa ha ha HA!" but just have the thicker strap or band around the ankle I don't really care for the look of, either.

And on a person, it just sort of is an odd look. You've got this thick patch of material partway up the foot, and it breaks the line of the leg, and looks clunky and weird. It's like officially intergrating legwarmers into your sandal. But you're not even accomplishing that sort of Olvia Newton-John spandex and aerobics thing, which can be kinda cute.

But the sandalboot? Just no. I don't care if it's stylish; I can't stand the way it looks. There were a lot of things that were "stylish" that were bad ideas in retrospect. Like legwarmers.

While we're at it, I can't stand shoes that give toe cleavage, either. You know what I'm talking about.

Blecch. I get the twitches just looking at that picture.

Where's my boy shoes?

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-29-10

2010-07-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

My various squash-family plants have been taking off lately. There are a bunch of baby yellow and zucchini squash hiding amongst the leaves.

Pictures.

2010-07-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

So, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far, away, my goal in life was to be a graphic designer. Many things happened, and that ended up going by the wayside. (Mostly a lack of self-confidence to think I could ever be employable at it, and dropping out of college and moving away to get a job that paid 3 times what I was making.)

I don't do graphic stuff much any more, but every now and then I do.

There's sort of a meme thing that's gone around on message boards from time to time, as follows:

Random Album Cover Art

Here are the rules:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quoteland.com/random.asp
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Maybe I'll sit down and make some more. But for today, I am sharing some that I have made in the past.

It's sort of an interesting little exercise, because you can imagine what sort of mood the random title and quote would give the album, and design that. Or you get weird nonsense, and still have to make something cohesive out of it.

Many many moons ago, I would have told you that my ideal job was being shoved in a room with a case of pepsi, and being left alone to design the album art for CDs. I'd listen to the music of the album, and then make the pretty pictures for it. It doesn't quite work that way, but it was a nice dream. And I have in the past actually purchased albums based solely on what the album art looked like.

While my more musically inclined friends would spend hours looking through record stores for the music (not that I minded the music) I'd look at the art.

Some of the random combos have weird enough titles, and cool enough pictures that you just end up slapping the text on them in there some way that matches with the image.

In a black and white, adding colorful text can add interest, and mood. It stands out as a title, instead of being part of the overall look.

But it does give you a reason to play with some interesting text design. This image didn't go at all with the words. Awkward.

Because the image is already given to you, your challenge is adding some design that doesn't just make it look like some fancy text slapped on a picture. Because that gets boring.

This first one, is mostly creative use of brushes to add layers to the image.

This second is just a bunch of simple, flat color stripes and boxes that match the image.

This is just some abstract white designs to sort of give the look of a beaten up photo.

Less impressed with the text border, very happy with the font and placement of the title in the middle.

Depending on how much time you want to spend on it, neat things happen.

This first one, the random image came up as the polaroid, but I rotated it and added teh tan background. Now it's more than just a flat photo background.

This second one, I took the picture, and placed in a photo album design. I hate the jaggies in the white pen lines I drew in for this, but like the concept.

I chopped this source image up into little technicolor sections.

Rearranged and repeated portions of this one:

An attempt to make the text look like it belonged in the original image:

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-28-10

2010-07-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

Purple Basil.

Purple Basil, unsurprisingly, makes purple flowers.

They're neat.

Words

2010-07-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

Prologue

Forgive me for there is no photo for today; I am going to offer up (so many) words instead. This post is really long, you've been warned. I haven't written anything of substance for some time. So please, if you're just going to tease me about how many words there are, and how you didn't read it all, just keep it to yourself. (Yes, people do this to me.) Quietly don't read it; that's fine. I just needed to write some things out. I tried to break it up into somewhat related sections, but the truth is that is order I am trying to impose on a flood of thoughts after the fact.

I think the photo project makes it easy to not actually write. Post a photo, explain it a bit, feel like you've been blogging, but you aren't actually saying anything much.

Part of me not having much to say is that I'm just not freely talking about what is going on with me much. When you decide that next time you get knocked up you're not going to tell anyone right away, it makes it harder to write anything about the process at all; it becomes like tipping your hand. If I write what's on my mind about watching for ovulation, then it's a concrete thing. Then if there is no subsequent "I am not pregnant, beware, the tampon times!" post, there is speculation. The veil of silence is the safe option.

