still feeling a little blah

I'm feeling a little better today but still a little sad. I keep having these random fleeting thoughts that a baby might not ever grow inside of me. I try to push them away as soon as they get in, but it only takes a split second for me to almost get teary-eyed. Maybe it's because I'm in my period that I'm extra-sad right now. Or maybe I just need to let it all out and have myself a good snot-dripping, blurry-eyed, can't-catch-my-breath-at-the-end CRY, ya know? Not because I'm sad that our first attempt at a baby failed, but because sometimes you JUST NEED TO CRY. I can't remember the last time I've had a good cry like that. Probably while reading a book. LOL

I need to stop procrastinating, though. I have a TON of big and little projects that I'm working on and today is my last full day off for a while. One of the bigger projects (which includes a few little miniature projects) really should be done before we get pregnant. That project is my website, and the mini-projects are getting the wording right for each page, making some sample crafts to display on it, etc. As soon as I get off here and finish my tiny lunch then I will start up on that. Now if I can just find where I put my motivation... Oh yes, there it is... buried under my to-do list. :)

early frustrations with the conceiving process

Today I am on to a new cycle. Even though in this past cycle, hubby and I weren't "officially" trying for a baby yet (we originally planned to start next month), I can't help but feel a little sad that I'm not pregnant now. I am VERY early in this whole process, having only gone through one cycle, and if it was just that fact in a vaccuum then I would be OK. But I have a good friend at church who is expecting her second baby and they will be 11 months apart. My sister is expecting a baby and is due this summer. I wanted to be pregnant with her so we could share stories and weight gains and things like that. Mom tells me that this is going to be my sister's last baby, so that means that my YOUNGER sister's family will be complete before I even start mine. It makes me just want to sit and cry. Deep down I know it's a good thing that we're not pregnant right now because we would have had a bit of a hard time money-wise, but this extra month or two will help us out tremendously.

But I'm still sad. It is sortof hitting me that I might not be a mom in 2006 even. I know that statistically there is only a 15-20% chance of getting pregnant in any one cycle, but I really wanted to be part of that minority THIS time. I didn't want to have to try month after month after month. I even tested this morning, literally seconds before my period came. I ordered a few more tests online so I'd have them for next cycle, but I am not even going to THINK about looking at them this time until 13 days past ovulation. I am so bummed right now. Good thing I have a bunch of errands and things to do to keep my mind off of it a little.

is it january yet?

We had to take our cats to the vet yesterday, just for their routine annual shots. This was a new vet that they hadn't been to... and with the shots they had to do a "pre-vaccination" evaluation (basically a physical). Well I didn't know that they would be taking their temperature for that! Neither cat had had their temp taken before. Tuxedo allowed them to do it with very little complaining, but Rainy threw a FIT. Then after that she hid under the little chair for the rest of the time and would NOT be put back up on the table for ANYTHING. To give her the shots, we had her go into her carrier (which she did with no trouble) and then the vet and his technician just took the whole carrier to the back to give her the shots. They came back only moments later and said she did good and that they just gave her the shots through the carrier. And of course, once they were home and back in familiar surroundings, both cats were happy and purring like they hadn't been on a little road trip at all.

As for asking if it's January, I finally did ovulate around Sunday, so I'm now in my "official" first two week wait. Back on the 9th and for a couple of days after that, every time hubby and I were alone together I would ask him "What if I get pregnant???" and he would smile and say "Then we'll have a baby" pretty calmly. But I didn't want to obsess over the whole thing so after a few days I stopped talking about it so much. Hubby hasn't brought it up very much either. He gets to preach a little sermon on Sunday night the 1st, and I don't want to spring the knowlege of a pregnancy on him before then and make him too nervous for his speech, so I'm going to TRY to hold off testing until the 2nd. But I'm only 3 DPO (days past ovulation) right now, and the 2nd seems like a long way away... so we'll have to see how I feel late next week. :P I do already have a small stash of pregnancy tests ready and waiting in my bathroom cabinet... I bought them when I bought my basal thermometer to make my order total high enough to have free shipping. LOL.

I'm not really expecting to get pregnant right away with the first cycle trying since statistically there is only a 15-20% chance, but if two lines DO show up then it would be a very nice surprise. :)

new additions, new website, new life plan

Well, on Monday we got two new additions to our house that I am so happy about... a washer and dryer. LOL. After they were delivered and set up, I gave the washer a hug, and the dryer a hug, and then hubby a hug. I'm so glad I don't have to pack it all up and leave the house to do my laundry now. The cats did NOT like the new appliances at ALL, but they are getting used to them now.

I am going to have a new website soon! I hope to have it up around the first of the year. I'm trying to work on it a little each day and I do feel that I'm making progress on it, even though I don't have anything tangible to show for it. This web design thing is all new to me, not to mention DNS and domain name registration and all that. But I am gradually getting the hang of it.

Now as for our new life plan, hubby and I weren't going to try to have children until next month, but my cycles have been long and wacky, so on Saturday morning we sortof decided to go ahead and start trying right then. I thought I would ovulate that day based on my fertility signs, but that still hasn't happened yet. Day 34 today. Still waiting for my 2 week wait.

now remind me why i don't have cable again

With the in-laws visiting over the weekend, we "splurged" and rented a few movies from the local video place. One of them were two movies from Lifetime TV. One was called "Too Young to be a Father" and the other was "Mom at Sixteen". As you can probably tell from the titles, both movies dealt with the issues surrounding teenage parenthood. Both movies brought me to tears. If I'm this hormonal while wanting-a-baby-but-waiting, how much more will my moods be swinging when/if I actually DO get pregnant? I will probably cry at used car commercials. That would be funny. If I did that then hubby would laugh at me for sure. Hubby watched most of the second one with me and it made him almost cry and want a baby so bad too. I really do miss Lifetime TV but I don't miss the high cable bill each month.

On a good note, my left eye has been behaving today. Well only for a little bit. But at one point I closed my right eye but I could still see clearly all the way down the street. So hopefully the 17 Jan 2006 eye appointment will go Ok after all and they won't schedule me for an enhancement.

We finally ate up the rest of the leftover turkey today. Now I have to go shopping tomorrow. I should be getting the Christmas gifts tomorrow too so I can get those wrapped. I did get a lot of addresses written on Christmas cards today though.

Jobs are still going fine and I am also going to take the plunge and sign up for the Greeting Cake Company. I'm also going to get a website (make it pretty basic at first) so I can also sell maybe little jewelries or crafty things or something. Just a little extra to help pad the budget when/if I am a stay at home mom.

two months until b-day

Today is November 25th, day after Thanksgiving here in the US. Hope yours was warm and cozy and filling. It's two months until B-day, which is hubby's birthday... but the B could also stand for Baby. Depending on what happens on 1/17/05, the 25th might be a very good time to start trying for a baby. I mentioned in my last post that we have to wait until after that day... especially since my left eye is being a little weird. I hope it gets better by the time January comes so I won't need an enhancement. It's not TOO bad right now, but if I look through just my left eye, I definitely notice a tiny bit of fuzzy astigmatism. It's nothing I would mind living with for the rest of my life if it doesn't get any worse, but I don't know how worse it is right now.

But anyway. I finally told Mom that I don't work at the payday loan place anymore. She asked me why and I gave her the same reasons I gave my old coworker... that I hated putting people in debt (and mom was like "well THEY are putting themselves in debt"... I didn't get into it with her to try and explain that part of my job function was calling the people who don't currently have a loan out with us and asking them if they "needed any help" right then), and that I didn't want to do triple the work anymore, etc etc etc. And I told her that I am a waitress now, and I told her about the work at home thing. She took the whole news better than I thought she would. Just was saying things like I am so smart and should have been using my pharmacy tech certificate (that I let expire in July... she was a little upset about that too... but it's not like I'm using it... even when I first got it I applied to every single pharmacy in the city and nobody hired me... but anyway) and that I'm too smart to be waitressing, etc. But I explained to her that it is a means to an end since I will not be working once we have children. Then she started saying that I am getting old for children. Which I may be, but women today are having healthy children in their late 30's. (Not that I'm going to plan on waiting that long though).

