Today's Sanity Brought to You By Pepsi

In today’s update, I am both

a.) Bleeding from the eyes
b.) Not bleeding from anywhere else

So at least I’m not menstrual-cranky, which is good because I’m I-hate-to-try-sleeping-in-a-hotel cranky. SO DRY. And of all the places to forget putting in eye drops, yours truly flaked out last night. After a lukewarm painful meal of disgusting KC bbq (my short end tasted oddly like an enchilada, which is definitely not how rib sauce should taste), I worked for another 5 hours and then tried to crash. No luck. Lots of blanket-kicking and nightmares about work while being occasionally tormented by someone singing in the stairwell next to my room. Oh, and Loud’s mother inexplicably called me at 1:30 am to hang up.

I’ve got a bag of Gardetto’s and 40 fluid ounces of Pepsi in me so I’m not asleep yet. As if I had to wake up at 6:00 am because the other Kronos people I’m with are ‘morning people’! F-ers. I have become even LESS of a morning person if possible, is what I have learned so far on this trip. This is most likely as a result of two years of my extremely quiet, peaceful, work-from-home ease-into-the-day routine. What I don’t want to hear at 7:00 am is, ‘So when I had my hysterectomy…’ and loud, braying laughter following similar stories.

Since I’m still not allowed to think about whether or not I’m preggers (which I am 99% positive I am not), it’s very frustrating to be sitting in an empty cubicle with nothing to do in a room that is 147 degrees and smells like WalMart perfume. I can’t wait til Alistair reads this someday and is like, ‘Man I knew my mom was a whiner, but this is brutal’. Seriously, I hate being so useless. I think I’m going to go sign up to be a Pampered Chef consultant online.

Pity, Party of One

This has been one of the most up-and-down days ever. It’s kind of like that Seinfeld episode, where Kramer calls Jerry ‘Even Steven’.

Yesterday sucked. It was rainy and miserable, and I learned my car needs some sort of alignment/brakes/new tires thing when I almost had an accident on the highway. I spent 5 hours looking for a plain, black good wool suit and found nothing but crap, and since Quiet refused to go with me to help I was alone and grumpy. The worst part though was the migraine I was working on, that attacked in full force later that evening. So instead of spending a restful pre-travel night I tossed and turned with the sweats and aches that follow a migraine for me. That set the pace for the whole good/bad day.

So here I am in a Fairfield in non-scenic downtown Kansas City (not sure what state I’m in exactly) and I just had a Fun Dip washed down with lukewarm bottled water that was technically my dinner. Not exactly jam-packed with baby-making vitamins and folic acid.

Good – My PS3 arrived!
Bad – It arrived exactly 24 minutes after I left for the airport. No lie.

Bad – I was booked on two middle seats for the flight here
Good – The flights took off on time and I was able to get a window for one leg and an aisle for the other after some begging and tears and hand-wringing and basically I think the guy just wanted me to leave the desk

Good – I got a decent, albeit high-learning-curve, car from Avis (the Chevy HHR LT)
Bad – I got a frustrating, albeit 1 ½ hour long, tour of Kansas City as a result of lousy directions and the even lousier highway system (the first time I’ve ever pulled over to the side of a road, put the car in park, and just screamed the F word for 5 minutes)

Bad – Dinner was pillaged candy and lunch was airplane peanuts
Good – Less calories?

Good – The hotel is only 5 miles from the client site and the meeting isn’t until 11 am
Bad – I have to drive back to the airport at 6 am to pick up some coworkers instead of going straight to the meeting.

Other highlights of the day included airport temperatures in the 90’s (and I was carrying a wool coat that weighed more than a bear cub), an unexpected and terrifyingly painful eye injury (my laptop bag slid off my shoulder and snagged on the toggle from my sweatshirt hood, which is on an elastic that stretched to its max and then snapped with a vengeance when my bag hit the floor and in an unbelievably unlucky turn actually hit me directly in the left eye, resulting in a bloodshot swollen mess for the remainder of the day), a desk clerk checking me into an unfinished room (I opened the door after the 4-floor climb and almost sobbed when I saw the unmade bed, the paint cans, and the plumbing in the middle of the floor), then a series of brutal bad-news (work) emails assaulted me when I logged in.

I’m here all week, ladies and gentlemen. And I have to iron at some point, which makes everything somehow worse (that’s time away from sleep). Oh, and if the emotional irritation and crying jags of the past week are any indication, I’ll most likely get my period tomorrow, which will mean February’s attempts did not work. Did I mention I don't want to be here? I just want to be at home. Tomorrow people are just going to yell at me (clients, coworkers, strangers I haven't even met yet; well, maybe not the last one, but you never know).

What Wait?