It's not that I am feeling particularly secretive (I'm not) or have suddenly gotten squeamish about sharing honestly. (I told y'all about all kinds of stuff, we're past that stage in our relationship.) It's not that we're not trying to get pregnant (we are), it's not that I have nothing to say (I do), it's just that I can't, won't, don't have anything I can say. I am not being coy because I am teasing before I announce (nothing to announce). I mean, when it can take up to a year, just because it can, I don't even really have much grounds to write about infertility, either. There's nothing wrong with me, but I don't exactly have a track record that inspires confidence. It's simply that what's going on with me isn't something I have a lot of freedom to write about, even if it is by my choice. I am not particularly interested in laying it out there so distinctly that it hasn't happened again, month after month. I have to suffer enough disappointment and failure and self-flagellation without having everyone know just exactly how not-pregnant I still am. At least, I don't need to actively remind people. I don't want to tell the world the second I become pregnant, and then have to tell people about more early miscarriages and become even more of a sad little tragedy to be clucked at from afar. I guarantee you it's not the sort of thing I'd keep a secret forever, but no one needs the play-by-play.

Rants about Peesticks

There will be no posts of pee sticks when it happens. I know I've done that in the past, but in the intervening months, I've come to loathe seeing other people do it. So I sincerely apologize for at a point in the past, having been one of those people. The people who post their peesticks all over the damned internet. Does having made the same mistake give me more license to be critical of it? I'm not just saying it's a bad idea, here from my armchair. I KNOW it's a bad idea.

I hate seeing other people's tests partially out of my own sense of "it's not fair!" and bitterness, but I've had some definitely-not-trying friends commiserate with me about our mutual annoyance. I mean, it's one thing if you're hanging out on BabyCenter. You're going to see pregnancy tests there, it's sort of part and parcel of the purpose of the place. I don't get my maxi pads in a twist over that. But if you're hanging out on some random internet board for some random nerd topic, or you're just browsing facebook and someone is all "Hey guys, check out this thing my wife just wizzed on!" it's annoying. It's especially annoying because I seem to have synched up with all internet wives everywhere, except they get pregnant and post their e.p.t.s, and I just bleed.

Just you watch. Someday I will stumble across one too many peesticks and I will post a picture of what's going on in my vagina.

Okay, while I am actually crazy enough to relish the idea of actually doing that, I am not actually bitchy, insane, or... gross enough to do so. These are the sort of thoughts I have that get filed away under the heading "not for human consumption" and go there to rot, unless I decide to be particularly honest and blog about having thought them later. Nor do I want to be that much of a terrible person as to post some negative tests in response either. You know, for those times where you have a beautiful triphasic chart, and are 4 days late for your period, and you piss a negative on the most sensitive consumer test on the market, while some schmutz on an internet board posts their positive test on some crappy blue dye knock off econo-brand, and are looking for an outlet. I never have days like those.

But thinking about doing it is at least slightly therapeutic.

I have cookies

Sometimes, the last vestiges of the Better Part of Me wakes up, and just wants to sit these people down, maybe bake them some ginger snaps (you know, for the nausea. I have experience!) and explain to them that maybe posting your pregnancy test to the whole damned world is not the greatest idea. Not to be a debbie downer, but miscarriages happen a lot. Pat their hand, and dispense advice. Perhaps you should tell people after you've seen/heard the heartbeat. Or at least a doctor. And if you're not telling your family yet, you definitely shouldn't be telling the internet.

That feels just as out of place and unwanted as the bitchy ironic posting of negative tests. That's the sort of thing someone who isn't a little specter of reproductive failure can maybe get away with, but not me.

I had a conversation with a friend once about the posting of the peesticks. About how I want to be all "Oh honey, a positive doesn't mean you're going to actually GET a baby out of it. Don't come crying to me when that miscarriage happens and you have to untell everyone."
Except if someone literally did come crying to me, I would probably come out with the gentle conversation and baked goods. And I'd help them. My friend agreed. Because despite the bitchy, bitter parts, my bark is worse than my bite, and I am seldom capable of being legitimately mean to someone else. Because I'm fucking maternal. I'm a big ol' lost mommy without anyone to mother all over.