I spoke to hubby. He is up with the extended family and all the children of his cousins. And he got to of course hold the tiny less-than-a-week old baby. While I was talking to him, his mom was in the background saying that she made me cookies. I asked her (through hubby) if she was trying to make me fat. She said no and that she wanted me to get fat a different way. :) So I asked hubby if she wanted HIM to make me fat. :P Getting "fat" because of a growing baby would be very nice indeed. Until I can't fit behind the steering wheel of my car. LOL. But that is a long time coming. Hubby even realizes that it might not happen on the first try. We would be sad of course but we would just keep going and try again the next month, and so on.

baby fever soon to be at an all time high

Since I am now working at a restaurant that is open 24/7/365 (including holidays), and working on the holiday is mandatory, I am not able to go up to Kansas for Thanksgiving this year to see Tim's family. (I wouldn't have been able to had I stayed at my old job either though). So Tim is going up by himself. He told me the other day that one of his cousins is pregnant with her third baby. Another cousin's wife is having her baby on Tuesday and supposed to go home on Thursday. He will likely be able to see and hold that tiny new baby while he is up there. And he told me that he will come home and want SO BADLY to make a baby with me. He already has baby fever so bad right now... I don't know how it could possibly get worse. LOL. Hopefully the fever won't reach its true peak until late January. We need to still wait at least until then b/c my last LASIK followup appointment is on the 17th and I don't want a pregnancy to interfere with that. But my job is going great. :) The home job is going fine too. I just have to be diligent at both of them. Right now they are only scheduling me about 4 days at work which is good and bad... good because it gives me more time to do my home work, but bad because I need that "guaranteed" money. But so far I've been able to pick up a few extra shifts here and there and at other stores to help fix it up a little. And hopefully we'll have a baby by this time next year so I won't have to work Thankgiving next year. :P

would you like cheese on your hashbrowns?

That is the question that I now ask several times a day. Except it's not "with cheese". It's "covered". I did start my new waitressing job on Tuesday and spent most of the day watching videos of procedural things. I took my training book home and was instructed to read the few "yellow" pages in it, but I found the book so interesting that I went ahead and read the rest of it. LOL. It showed me a little of how to write up tickets and how to call in orders. On Wednesday, I shadowed my trainer all day (morning shift) and she also showed me how to call in tickets and write them up. Then she would have me call in tickets that she wrote up and after I called the order in, she would tell the grill operator "and I'm not even telling her what to say!". She was very impressed with me. She said that in the 11 years that she's worked there, only 2 other people have caught on as fast as I have. Also on Wednesday they let the other new girl go... she just wasn't working out. I think she had been there about a week before I started. When I left on Wednesday my trainer told me that she thought I would be ready for my own tables sometime on Thursday (which was good because as soon as I had my "own" tables, I could start keeping the tips). And sure enough, I was. Yesterday I followed her for only about an hour and then she went ahead and had me clock out and back in (so she could change my pay later at that time from training pay to waitress pay) and the rest of the day I had my own tables and my own tips. :)

I still have a LOT of things to learn though... like the advertised special on a big sign right outside of our restaurant... I keep forgetting about that and charging customers too much (66 cents). And my trainer gives me mini-coachings every day for something to work on... today she said I looked like I was concentrating too much and I need to smile more. :) AND I need to keep working on the prices. I'm remembering some of them but others are going to take me some time. But overall I am very much enjoying it. My coworkers are all very nice and friendly. The smoke isn't bad. I "tested" it by smelling my work clothes the next day, and they don't smell smoky or anything. Oh and I met the owner today too. He asked what day I started and I told him Tuesday. Then a bit later he asked if my trainer was going to send home some practice tickets to call in. I told him that I was sortof out of training already. LOL. So he gives me a fake order to see how I would call it in, and I forgot 2 small things. But it's all good. :)

Now, how is this new job going to affect when hubby and I try for a baby? I don't know. It will be a couple of months before I really see how this plus the home job is going to work out w/ regard to getting out of debt, etc. We should still be able to start trying in April at the very very latest, and could possibly start in January at the earliest. If we start trying in January, and my post-pill cycles stay as long as they have been (this most recent one was 53 days)... then I could be at the beginning of my last avoiding cycle. It is a scary thought. But exciting at the same time. :)

the job saga continues

Wow. When was my last entry? Two weeks ago. Wow. Time to catch up, LOL.

A week ago Monday I had an interview, but it wasn't for the call center. It was for a national breakfast restaurant chain, to be a waitress there. They hired me. I start on November 8th. I am so excited. The only thing is that it is a little restaurant and pretty much the whole place is smoking except for 3 booths on one end of it, but it is VERY well ventilated (when I went to fill out my application, one of the waitresses sat down RIGHT next to me to take a smoke break, and I didn't even notice that she was smoking until she said something to me and I turned to her to reply.) I think it will be something that I enjoy. My shift will be afternoon and evening, but I get Sundays and Wednesdays off for church. I would be getting waitress pay 2.13/hour plus tips, but I would work at a slow time during the day, and based on the estimate my interviewer told me, I would be taking a pay cut to go there. But... the restaurant is RIGHT across the street from me so I don't even have to drive, so I will save a lot on gas. AND... with the evening hours, etc then I can have more "prime time" for LiveOps so I can work when that job is busy, too. I am excited. :)

My second cycle off the pill is being very long. If I wasn't charting, I'd think I was about 4 weeks pregnant, LOL. I am on day 44 and just now today I had a temp shift that could potentially indicate that I ovulated yesterday. Hopefully my temperature will stay high over the next few days to confirm this.

Oh, and one more possible work at home thing. I might be able to get into medical transcription, too. The girl that I was e-mailing about LiveOps wants to help me get into transcription through the clinic that she works with. And I can also do THAT when I stay at home, too... and I can do the transcription with a noisy background (baby talking, cats meowing, etc) unlike LiveOps which needs silence. Only time will tell how any of these opportunities will work out, but I am hopeful and praying. :)

moving on to step two in working at home... plus a lead on a day job

I had my call this morning and it was fairly informative. I had been talking to people and e-mailing one person in particular about this, though, and I pretty much already knew most of the things in the conference call. I went ahead and downloaded my papers and sent them priority mail today so that I might be able to start my training on Monday evening. Hopefully I can finish by next weekend so I can start taking calls. :) I can't wait.

As for the lead on a different day job, one of my current customers said that where she works is hiring... and she works in a very busy call center for a health insurance company. I tried to call HR this morning for that but only got their voice mail. I will have to try again on Monday. Working there instead of where I'm at would be great. My current job pays the bills and all but I don't like getting people in debt so I can take home a paycheck to get out of it. :(

Spoke to Mom today. Nephew "I" is now saying "scuze you" when people cough, and covering their mouth with his hand. So cute. :) Can't wait until my as-yet-unconceived children do cute things. :)

dreams coming true sooner than i thought

And by dreams I mean my work at home dreams. But before we get there, I have other info.

Tim and I have been talking for a while about getting a new computer. This one that we have currently is "messed up" (with spyware and whatnot I'm sure) to the point that downloaded programs won't open or install correctly and are unusable. In theory we could wipe the slate clean and start over but I've been so nervous about that. Plus the ISP disc that I have might install in a way that only lets me read my e-mail on the computer instead of on any internet-connected computer. So this week we are getting a new computer and also getting DSL. We've been on dial-up forever and our DSL company is running a promotion which makes it VERY affordable. I am so excited. :D

On the work at home thing... since my last entry I had come across a couple of things that could be feasable for me to do. One of them was a direct sales company but I could do it entirely online if I wanted to. It is the Greeting Cake Company, and I may still sign up for it but probably a bit later.