I have been having really weird dreams lately when I do sleep, which is erratically and in two-hour increments and with lots of tossing and turning and drooling and kicking off of the blankets. Part of one of last night’s nocturnal adventures was largely due to the incredible amount of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon I’ve been ingesting. I had this weird sensation of my arms being cut open and refilled with something green and gooey and toxic (I was probably sleeping on them, I do that a lot). The scariest one though was as follows;

I woke up (in the dream), in my own room and in my own bed, facing the window like I usually do (this new house is a bitch for morning light; I’m pretty sure the sun has been rising at about 4:30 am the past few mornings, and the birds have been swarming with their shrill piercing calls – I hate morning). Anyhow, I wake up and sleepily look out the window, and I can see an airplane (this may be because we are about 10 miles from the airport, and often hear the planes overhead, and maybe I was sleeping lightly enough to hear one go overhead). So in the dream I am watching the plane and thinking, ‘Hmm, that one is coming in a little low’. Next thing you know my radio alarm goes off (still in the dream), and there’s an air traffic message about how backed up flights are for landing and how there’s going to be a problem. Watching out the window, I see about half a dozen planes back-to-back start trying to land, but they’re too low and crowding each other, and they start to crash. I’m starting to freak out, but it seems so unreal that I can’t react, and I think they’re far enough away still, until one crashes and explodes and flaming debris starts to hit the house. I start to run out of the house, but realize it’s end-of-month invoicing day at work and I can’t take time off for anything, so I wake myself up. The end. I hate work more than mornings.

I also had a dream where I was fighting with my sister, but that’s pretty routine. The point is, I am not thinking about whether or not I am pregnant.

The February Attempts

I don’t think I realized just how tense I was about this whole thing until I found myself avoiding my own blog. February attempts 1-3 have been made without posting about them, and it’s because I just can’t even think about it. If I start to think about it, then I start to worry about it, then I worry that my worrying is going to affect my chances, so then I stop thinking about it altogether and think about rainbows and kitties and cotton candy instead.
This getting pregnant thing blows. It’s suppose to be an exciting, beautiful thing, but I don’t see how it could be; you’re either crazed from trying, or insane from the never-ending cycle of waiting, or clinically depressed when you’re crushed with disappointment month after month. I just can’t think about it. I can’t think about how many more times I’ll try before I’ll consider some sort of fertility testing, and what would happen after that, regardless if the results were good or bad. I don’t want to face the statistics on my age and weight and self-insemination and success rate, and I don’t want to have to entertain the idea of never being able to conceive. My chest tightens when I look at the rules and financial costs and timelines of the adoption process.
This was supposed to be easy. My high school Health teacher told me so. I should be able to get pregnant from sitting and watching TV with Loud and Quiet.
I wish I could be the kind of person who could actually enjoy this process. Be more patient, and easy-going, and devil-may-care. Instead, I will post this, then not think about it for the rest of the day. I won’t think about it tonight, when I have to swallow my pride and embarrassment and ask Quiet for yet another jar of magic. And I certainly won’t think about it for a single minute of the next two weeks, fourteen long slow days where I’ll get emails from friends with pics of their second child’s birthday party and I’ll compulsively read everything I can get my hands on that has the word ‘baby’ in it, and I’ll TIVO ‘Baby Story’ and all the sappy crap like it.
But I won’t think about it.

February Made Me Shiver

Here we are in cold, cold February. I have no idea what to post, since I’m so blah about the whole thing; don’t want to get my hopes up, don’t want to get stressed out and have a week-late period again, convinced I’m pregnant the whole time. Don’t want to have to put Quiet through this mess for another week, don’t want to have to be charting my BBT because I’m worried being late has thrown off my whole cycle and it’s not like I was that good at reading it in the first place.
On the plus side, I had a delicious guilt-free dirty martini last night at my jewelry show and it was oh-so-tasty. Loud has promised that he will quit drinking to support me (and prove a point) for the nine months of my pregnancy, which will be tough on Quiet; the two of us, sober for that long? He’ll have a serious drinking problem by the time I deliver, poor guy.

So… another day or two and we’ll get to work brewing up another batch of Elf Magic. I need to go buy a better pregnancy test, like a digital one, no more screwing around with little lines or colors or that crap. I also need to check and see if we’re running low on specimen cups. Still much cheaper than paying to use a service! Loud is out of town for work this week and it’s just me and Quiet, and it’s very, uh, quiet around the house. And cold, did I mention the cold? I’m going to start painting my home office this week. I’d love to start the nursery, but I don’t want to be Miss Havisham and go all crazy if I can’t get pregnant, so that will have to wait. That’s all this is, is waiting. You wait to try and catch the perfect date to inseminate, you wait to see if it worked, you wait again when it doesn’t. I’m in a perpetual state of standing on the brink, and all this breathless anticipation is very tiring.