I have cookies, let me make it better.

The cookies however, help explain my dough belly, and in my head I feel like I look about 4 months pregnant ALWAYS, god help me when I actually get all period-bloated, and I live in fear that someone will ask me when I am due. I have no idea how I would react to that actually happening. It won't be pretty. It will probably never happen, no one actually asked me about being pregnant randomly in public when I actually was very pregnant.

P.S. Your abdominal muscles will never be the same after a cesarean. Maybe that's just from having kids in general.

Fuckin' Facebook, Man.

Man, facebook. Now there's another topic for the bitterly childless. There is no greater internet mecca for people to spew pictures of their children, their pregnancy tests, their ultrasound images, and announce their successful reproduction than fucking facebook. I can't say it doesn't belong there; it's certainly more appropriate there than a picture of a pregnancy test posted between a threads about a TF2 tournament, and World of Warcraft, but for me personally, facebook has become a minefield.

Let's be honest here; I am no longer a magnanimous enough person to be happy for anyone else's successful reproduction. I just. Can't. I don't want to see it, hear about it, look at your pee, or post generic congratulations on your status message. It's not you, it's me, really. I get that you deserve your blissful happiness and want to tell the whole world, and I have no intention of detracting from that in any space that belongs to you.
(I however, get to whine on my own blog. And this isn't about you personally. No one person gets to me that much. It's not you, it's me. Well. Ok. It's about you, but it's also about the 7 other peesticks I've seen recently, and the four other people due around when I should have been, and the 6th blogger I've read who is trying to conceive, and the 87th person who posted pictures of their kid on facebook, and 15th person who is having another kid.)

You know how when on facebook you tend to scroll past all the drek about someone having leveled up on their farm, and which Harry Potter character they're most like, the request to join their mafia and read the status messages instead?

I am not that person anymore. My drek is the actual substance. I scroll past everyone's messages and lives, and pictures, and important things, because I'm 29 frigging years old, and it's like a freaking baby boom in there. I'm only here to get that experience bonus, and to adopt the alien calf from your farm. Please send me more fuel.

I should have been a hermit

Jokes about facebook games aside, I am serious about the fact that I just don't have it in me to be happy for anyone else reproductive endeavors. Whatever psychological fortitude it takes to see all that stuff and be fine, I don't have it. It's hard to deal with, and I just end up shying away from places where that sort of thing is prevalent. I don't have it in me to feel bad for a lot of people, either. I have honest-to-god removed people from twitter and from my expansive google reader list when they've whined about not getting pregnant when they have already at least one healthy, living child. Sorry lady, I just don't want to see that either. I don't doubt you want to pregnant, and that it sucks that you're not. I'm not saying you don't deserve more kids because you've already got >0 and I've got fuckall, (Well, part of me is saying that, but that's the part that doesn't get let out of the cage.) You do what you do. But I don't want to read it. That's all I ask for; the space to not have to hear about it.

I used to care about what was going on with others. That seems so long ago already. I used to buck up, gird my grieving little loins, and find the better parts of me to be legitimately empathetic to others reproductive concerns, positive or negative. I don't find myself capable of that any longer, and to be honest, I don't even try. Most of the time, I honestly feel like I didn't just lose a lot of blood, I lost the better parts of me back in January. Dealing with that miscarriage was like a giant punch in the psyche for me. I very much wanted to believe that while losing Caleb sucked, hard, and even though I was afraid of it happening again, that things would be better next time. That things couldn't keep sucking that bad. And when that didn't happen, some part of my sense of optimism burned out, and you can't just replace that shit like a lightbulb. (New, compact fluorescent optimism! Energy Star rated!) Months of long cycles, slothy ovulation, not conceiving, and trying to face your fears of all the really bad things that can happen aren't helping rebuild any sense of hope, either.

I fully realize that I do not have it The Worst™, and I could be irritating someone who doesn't want to hear my bellyaching. That's fine. I understand if you need to leave. You, the person that truly understands how much reproduction can suck, you are the only one I have anything left in me to care about. And I'm not talking about the piddly little suck that is not getting pregnantas fast as you'd like to. I'm talking about the real suck. Dead babies. Infertility. Losing your fertility. Miscarriages, stillbirth, birth defects. Being out of options. Having to give up.