The other opportunity I looked into, LiveOps, sounded VERY promising. Plus there was a whole message board with people who were thinking about it or who already do it. So I spent a few days on that board asking questions and reading old posts. To go with this company, I had to be able to be connected to the internet and talk on a regular landline phone at the same time. Also, my internet connection had to be high-speed. And it had to be free of spyware (run a program once/week). My current computer is unacceptable because I can't get spyware cleaner programs to run on it once downloaded. It's kindof like cleaning the bathroom. If you do a little bit once/week then it is SO much easier than doing it once a year. But anyway back to LiveOps. So I was quite satisfied with the answers I received on the message board, etc., and decided late yesterday evening to submit an application and wait for the infamous "conference call" e-mail. (If you get one of those, you're pretty much "in" and just have to send in paperwork and $$ for them to run a background check). Some on the message boards hadn't heard in months, and others heard in only a couple of weeks. So I had planned to wait a while and just keep my hopes in the air a little bit. But when I got home TODAY there was the e-mail in my box!!! I was so excited. My call is this Friday morning. I can start working pretty soon, after my training, and should get my first check on November 16th.

Plus this is something I can do after the children come, which will help a little bit with the budget, and possibly allow us to try for a baby a little bit sooner. I'm so excited. :)

dreaming of working at home

I know and you know that there are a million scams out there for work at home "opportunities". And this week I believe that I have been scammed again. I need to do more thorough Google searches before trying out any other "opportunities" that require money. (I was out less than 2 extra value meals this time though so it wasn't a huge bite out of the budget). But still. That was money that could have helped, even a teensy bit, with the washer/dryer fund, or something.

I do still desire to work at home and keep coming back to transcription. I don't have any medical transcription background, but there are other things that can be transcribed. I saw an ad for legal transcription but that job of course wants legal experience which I don't have. Typing is and always has been my forte and I want to use it somehow. A thought popped into my head that I could transcribe sermons, but I don't know how I would feel about transcribing sermons with a message that I didn't believe in. And most churches which I WOULD go to would probably not be able to pay me scripturally. So I don't know. I can draw but when I draw well it takes me a long time, and there probably isn't a very high demand for it. And I can craft. Maybe I could make plaster magnets. But they took SO long to make last time. Well, maybe THAT was because I left them sit and only worked on them every so often. If I make a bunch of them at once, like a hundred or so, then it might be a little more worthwhile.

If I could find a work at home opportunity where I could make just a little extra here and there, like $50/week, then Tim and I could pay off our debts a teensy bit sooner and could start trying for a baby just a little bit earlier. I crave motherhood. And the further that time goes on, the more I crave it. I don't want it to become an ache. Patience is a virtue but can one be too virtuous?

no motivation for exercising

I'm still not in the best of shape. Walking up one flight of stairs at slightly more than a normal pace will leave me a little out of breath. I do have a half-hour walking video that I do... sometimes. I just keep hitting the snooze alarm until it's too late and I have to go ahead and get ready for work. I need to do something like put up motivational post-it notes all over the house, saying things like "Just know how much healthier your future pregnancies will be if you start to get in shape now" and so on. And I know all that in my head. I just can't get my head to communicate with my body lately.

Diva cup had a little leaking last night, but I think that is because it wasn't positioned properly. And it was only a LITTLE leaking. I still love it. :)

As for work, I'm getting to the point more and more where I DON'T love it. We have a new district manager and she is implementing a ton of new policies with consequences of termination for not following some of them. All the managers in the district had a meeting about 2 weeks ago and there were new things to do right after that one. Now they just had another meeting yesterday and there are tons of additional new procedures from THAT one. I can't hardly keep it straight. Like one of them is staying until 8 for two nights a month. And not open for the customers to come pay late if they need to... but to do collections and whatnot during that time. If I thought I could find a different job that would pay the same I would leave. But this one is so close to both home and Tim's work, and overall it's not all that difficult, and it's not like I'm going to make a career out of it. I just wish I could go back into direct sales right away and we could go ahead and start trying to get pregnant. And also that the direct sales business would pick up so we could still pay off our credit cards on schedule. :P If I find the right business... maybe I can get into direct sales sometime early next year. But that is when we'll start trying for a baby anyway so I don't know. Only 6.5 more months until we start trying if we try in April. Still possible that we can try in February or March, but January is pretty much out. I just have to go one day at a time.

i forgot how bad they were

Cramps, that is. I have FINALLY finished my first post-pill cycle and now I'm cramping nicely. My periods were very heavy before I got on the pill and I expected them to go back to the way they were, just not quite this fast. I wanted to ease into it a little more. LOL. But these cramps, while I have them, are motivating to exercise. I am actually glad today that we are delaying TTC for another few months. Gives me more time to get into better shape before throwing a pregnancy and labor at my body.

Diva cup working fine so far. I can barely feel it at all. And even if I could feel it, the cramps are much MORE "feel-able". LOL

delay of babies again

The good news is that I finally ovulated on cycle day 34, on Sunday. Everything seemed to line up. Now if I can just do it next month, and the month after that, and the month after that, etc.

But the bad news is that Tim and I were looking at the budget last night, and somehow when I calculated out the time when I could stay home and Tim's salary alone could support us, I missed something. I thought that he alone could support us if all the credit cards were paid off, but we still had the car payment for another couple of months. But that is just not so. :( We are still a little bit short. So we had to push back our TTC date to April. (Possibly March, but more than likely April). Most of the credit cards can be paid off by September, if I do the extra payments on the months that we get 3 checks. Then if I'm still working in the month following that, the car can pretty much be paid off the very next month. So it's still "possible" that we could start trying earlier in the year, but I won't know anything until RIGHT THEN since I have a few more months of payments this year to show me where we're really going to be at with regard to paying off the cards. Plus we have to save for a midwife fee, too.

Speaking of saving, I think that I've decided on the Whirlpool Calypso washer/dryer instead of the Duet. They are still "energy star" but are more in our price range. We should be able to get them in early November. We may have to order them and wait for delivery, but I'm excited. :)

i'm going to be a diva

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a Diva Cup. Then my cycle went all screwy so I forgot all about it until it came in the mail yesterday. I am excited. I went ahead and got the larger size since I'm pretty close to 30 already and since we are going to try to get pregnant early next year. I gave it a "dry run" last night and was able to put it in and take it out pretty easily. Now all I need is a period. LOL. Hopefully that will happen soon. I actually did have the teeniest bit of eggwhite cervical fluid today so maybe my cycle will be moving on soon.

But back to the Diva Cup. One of my coworkers might get one too. Here is the story:

Little background first - I have two girl coworkers. C is a bit wild. By her own admission, she started having sex her first year in high school, has never NOT had a boyfriend (until very recently), smokes a lot, etc. M on the other hand is more like me - very quiet, moral, reads her Bible every day, waiting for marriage before having sex, etc. So there's the background.

A couple of weeks ago when I first heard about the Diva Cup, I was telling C about it and how I was thinking of getting one. She looked at me kindof skeptically and said that I'd have to tell her how it works out for me. I didn't tell M about it.

Then today, all 3 of us are in the office today. M came in an hour later than C and I did, (hey.. M C I. get it? MCI. Ok n/m lol) so I told C, "Hey, remember that Diva Cup I was telling you about?" She did, so I told her I got one and I showed it to her. Her jaw about hit the floor. I showed her how you fold it in half and half again and how it "pops" open once it's inside and told her that you just empty it out every so often. Her jaw was still on the floor. LOL. She said later that I embarrassed her (not in a bad way) and that was a hard thing to do. I said that I was going to tell M about it too and she said I shouldn't b/c M would probably REALLY get embarrassed.

So a bit later, M and I are there alone and C is running errands. I ask her if "period stuff" is embarrasing for her to talk about and she says no, and I'm sure she is wondering why I asked, LOL. So I tell her, "Well, I was online, and on one of my message boards about fertility monitoring, the girls were talking about a cup that you wear inside to hold your flow" but I didnt' get much further. She interrupted me and said, "Yeah I know. I've used one." ROFL. Now it was my turn to be shocked. Turns out that she had used Instead, because she had started her cycle while away, and went with a friend to the store and the store they went to only sold Instead. No pads, no tampons. Once I figured out that she had used Instead, I brought out the Diva cup again (She thought the little drawstring bag was cute LOL) and showed her how it worked, told her it was reusable, made of silicon instead of latex, etc. She was VERY interested.

Then, still later, when all 3 of us were back in the office, C had an idea. Our former boss lives in Ohio now, and C and him had become fairly good friends (they have crushes on each other too but that's another story). C and him talk on the phone pretty regularly, and C also has just moved. She might pull an embarrasing trick on him - by calling him tonight and saying that since her computer isn't hooked up yet, could he go to divacup.com and tell her how much it costs? ROFL I feel a little sorry for the guy.

normal cycles have not returned

Well, today is cycle day 32 of my first cycle off the pill, and I still have not ovulated or gotten my period yet. It makes me sad, but at this point I'm thinking this is a trial I have to go through to build my patience. It's very difficult. I look forward to going to bed each night because I wonder, will the next day be the morning I have a temperature rise? Then in the morning when I wake up and do NOT have a temp rise, I am sad and look forward to going to sleep at night again several hours later. Sometimes I even "zombie" through the day a little. I need to just not dwell on it so much and live my life instead, but it's very hard not to think about it.

On a message board I'm on, one of the users gave me a little comfort by saying that since my body was on hormonal BC for so long, I didn't "use" my own hormones. She compared it to not using your arm for an equivalent length of time, and how it would take a long time of physical therapy to get it back to normal. That helped a teeny bit.

When people tell me that it took them 6 months or 9 months or whatever for their cycles to return, I despair of being able to get pregnant when we CAN start trying (based on debt payoffs so I can be a stay at home mom).

i love scrapbooking

I started my wedding scrapbook a week or so ago. It is going to be fabulous. :) I still had all the cards that we got for our wedding so I cut out all the verses and signatures and pictures from them, and will intersperse them throughout the album. I bought a pack of extra pages to go with it, and hopefully I won't need ALL the pages for the how we met/engagement/wedding/honeymoon stuff, so I can put pregnancy pictures in it too, if we are blessed with a baby.

But right now I don't know if that is going to happen. Tim wants a baby NOW still. We are waiting until January to start trying. I am on cycle day 26 now of my first post-pill cycle, and I still haven't ovulated. :( It is really starting to make me sad.

On a different but related note, some of the girls on a message board that I'm on use a diva cup for their period, and since I've been able to do internal checks on myself I figured I could go ahead and try one out. They all seem to love it. It should be here in a couple of weeks.

Work is going fine. We have a new district manager, a female one. She had a meeting with the district on Wednesday, and now our paperwork is doubling. It is going to be a little stressful for a while but should even out by the end of the month. It's just going to be hard to remember things and get in the habit of doing certain things daily that we didn't do at all before.

still waiting on a normal cycle

Well, today is cycle day 19 on my first cycle off the pill. I've heard of women having hundred-day cycles their first couple of times off the pill. I hope that's not me. My temps are still low each morning. My cervical fluid still looks to be fertile. I just don't know what's going on. But I don't regret getting off the pill. I should have done it a long time ago.

I called my mom again this afternoon. She said that she and my sis were going to try to come see me over Labor Day weekend after all, but sis started her job sooner than that so they can't come now. I really and truly don't know when at all we will be able to see each other now. Probably not until after my as-yet-unconceived baby is born. When said baby arrives, though, I will be able to have a homebirth with a legal midwife. There is a small practice of CNMs that is still listed in the phone book as doing homebirths. I hope they are still around when it's my turn.

I've developed the pictures of girl kitty playing fetch. Hope to post them sometime.

childbirth thoughts

No, I'm not pregnant. But I do think about it and dream about it and hope about it for one day in the future. Today's post is prompted by a post I got on another list I'm on saying that they don't do referrals for illegal midwives. That would have been my best chance for having a homebirth since most of the Certified Nurse Midwives have to have doctor backup and very few of them do homebirths anymore. It's possible, but only slightly such, that legislation will pass between January and May that makes direct-entry midwifery legal again in MO, but if it does not pass then I may have birth by myself without any "professional" guidance. I have no fears.

But in the meantime I will still pray that legislation will pass to decriminalize midwifery.

family is so far

For the first time since I first left home 9 years ago, I'm homesick. I really want to see my family. Especially my new nephew who is 6 weeks old now. And I have the Tuesday after Labor Day off (and Sunday and Monday). Since I had to work Saturday and Wednesday, I was thinking that my mom and sis and baby could come up at least for that weekend. I called them this evening... and my aunt is already going to Amarillo that weekend so they can't come up. I cried. I won't get enough time off anytime soon to take a trip up there, and they said that they can come up and see me sometime on one of Dad's off weeks, but I will only have limited time off to visit with them. :( I just feel so detached from them lately like they're thousands of miles away and I'll never see them again. But Mom did say she'd send me a few pictures.

Charting is going fine. I wonder if I'm really doing it "right" sometimes but this is still only my first cycle off, so I am still learning. Without being TMI, I wonder if I'm charting my CF correctly. Hopefully I'll have a temp shift in a couple of days.

first overnight guests in new apartment

More than a few years ago, Tim's family was host to a German foreign exchange girl. Since that time, that whole family has made an annual trip to America to see us and also visit several other places around the country. This is the first time that they came and Tim and I weren't in Oklahoma anymore. Saturday afternoon, Tim's parents and the girl and her brother arrived. They stayed the night and stayed Sunday night also, then the German parents joined us today briefly for a quick visit to a park (where the ducks and geese are so tame that they will eat out of your hands) then we went out to eat.

While we were waiting for our table, I noticed that my left eye seemed to be doing better. I covered my right eye and could see things way across the way. Today was the first time that eye had been clear since before my last appointment on July 20th. It still comes and goes but mostly comes now. Hopefully it will stay fairly clear from here on out. I was a little worried that I would need an enhancement. Not because of the surgery in general, but because I live so far away now that I would probably have to take a week off work to have followup appointments, and then still go back a month later for followup, etc. When I had it done the first time, I had a LOT of followup appointments, pretty much every other day. I don't have enough time off to do that again.

We got word on Tim's car and they fixed it, but all 8 of the valves were bent so all 8 had to be replaced. So it was about $150 more than the estimate. No worries though. We will be taken care of. Tim's parents gave us some garage sale money for the things of ours that they either kept or are going to sell sometime down the road. So that will definitely help us out. But all through the weekend we were still a one-car family. I was able to use his parents' van for a few things I needed to do this weekend since Tim had to work and needed the car for that. Plus when we were all together too, they "let" me chauffer them around since they didn't know their way around the city. It was neat to drive their van. I was used to a much smaller car but did pretty well with the big truck-ish vehicle.

Charting is going well. So far I have remembered to take my temperature. This week I am more nervous than last week though. This week I am REALLY off the pill. It's kindof exciting. I can't wait until we can TTC.

fixing a car and a delay of plans

Well I have a bit of bad news today. DH's car kindof died on Tuesday. It died about 100 yards from home so we were able to get it into a parking spot, but it wouldn't start. When you turn the key to "start", it would just make a high whine. Kindof like if you turn on the blender with nothing in it.

So we call around and find someone to look at the car and we get it towed out there early yesterday morning. The immediate issue was the timing belt. It snapped, so that caused the dying. Another potential issue was that the valves could have bent but they wouldn't know any more until they put a new timing belt back on. So we called them a little later and sure enough, several valves are bent.

We just don't have the money for a different car and it's going to cost quite a bit to fix it, but we looked at the budget, the checking account, the savings account, and the upcoming bills and decided to go ahead and get it fixed. It pretty much ate up all the washer/dryer fund. Being a Nissan, which has a reputation of running for a long time, I have no reason to believe that anything this major will happen to the car again anytime soon.

This is where the delays come in. Since we have to start rebuilding the W/D fund then that will of course delay our purchase of it. And I have a stash of fabric to sew into maternity clothes but about 2/3 of that is still unwashed (I pre-wash my fabric before I sew with it). I don't want to tote that to the laundromat so I need a W/D to wash it... and since it's for planned maternity clothes then I want to have my sewing done before I need it so I don't sew in a hurry and mess up and have to rip out seams, etc.