Tick.

Milestones tick by and do a great job of reminding me that it's really not that easy for me like it seems to be for anyone else. Which is a bent perspective. It's only really that easy for teenagers and people who had sex that one time, but the condom broke. But it is really hard sometimes to not feel like there are BABIES EVERYWHERE, except for you. Accuracy and rationality, be damned. Because you can remember that it was 2 years ago when you got pregnant the first time. My god, had it really been two years? And look what I have to show for it. A whooooole lotta crazy and not a whole lotta baby. Because the nice little fertility charting software has a little section that tells you what your due date would be if you conceived this cycle it's and you see the date of your 30th birthday while the sound of clocks ticking in your head gets a little louder. You watch the people who had kids around the same time you were pregnant. They're kids. They're not babies anymore. They're walking, talking, having first and second birthday parties, and talking. You saw the pictures and repeated quotes on facebook.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

Another cycle goes by.

Tock.

Another milestone.

Tick.

Another year.

Tock.

2.5 years ago, I quit my job, I moved 1200 miles, and I "settled down" to start a family. I was on to the next stage of my life, it was all coming together, just like magic.

Tock.

Here's some Things I Learned The Hard Way™: Make drastic life changes AFTER you have the kid, not before.

Regardless of all the hoopla about the nuances of the right and wrong way to raise kids, odds are your fetus will be blithely unaware and unwarped if you so happen to conceive it while both parents are working long hours and living in a small, older apartment in L.A., even if that's not your Ideal. If shoving a kid in daycare while you work another 80 hour week is going to do something terribly detrimental, they're not going to be any worse off than the kid next door.

You know. Unless that shitty rare heart defect thing was gonna happen no matter where you were. Then dead babies are COMPLETELY unaware of whether or not you had the house in the burbs with the white picket fence first.

No one is ever perfect, or perfectly ready to have a kid. You can try your best, but if something goes wrong, you will find some stupid tiny thing to beat yourself up about.

Lost. (Not the show.)

I can't just give up trying to have kids. I am way not there yet. Hell, if my OB handed me some Clomid tomorrow, I'd probably hem and haw about that. (I do not have an appointment for that tomorrow, or any other time. It's figurative, work with me here.) I want to have kids. It's what I want to do. I can't see myself successfully only sorta caring about trying to have kids. If I let it go, stop caring, I would have to put it down completely, and be done trying, and walk away, move on to something else. I'm not there yet.

But I am definitely way past the point where it would be nice to have something else going on in my life. Problem is, in this economy, in this physical location, I don't have the qualifications to do anything I could really get into. I haven't had any success getting back into what I used to do. I could go out and find any job just to do *something*, but I can't imagine that would solve the issues of my lack of purpose and identity. There's not a whole lot of fulfillment to be found in selling cell phones. However, I am not explicitly saying that's off the docket. Desperation is a pretty amazing thing.

Excuses are like assholes

The things that interest me, medical stuff, breastfeeding, pregnancy, labor, heart defects, parenty things... They're all really hard to dig down and get into, to be part of that world, because I have my open little sore of dearly wanting to have kids, and not having a whole lot of success at that. I know me. I would break down if I had to put on the smile and be someone's lactation consultant every day. I couldn't handle seeing that many more pregnant women if I pursued being a doula. It's hard to see the heart babies and the preemies that made it. I imagine that breaking down into tears is somewhat of a disadvantage in certain job roles. (Most. All.) You could argue that I should be less broken and then I could pull that off, but it's easier said than done. I think asking someone with all the dead baby brokenness and an insatiable baby hunger to delve into BABIES EVERYWHERE is a really steep request. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a swell goal, you know, to not be broken, and to be able to do that sort of work I could really care about, but I'm not there yet, either.

I fancy myself as both too poor and too old to start medical school now. I don't even have a four-year degree in anything. I'd have to start from scratch. And starting that while at age 30's doorstep, and actively trying to start a family seems... incompatible. That is a whole lotta student loans when your goal, when you eventually manage to produce another living being, is to stop everything (again) and just be a mom. At least for a while. I won't finish before I'd want to stop, again. There's only so much dropping out of college, if even for good reasons a person can do in their lifetime.