This also has the potential to delay TTC-ing. I'm still looking for January, depending on how fast we can rebuild the fund. But as soon as we get a W/D then we will have to start saving for a midwife fee which is yet to be determined for the amount. (Not covered by insurance but a homebirth is what we want).

But as of right now I am still hopeful. I just keep praying and being faithful and know that DH and I will be taken care of. These setbacks are only momentarily frustrating. The wait only briefly seems forever. And the reward at the end of the tunnel will be what I've always been waiting for. Or something like that. Didn't mean to get all philosophical there. :)

Then Tim tells me just tonight that we should go ahead and have a baby b/c we'll be so happy with the baby that it won't matter that we're broke b/c we won't care, that all we'll feel is happiness for our new addition. His head is in the clouds and deep down he really knows that we should wait. With this car thing, he knows now how important living within a budget is, and not eating out, etc. I think we will be able to stick with a budget more than ever now. But only time will tell.

dissatisfied with job after only two months?

Well, not really dissatisfied with the job, per se, but with one particular person I work with. I prayed the other day for patience and already that helped a lot. When I first started, it didn't bother me but now I feel like she is overly bossy and loud and talks too much etc. And she is the one that is going to be there for a while. My other coworker, the sweet quiet church-going one, plans to leave next summer at the latest. :( I am sad, but maybe she will be there through the summer and hopefully if we are blessed with children when we try then I'll only be "without" her for 2 months or so. All these little mini-trials will just make me stronger. But every other single facet about my job is great. I am thankful for my blessings. Today I got to work in a different store again to help out. It's nice to have a change of scenery like that. I wasn't very busy but had spurts of 3-4 customers coming in at once. I liked it.

I've re-figured the credit card payoff scheme. I added an extra 30/month or so to just the regular payments, and also an extra 200 for each of 3 months towards the end of the year to reflect the extra paycheck we get. (Get paid biweekly and the budget is based on a 2-check month but some months we get 3 checks). And the new payoff date is September! A whole month earlier. I think we will still wait and start TTCing in January, though, just to give us that extra month of cushion and savings. Plus I might be able to pay off my car the next month. That would be very exciting. :)

I'd better go for now. I want to do some sewing this afternoon. I cut the cloth out last weekend and all week I was too tired to do anything else besides cook and dishes. It is a summery dress so I want to finish it while it's still summer. Once Labor Day hits then I won't be able to wear it to work since I'm not supposed to wear open toed shoes there, etc.

last week of pills

Well, this week is my last week of pills. I ordered a thermometer online last week and it came on Monday. I had to go online because all the ones I found in stores weren't sensitive enough. Taking Charge of Your Fertility recommends that it be sensitive to 1/10th of a degree. I found many that would measure to 1/10th, but when I read the fine print in the instructions manual it was only sensitive to 2/10ths. But I have the thermometer now and have "practiced" taking my temperature for a couple of days, to get into the habit of doing so.

I'm so nervous about going off the pill, but Tim understands that we shouldn't get pregnant before January. If we do it won't be the end of the world, but we just wouldn't have our debt paid off as soon as we'd like. If we don't get pregnant right away in January or February then I can pay the car off in November. (The rest of the credit cards would be paid off in October). That would be awesome because then there would be 3 more months that we could put it into savings. So exciting.

My eyes are still having troubles. My right eye is the one that can see clearly, but it is also the one that itches more than the other one. Both of them also turn red, but only red in certain areas. I'm being liberal with the eye drops and have been since my last appointment, but I just don't know what's going on. My next appointment isn't until the end of next month so I have a long wait. Hopefully my eyes will heal up (with the redness and itching at least) in another few weeks or so.

a very long day of travel

So my last followup LASIK appointment was on Wednesday. Since I live out of state now, we had to make a day of it and come down for the appointment then go back the same day. We also closed out our previous checking/savings accounts, and had lunch with his parents while we were there, which made the day very long. But at least we didn't have to stop and pay tolls since we had the Pikepass. I should have gotten one of those a long time ago.

So anyway we close out our accounts first which only takes moments. Then we are going to meet his parents at a little cafe on campus that is next to the bookstore that Tim used to work at. He rings the back doorbell making like he is going to deliver something and the door raises. He recognizes his old coworkers and says hi to everyone. One of the ladies in the office said "No babies yet??". Then when his parents caught up with us, his mom gave us a Baby Einstein video, and a book on 1,000 ways to entertain a child, or something. I asked her if she was hinting at something. :P It was just kindof funny to get all those baby comments. Especially since we decided to go ahead and go off the pill after this pack.

What? You heard me. We are still not planning a pregnancy until at the end of the year but I loaned out my first edition Taking Charge of Your Fertility to a coworker, and while she has it I checked the revised edition out of the library. It reiterated my thoughts that "this is something I can do." I talked about it with Tim on the way home and he is OK with it, too. We will have to be VERY careful though, because I really don't want to get pg before late December so that our "due date month" will hopefully correspond with our credit card payoff month and I can stay at home. :)

Oh before I forget, my eye appointment. My left eye has been giving me troubles for a couple of weeks, and they did a "map" of it when I couldn't read the appropriate line, and sure enough there is some astigmatism there again. (I'm so glad now that I got the years' worth of followup exams and the enhancement, if needed). The optometrist checked my eyes and said that the flap is still looking fine. He said that if I didn't live so far away he'd want to see me in 2 months and I said that two months is very doable. So I go back at the end of September. I'll have another update then.

hip replacements should not be for the young

My brother in law had to have a hip replacement earlier this month. But it wasn't healing properly, so they replaced it again this past Friday and he is supposed to come home tomorrow (to Mom's house since his apartment is upstairs). I pray that his hip will heal properly this time so that he can be there for his son and be able to play with him and run and jump and do sports and football. And that he'll be able to walk well, without any trace of a limp. I pray that God will put His healing hand onto his hip so that he will become whole again. I'll have to call Mom later this week to see how he's doing.

In my bio on the Nest, I've put two countdowns. One is for trying to conceive, and one is for paying off debt. TTC will probably be at the very end of December (my last pill period will be the 27th, 28th, and 29th) and then hopefully we'll get pregnant in January. Then my paying off debt countdown is 15 or so months away. Still not just around the corner, but getting closer as each week goes by. And I can hardly believe that it is only about 15 weeks until we can get a washer and dryer. :)

Work is still going fine for both of us. Tim's part timer's last day was today, and the assistant manager he has will probably be let go at the end of summer unless some big attitude changes on his part happen. He has a positive attitude overall, but is very wishy-washy about wanting to stay with Leslie's or not. My job is fine too. I finally finished my training program, just in time, too because tomorrow we are getting more trainees in the store. It'll be fun to teach the newbies again. :)

ow my aching head

So last month, for the first time ever in 6 years of taking the Pill, I skipped the last week and went straight to a new pack to skip my cycle for that week. But now I'm wondering if that was such a good idea. For going on 3 days now, I've been having big headaches that come and go. I remember having them before during my "off" week of pills, but nothing that I needed to take medicine for or that lasted very long. But this is the second time in 3 nights that it's been painful enough to keep me awake while I wait for medicine to kick in. I know it's not dehydration because I've been making a very conscious efford to keep enough fluids in me. There is a tiny chance that it is from the heat... I did turn the a/c up a couple of degrees in hopes of having a slightly lower electric bill next month. If the headaches continue into next week when I start my new pack then I may turn the a/c back down and see if that alleviates the pressure.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.

i'm an aunt again

Woohoo! My sister had a healthy baby boy on Sunday morning. She actually went in for an induction on Friday morning, and all day Friday nothing much was happening. They let her rest overnight and started her up again on Saturday. The baby did fine through all this, and things were happening... but not fast enough for the doctor so he decided to go ahead and give her a C-section on Sunday morning. Mom called me and said that everyone is doing fine but of course my sister is plenty sore.

Since I live 8 hours away from them again I'm not sure when I'll get to meet my new nephew in person, but in the next couple of days his newborn picture should be up on the hospital's website so I can take a peek at him then. And I'll have to have Mom send me pictures as he grows, too. Can't hardly wait until it's my turn, but even TRYING to get pregnant is still several months away, and then it may take several months after that to actually conceive. I remember while I was back in Oklahoma I really REALLY wanted to hurry up and get pregnant and start my own business so I could quit my job sooner rather than later since I felt "piled on" all the time, my coworkers were constantly using bad language, etc. But with the job I have now, I still like it, and I don't think I'll come to dislike it. So it will be OK if I don't get pregnant right away when we start trying. I wouldn't be in a hurry for a countdown to my last day (I'm planning on being a SAHM). Besides as each month goes on, that is just more $$ into savings, more time to sew maternity and nursing clothes, more time to scrapbook, etc. :)

july already? where did the time go?

I came on here today and wondered if I really did make a post in June, and sure enough I did... 33 days ago. LOL. Not a whole lot has happened since that entry. We are still unpacking. I finally did a big bunch of it today and the living room looks so big now. In our old apartment I had to leave all of our "good" dishes and about half of our everyday dishes in a box, but all of that is unpacked now. Before today started, I had 4 large boxes of miscellaneous kitchen things, and I was able to find homes for most of it and now I'm left with only 1 box once I condensed it back down. I even unpacked my large cookware bits and a few large stonewares. It was hard to find homes for the larger pieces, though, because the cabinets in the kitchen are a little short and not quite deep enough for some things.

Even though children are still way in the future still, I've been reading a lot in books from the library. We still plan on having our babies at home so I've been reading up on that "family" of topics. I also still am the listkeeper on the nest for my TTC Fall/Winter group. It grows every week or so as someone else requests to be added. I've been able to share several funny stories with them over the past week or so. The first month on my list is September, and it's only 2 more months before some of those people will be able to TTC. Then the months for the rest of us will seem all that much closer. :)

Right now I'm looking forward to October, though, since that is going to be the most likely time for us to get a washer and dryer. :D Tim's mom has sold his old car for us. Not for very much, but for enough that it will greatly help the washer/dryer fund. I'm so excited. :) I love new "toys". hehehe

Youngest sis hasn't had her baby yet but is due on Thursday. She was going to have a C-section last Wednesday but the baby had turned so now she just has another appointment tomorrow to see where she's at and what they want to do.

I had a plugged salivary duct earlier last month. I'd had them before but they'd always gone away within a couple of hours but this one stayed overnight and I was hurting, so I went to a walk-in clinic. The dr used two moistened q-tips to work out the tiny stone. He had me back the next morning for a follow-up, and told me that it looked "almost normal". It kinda hurt a little but a numbing needle would have hurt more so I was glad for the little pain. :)

I also found my friend L again. I sent her an e-mail but hadn't heard from her since November so I wasn't even sure if she had the same e-mail address or not. But it turns out she did and hopefully she'll get me her address and phone number so I can give her a call and a Christmas card. :)

july already? where did the time go?

I came on here today and wondered if I really did make a post in June, and sure enough I did... 33 days ago. LOL. Not a whole lot has happened since that entry. We are still unpacking. I finally did a big bunch of it today and the living room looks so big now. In our old apartment I had to leave all of our "good" dishes and about half of our everyday dishes in a box, but all of that is unpacked now. Before today started, I had 4 large boxes of miscellaneous kitchen things, and I was able to find homes for most of it and now I'm left with only 1 box once I condensed it back down. I even unpacked my large cookware bits and a few large stonewares. It was hard to find homes for the larger pieces, though, because the cabinets in the kitchen are a little short and not quite deep enough for some things.

Even though children are still way in the future still, I've been reading a lot in books from the library. We still plan on having our babies at home so I've been reading up on that "family" of topics. I also still am the listkeeper on the nest for my TTC Fall/Winter group. It grows every week or so as someone else requests to be added. I've been able to share several funny stories with them over the past week or so. The first month on my list is September, and it's only 2 more months before some of those people will be able to TTC. Then the months for the rest of us will seem all that much closer. :)

Right now I'm looking forward to October, though, since that is going to be the most likely time for us to get a washer and dryer. :D Tim's mom has sold his old car for us. Not for very much, but for enough that it will greatly help the washer/dryer fund. I'm so excited. :) I love new "toys". hehehe

Youngest sis hasn't had her baby yet but is due on Thursday. She was going to have a C-section last Wednesday but the baby had turned so now she just has another appointment tomorrow to see where she's at and what they want to do.

I had a plugged salivary duct earlier last month. I'd had them before but they'd always gone away within a couple of hours but this one stayed overnight and I was hurting, so I went to a walk-in clinic. The dr used two moistened q-tips to work out the tiny stone. He had me back the next morning for a follow-up, and told me that it looked "almost normal". It kinda hurt a little but a numbing needle would have hurt more so I was glad for the little pain. :)

I also found my friend L again. I sent her an e-mail but hadn't heard from her since November so I wasn't even sure if she had the same e-mail address or not. But it turns out she did and hopefully she'll get me her address and phone number so I can give her a call and a Christmas card. :)

settling in after being transplanted

Well we moved two weeks ago yesterday, and I am finally feeling slightly settled. I am by no means unpacked yet, but I'm unpacked enough to do day to day stuff like cooking and wearing clothes. The rest will come in time.

We were able to get a new stove from the apartments right away. :) The original one did not work at all, even after messing w/ the circuit breaker. The apartment office was going to have some appliance repair people come out to look at it, but after they called the management company they went ahead and just ordered us a new one. I love my new "toy".

It only took me 3 days to find a job. Well, 2 actually but it was 3 days to find the job I wanted. Here's a short timeline.

Saturday, 21 May - try to visit Tim at his job somewhere in the late afternoon. He is busy so I walk up and down the strip mall. A payday loan place 2 doors down from him is hiring but are closed right then, so I decide to fill out an application with them on Monday.

Sunday, 22 May - buy a copy of the paper and make note of a few other places to apply to, including a titling company.

Monday, 23 May - I go to the titling company first and apply there. He is doing interviews first come first serve while people fill out their applications, so I wait a few minutes and go back. He doesn't have anything available for me since he is looking for someone w/ experience, but gives me a referral to one of his other branches that is looking for a data entry position, which would be right up my alley. I also apply today at the payday loan place and he has me come back on Tuesday for an interview too.

Tuesday, 24 May - I interview w/ the titling place and she said that she filled the data entry position on Friday but they have a typing position. She tells me a little about it and I think it's a job I could do, so I tell her I'm interested. She said that it would take a few days to go over my application and she'd be giving me a call. So I leave and then have my payday loan interview that afternoon. That interview goes well too I think and he said it would take a few days to get my credit report back. I give him my cell phone # thinking that he could call me on my drive to Amarillo over the weekend or something.

Wednesday, 25 May - My cell phone rings in the morning but I don't get to it in time and the caller leaves a message. I check it, and it is the titling company already, and she wants me to call back if I'm still interested b/c they have an offer for me! Wow. So here is a job already, if I want it. The payday loan place would be a better fit for me, so I'm still hoping that I get that position. I called the store but the manager wasn't in. I gave one of the girls the message that I've gotten an offer from another company but that their company is my #1 pick, just in case the manager calls in to check on things, etc. About half an hour later I get a call from the district manager who said that my application is still in process and said he should know something by the end of today or at the earliest, first thing in the morning and wants to know if I can hold on until then. I tell him I can. At 4:00 pm I call the titling agency and she gives me my offer. I ask if I can sleep on it and she says I can. Then at 6:30 the DM of the payday loan company calls back again and wants to know if I can come in and talk with him tomorrow. I hesitate briefly b/c I had been planning to leave early in the morning on a 9-hour drive to visit my family for the weekend. He said that he was leaving town also and wouldn't be back until Tuesday. I didn't want to wait that long so I told him I'd meet with him.

Thursday, 26 May - I go in at 10:00 am for my interview with the payday loan place's DM. He asks me some of the similar questions that the manager already did, and also verified that the manager went over certain bits of info w/ me. At the end of it all, he says that he spoke that morning with the VP based on the feedback the manager gave him of my interview, and that they want to go ahead and offer me a position. :) I was excited. My first day was yesterday and like most first days, it was filled up with a bunch of new hire paperwork. Right after I found out on Thursday, I went home and called the titling agency quick to let her know that I was "pursuing other opportunities that I feel would be a better fit for me right now." She appreciated the call and wanted me to check with her again if this job didn't work out.