This is all a lot of excuses. Which I loathe. When it gets right down to it, having kids is the most important thing I want to do with my life. So when that conflicts with something else, the having kids thing wins. So I end up with god-damned excuses.

So what do I do? Damn the excuses and chase some other goal? It doesn't seem like at my age (oh god) it's the best time to put off the spawning while I do other things. That era in my life has passed. And I know too well that you can't always just reproduce easily and when convenient. I mean, I was 26 when we started explicitly trying to conceive. And here I am now. At least I am only 29, and not older. It's not too late for me yet, and I don't want to decide to do something else like, go to college for 4 (8, 12...) years and then think I can just have kids because I'm ready for it now when I am 35, 40. Maybe it's me being too pessimistic, but if I wanted to go off and be a scientist or a medical researcher, and have kids, things needed to have happened a little differently. I suppose it's not impossible to do both, but that is a SERIOUS freaking undertaking. And probably requires some extremely good timing when the popping the kids out. And a really understanding college. And some really, really understand student loans. And a more lucrative career goal at the end. I feel like spawning is tricky enough when I've got all the time in the world to spend on doing it right, and not burning the candle at both ends.

I need a fulfilling, spawn-compatible life goal. That doesn't make me cry.

How do I start this thing?

I feel like my whole life is on hold. And that it is out of my control to move to the next step. I don't know how much longer this trying to have kids thing could take. I could get pregnant this month. It could take another motherfucking year, because that's how these things are. Being completely unable to further my own destiny is infuriating.

The sucky thing about losing your only kid is that you also lose your identity, too. You're no longer a parent, a stay-at-home-mom... you revert back to a bored crazy housewife. I have even lost my sense of me-as-a-writer, even if it is on a two-bit personal blog with low readership because I haven't been able to write about what I really care about.

I have lost my identity. That stings a lot to admit. And I am struggling to find meaning in a secondary purpose when my primary purpose is out of reach.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-26-10

2010-07-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

One more dog:

And last but not least, since the other three dogs have been gracing my blog lately, is our faithful 11 year old lab mix, Dixie.

She loves everybody, unless you're not supposed to be there, then she is the stalwart protector. More than anything, her life is about being pet, and stealing her way up onto the couch when we're not looking. When we go downstairs in the morning, or come back in the house from being outside, or having gone somewhere, you can hear her jump off the couch, and then see her trying to look innocent.

"What? I've just been standing here on the floor this whole time. Definitely the floor. No, don't touch the couch, I don't know why it's warm, and there's a dog-dent in the cushion. I'm cute, right? Pet me?"

Photo-a-Day-Project, 7-25-10

2010-07-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

Two more dogs:

Buster found a chewie he had previously buried in the yard.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-24-10

2010-07-24T22:21:00.000-07:00

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-23-10

2010-07-23T22:36:00.001-07:00

Tomato blooms. So tasty. Grow faster, my pets. Yesss. MWAHAHAHAHA!

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-22-10

2010-07-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

I went outside to take some pictures for today, and I found this:

Thanks birds, for leaving this on my gate. It's lovely. I'm sure it's even more lovely that I decided to share this with you all, too. Sorry.

ANYWAY. I have better than that.

This is a little plant that is growing out of our retaining wall. (The one that is in our yard because our house is not merely built on a hill, but into the sheer face of a cliff. *not bitter*)

It's an interesting looking plant. I've pulled out tiny plants with the same looking leaves from my garden beds. I have no idea what it is.

It flowers in these pink little clusters.

The leaves have these little black spots on them. They're almost heart-shaped.

Edit: After some extensive googling, I think I have identified it as Persicaria Maculosa.

Google Image Searching the name results in a lot better pictures than those on the Wikipedia page.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-21-10

2010-07-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

Squash blooms!

Well, a bunch of pictures one bloom, but it was in a perfect state for being photographed, this morning.

That little green bulge means that a squash is coming!

Photo-a-Day-Project, 7-20-10

2010-07-20T16:42:00.000-07:00

No picture today. Experimenting with a video, instead.

Nothing terribly awesome, certainly not cinematic, just the dogs running around the yard.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-19-10

2010-07-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

iPhone Photography again!