So that's what I've been doing the past few weeks. :) Tim and I have already found a congregation to worship with. We are definitely getting acclimated to our new life here.

how to move three times in fifteen months

I moved from Texas to Oklahoma in February of '04. Got married in April but still lived with Tim's parents until September, when we moved into our own apartment. Just this month I finally feel like I'm really getting organized and unpacked and settled, and we even had renewed our lease already. Then earlier this week Tim says to me that there is a store management position open in Missouri and he is one of 3 people up for the job. Then a few days later he was one of two... with him being 51% and the other candidate 49%. Both of us were nervously awaiting the boss's decision for who would get that store.

Found out yesterday afternoon that it will be Tim. :) We are excited but nervous too. It is going to be a bit of a whirlwind moving experience... 3 days there to find an apartment and get moved in. Plus I will actually have to come back for a bit to finish up my 2 weeks, get things disconnected (utilities and whatnot), etc. It will definitely be an adventure. Unfortunately this move will put me 8 hours away from my family again. But we would possibly be able to move around to other (larger) stores in the region as they come open also.

It still hasn't quite hit me yet that we are moving. Probably won't hit me until after I finish up here towards the end of the month and then leave here for the last time in a while. I am looking forward to it.

got a "new" car

Ok, so the car that Tim has has been slowly dying over the past couple of months. It is unable to be driven in OD now, has no a/c (even though that's not mechanical), and eats up gas like it's free. It wouldn't be cost effective for us to repair it. So we've been on the lookout for a different vehicle for him to drive but not having any luck. But I was driving home from work on Monday and saw a car in a parking lot close to home that said "runs great, a/c, must sell, $850" on it. I was going to go right past it and just go on home, but I decided to take another look. It was not pretty. It needs a paint job eventually but Tim wants to do part of that himself (there is a guy at church that has an auto paint sprayer) possibly. It also had a board in the backseat that was holding up the driver's seat. The tires were completely bald, and there were a few dents here and there. But it was a Nissan and Tim wanted a Nissan or Toyota since those makes have a reputation of lasting a long time. (Actually it is so old that it said Nissan AND Datsun on the back.) I called the # on the car and asked about the mileage and he said it was 164K. Which is not bad at all for a Nissan. I asked a few other questions then told the guy I'd probably have Tim call a bit later. When Tim got home I told him about it and he called the guy too. Tim worked on Tuesday, and the guy was moving to Florida on Thursday, and the only other offer he'd had was for $300. Tim made arrangements with him to test drive it that night after a few errands, then on Wednesday he picked it up (for less than the asking price) and got the tires and a few other minor things (spark plugs & wires, a seat from the salvage yard, etc). He is very excited about it. I even "got" to drive it for a little bit too and it didn't feel stiff or loose and didn't pull to the right or left or anything. It was fun. Tim is also excited that this car has a/c in it since the one he was driving didn't have it. He gets hot at work and then didn't have any relief on the way home. This car also has a CD player in it, and Tim is excited about that too so he can listen to some CDs now. :)

On a sadder note, I have been missing my daily walking for over a week now, since last Friday. :( Tomorrow I have big plans for my Big Organization Project so hopefully the work doing that will jumpstart my working out again.

visit interrupted my organization

Wow has it really been 10 days since my last entry? I need to get on the stick.

Work has been busy with callouts and mailouts and faxouts and stuff to promote our new catalog that comes out every March. I am pooped when I come home.

Still plugging away at toilet training the kittens. June 24th I'll have to stop calling them kittens for they will be "grown" by then. I have transferred them to a different kind of litter which is completely flushable, so now I don't have to scoop so often, I can just use my scooper to kindof urge the clumps into the toilet and then flush them away. I have saved the mixing bowl though, in case I need to regress. I have also taped up about half the hole since that or something has been discouraging Tux from going #2 in the potty. He picks the tub so at least that is fairly easy to clean up. And last night he did go in the potty so hopefully that will continue. I try to be very encouraging to him about that.

The visit that interrupted my organization was my mom and sister. They came in to my aunt and uncle's house over the weekend to watch a gynmastics meet on Friday night. Saturday I just did my normal errands (laundry and grocery shopping, etc) and then spent the afternoon and evening over there visiting. (They live in one of the next towns over). I got to feel my sister's baby kick and move several times so that was neat. :) I can't wait until he's born in July. And my sis looked great. Mom made me some flipflops while she was here, too. She took some normaly flip flops and crocheted some fancy yarn around the straps and now I have big feathery poufy straps. It is very cool.

pic of the kitties

Nothing news-wise to report today, but just thought I'd post a picture of Rainy (on the left) and Tuxedo.



Sorry it is kindof digitized... it was cropped from a larger snapshot. Here in a few weeks or so I hope to have a series of pictures of Rainy playing fetch that possibly will be a bit better quality.

four days in a row

Well, I managed to get up and do my walking video for four days in a row (Tuesday through Friday). I am taking the weekends off but may add them in later. I noticed that this walking started making me feel "crampy" (but it wasn't even that time of the month). Hopefully that will get better as I get in better shape and my body gets used to exercising. I know that when/if Tim and I are blessed with children, that being in shape will help me to have an easier pregnancy and delivery so I am using that to help motivate myself too. We still aren't planning children for quite a while yet, but no birth control is 100% so I need to keep that in mind.

The Big Organization Project is going fine. Today I'm going to go through the books, which won't take very long, and then probably do a room-by-room sorting instead of a project-by-project sorting. I'll need to work on the living room and dining room a tiny bit today b/c Tim's parents and brother are coming over for lunch tomorrow. When I did the paper sorting that helped a LOT but there are just still a few tiny things to put away. Tim's parents are also going through a Big Household Sorting and we are probably going to have a mutual yard sale in June.

The cat's toilet training is going OK. Right now I am a little discouraged. I had water in the mixing bowl under the sitz bath last week, but "something" (not sure if it was that water or not) made Tuxedo want to go in the tub instead of the litter. So I went back a step and took out the water, and so far I've caught him twice in the past two days going where he is supposed to, and praising him for it. I just hope they will let me put the water back in there someday. I know this will all be worth it in the end when my cats will go right into the toilet and I don't have any litter to clean up from being spilled or tracked around the house, etc., but my light at the end of the tunnel feels like a dim pinprick right now and the tunnel feels like it's 5 miles long.

i am in shape... round is a shape

Well, ok maybe I'm not really round, but I'm well on my way if I don't change my habits. I eat just fine, not overeating or eating too many bad things, etc. But I need to excercise. I have good intentions of getting up in the morning and doing my walking video for half an hour, but then the snooze alarm is SO tempting, and until this morning I've been succumbing to temptation. But this morning I got up and I walked. :) I was so happy. Now if I can just do it tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, I'll be on my way to getting in better shape. Probably next month (if I can keep up the walking this month) I'll add in weight training 3 evenings per week, too.

I think part of the reason it's so hard for me to stay on track and excercise is that I look at my big goal of getting in shape which is months and months down the road, instead of just taking one day at a time. A nicotine patch ad actually made me think of that. A girl had been on the patch for 10 days and was saying how she just takes it one day at a time, instead of thinking about the REST OF MY LIFE. So I will try those thoughts and hopefully develop a good excercise habit.

getting organized slowly but surely

Starting last week, I've been using my Saturdays to try and get a little more organized. Tim has to work most Saturdays so I have the whole day to do laundry, go grocery shopping, and get some things done around the house. Eventually I want to be able to move the computer into the living room and the bookshelf into the big bedroom (right now they are both in the little bedroom) to clear out that little bedroom so it can eventually be a nursery if we are blessed with children. We aren't trying for children for quite a while yet, but this Big Project of Getting Organized is going to take a while I think.