Found this "little" guy this morning when I let the dogs out. Buster was obsessing at a corner of the deck, so I went to go see what on earth his deal was, and hello! giant dragonfly thing.

Instead of leaving the poor bug along to be woofed at by an incredibly loud beagle and hoping it'd still be there by the time I ran upstairs and got my camera, I just took an iPhone photo. The thing is figuratively attached to my hip most times, but this morning it was literally attached to my hip, since I'd tucked it into the elastic waistband of my pajama pants.

Tap-focus is finicky, but effective once you get it to hone in on the right thing. (Not pictured: Several blurry reddish deck spokes, well focused pictures of bark chips)

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-18-10

2010-07-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

Arugula blooms. They are very interesting flowers. I like the sort of pinwheel/propeller look they have with the 4 narrow petals, and the black veins. They're supposedly also edible, but I haven't gotten up on that.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-17-10

2010-07-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

If you don't like spiders, even little teeny ones, don't read this post.

My garden has a bunch of little spiders living in it. I figure I am okay with this, because the last time I checked, spiders are not herbivores, but they certainly like eating them. Anything that eats the things that'd eat my plants are a-ok with me.

These guys are teeny. Their abdomen/thorax/whatever parts are probably about 1/8" across. Some build webs, other seem to hang out directly on the plants themselves.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-16-10

2010-07-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

SON OF FROG

Or daughter. You know, it's hard to tell these things with frogs.

Last year, I had a little green frog that hung out in my plants, mostly in my oregano.

I am going to imagine that the frog that hopped out of my flowers this year is the offspring of the frog in my oregano last year.

Photo-a-Day Project, 7-15-10

2010-07-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

HERBBBBBS. Parsley, Sage, Basil, and Thyme. Mmm.

Pardon the iPhone photography, I was too lazy to go upstairs and get my real camera. (Take notes, laziness will be a theme here shortly.)

It's officially summer now. I have made the season's first pasta salad with herbs from my garden.

I don't really have a recipe. I sort of. Throw things in a bowl until it's full.

What you need:
Some kind of pasta. Rotini is good. Colorful Rotini is interesting.
Some kind of meat. I have been known to cut up lunch meat, in a pinch.
Tomatoes
A whole mess of herbs
Olives
Mayonnaise, Sour Cream, Yogurt, and maybe some sort of liquid dairy, like milk, cream, or half and half.
If you don't want to die from a coronary by the time you're 40, you can do a little oil and vinegar to keep it all together instead.

Cheese, bread crumbs, croutons, peppers, whatever, to top it off.

Take pasta, boil it, toss it in a bowl. Chop up some meat. I used a prepacked precooked, pepper-encrusted turkey breast. This is good, because some pepper stays on the turkey, and some falls off into the salad. Also, when I am tossing together pasta salads, I am usually not being a purist. I just need meat in here. Viva la precooked! Chop up some tomatoes. I only had one in the house, so I used that but it could have used more. Chop or cut up your herbs. Sometimes, I just use scissors to chop up herbs because trying to scrape tiny smudged herb bits off a cutting board bugs me. Drain a can of sliced black olives. Toss this all in a bowl. I added enough herbs to make a rabbit weep with joy.

Add your liquid stuff. Mayonnaise, and some sour cream or plain yogurt for a little tang. You can thin it with some liquid dairy, whatever's around later if needed. If you're doing oil & vinegar, do that to taste and proper saturation. Sometimes, if I am feeling insecure about flavor, or if I am not trying to use up a parsley plant the size of a yeti, I will squirt some salad dressing in for a little more kick. (Usually ranch or italian. But a load of herbs in a mayo/sour cream base basically IS ranch dressing, sooo.)

If you didn't use meat that came with several pounds of pepper slathered on its surface, adding some pepper is a good idea, too.

Stir it up, taste it, tweak as needed.

I usually eat mine with some cheese of my choosing. (Feta is great. Feta I love you, why do you have to be a soft cheese when I am trying to reproduce and being paranoid?!) A more Italian-oriented salad works good with some parmesan. I also like to add some croutons or bread crumbs or something else crunchy on top. Something about the crunchy texture on there is just amazing to me.

Yum.

Edit:
P.S. Dear Josh, guess what your dinner is!