Last Saturday I started this major project with the bathroom. Before, I had all the cabinets full, and half the countertop had miscellaneous things on it (hair dryer, contact lens solution for Tim, etc). I emptied out all the drawers, the cabinets, and the countertop into the hallway and sorted it into piles of similar "stuff". I combined a few bottles here and there and threw out empty and expired products. Then I put everything back... and lo and behold I have a countertop now! It looks so much more pleasant than it did before. I am excited. :)

Then today I didn't know which other room to start with, because all the rest of them kindof intermingle, so I gathered up every single loose paper. Old bills, papers that Tim had printed off the computer, old church bulletins, junk mail, etc that had been accumulating in various places and put it all in a BIG box. Then I went through the box, filing what I wanted to file, and throwing away what I wanted to throw away, and leaving for Tim what he needed. Most of the papers were from the little bedroom. It is amazing how much more floor space I have now. :) Another thing I did was put all our decks of cards and other gaming accessories back into one box, instead of one box here and one box there and two bags over there.

If I don't change my mind between now and next Saturday, then the next "installment" of this project will probably be books. There are a ton of books we have that we don't use anymore, or don't have need of yet, that I need to sort through and box up and/or sell (garage sale, etc). We of course can't have a garage sale here at the apartment, but may do a joint one with Tim's parents later this summer at their house.

double vision caused by user error

I found out what was happening to my "disappearing" entries. I was seeing an old version of my page. I cleared my cache and now all my posts are showing up again. Woohoo. :)

As for my double vision, I had my appointment this morning and they said that my flap still looks fine and everything (no epithelial ingrowth like it was a month ago). My double vision is being caused by dry eye. I have been using those salty drops which suck out a lot of the water from my eyes, but they never felt uncomfortable to me during the rest of the day so I kindof slacked off on the lubricating drops, using those about 4 times a day. The doctor today said that my eyes looked like someone took a toothpick and poked at it to make a bunch of dimples. Yikes! So he urged me to use the lubricating drops once every hour. And I need to use the salty drops for one more week and then discontinue those. Next appointment is in a month. :)

a bit of double vision

My left eye is still doing marvelously. But my right eye this week has a bit of double vision. I can see my world around me, but then I see little "echoes" of the images just underneath the "real" image. I'm hoping this will clear up on its own and I won't have to have another debridement. I'll be sure to bring it up at my next appointment.

I can't believe that it's been over a week since I last wrote... it doesn't feel like that long.... hope this blog thing isn't eating my entries. ;)

kitties accidently had a self-training day

I have to leave every morning to go to work before Tim does, but then he gets home after I do. So I get home this afternoon from work and find that Tim has left the litter arrangement (the mixing bowl/sitz bath combo) out of the toilet. (We have to take it out when we need to use the toilet since there is only one toilet in our apartment). Sometimes when it's on the floor the kitties will try to walk in it, but since it is top-heavy they spill it. There wasn't very much spill which means they probably only tried briefly to walk in it and instead gave up. I found something else in the bathroom too... in the toilet was a yellow tint. Since Tim and I ALWAYS flush after using it, I just knew it had to be one or both of the kitties. :) I was excited, but I went ahead and put their "rig" back into the toilet for now. The kitties used the potty. Woohoo. :) And they didn't appear to fall in, either, because there wasn't a big area of water where they had splashed around trying to get out or anything. So exciting. :)

litter hole about the size of a potato

Just a quick update before I leave for work. Last Thursday I finally cut the litter hole in the sitz bath a little larger. But immediately before that it seemed like there was no hole at all, because in the mixing bowl there was a TON of litter that had been spilled and scraped into it, so that covered up all the space between the bottom of the sitz bath and the bottom of the mixing bowl. So anyway on Thursday I cleaned all that out and made the hole about the size of a small potato now. I haven't had any poop on the toilet seat all week which probably means that both kitties are putting at least their front paws on the seat consistently. But I was watching one of the cats in action and she had her foot through the hole and was standing partly in the mixing bowl, partly in the sitz bath, and partly on the toilet seat. I was sad about this because I was hoping to delay putting water in the mixing bowl for another two cuts or so, until I had about half the sitz bath left, but after this Thursday's cut I'll have to go ahead and start the water in the mixing bowl. Oh well, just makes me closer to my goal I guess.

gospel meetings and good preaching

Tim and I went to a gospel meeting at the church in Mustang this week. (A "gospel meeting" is where a visiting preacher comes in and brings us Bible lessons on Sunday and then also on Monday through Wednesday evenings... some of you out there may call something like this a "revival".) Anyway we got to hear Bruce Reeves from Conway Arkansas, and he preached some fine lessons on expediencies, apostasies, and baptism. He is the kind of speaker you can listen to for a whole hour and only feel like you've been there for 10 minutes and want the sermon to continue.

At our congregation at 84th street we have found a replacement preacher for our one who passed away from cancer this past Thanksgiving. Harry Osborne will be coming to work with us towards the end of May. We are all excited to have him come. It has been a hard transistion but we are all ready to move on now.

My eyes are still doing OK. They are still fluctuating but hover pretty close to 20/25 or so. Only a week and a half until my next appointment. Then maybe I can stop the salty drops. I have a slight feeling of dread whenever I start to put them in, but the burn isn't as bad as I think it will be. Maybe I'm getting sensitized to the salt, I dunno.

salty drops for my eyes now

I had another appointment on Thursday afternoon. They checked my eyes and they still looked OK, no ingrowth happening under the flaps like before. They went ahead and took out the bandaid contacts and had me keep using my antibiotic and steroid drop through Sunday (but my antibiotic won't last that long... I have maybe half a dose or one dose left), and they also told me to go get another type of drop from the pharmacy. It is an OTC drop and is salty... 5%. They want me to put this in my eyes four times a day until they see me again in 2 weeks. They said it would draw the moisture out from under the flaps and help them stick very closely to my eyes and help prevent those cells from growing under again. It feels like I am putting ocean water in my eyes when I use them. But it only burns for half a minute or so and then it is OK. Right now it feels like I have an eyelash in my left eye but my right eye feels completely normal. I won't give any more LASIK updates until after my next appointment. I am still seeing fine to work, read, drive, etc.

another lasik update (debridement and 20/20)

Well here I am, close to 3 weeks after my LASIK surgery. I had a procedure on Friday, a debridement (sounds like de-BREED-ment), to clean out some ingrown cells under my flap. Since it was a surgical procedure, I had to go through everything in the surgical suite again, from the bonnet and booties to the numbing drops to lying down under the laser. I won't bore you with the prepping details. They had me watch the blinking light again but no laser was used this time. The doctor lifted up my flap and cleaned it off, then irrigated it. I think my eyes might have wandered a little more on Friday than they did at my initial surgery, because I kept hearing over and over again "Keep watching the blinking light.... the light doesn't move; it's your eyes....." etc. But despite all that the procedure went OK. After replacing the flap, the doctor put in bandaid contacts immediately. Those are still in today and will be in for another few days. After the debridement, I noticed an immediate difference in the comfort of my eyes. Before they were just slightly irritated, like I'd had contacts in a bit too long or something, or a little bit of dust, etc. But after the debridement they felt so smooth when I blinked. It was weird. Before the procedure I was waiting for a spot to get 'prepped' and I was chatting with the people who gave out the post-op instructions. It was neat to do that since I'm sure it's not very common for someone to go back to the surgical suite so soon after their surgery.

I had another appointment today and they said everything looks fine. They are leaving the bandaid contacts in longer because of how I healed last time. The contacts will help prevent my eyes from having ingrown cells like they did last time. A piece of good news today... I am seeing a little better than 20/20!! I hope I am still seeing this well when they take out the contacts. Even though they are not perscription, they help me see slightly better because they hold a little more moisture on the eyes. But I am excited. :) I remember back to my first post-op appointment when I couldn't tell that there were even letters at all on the lower few lines of the eye chart. Now I am reading the letters. It is so amazing. I can hardly wait for Tim to get this done in a few years. :)

The cats are doing fine. Rainy has learned how to fetch. She has a few jingle bell balls that she can pick up with her mouth. If I throw one of those across the room, she goes tearing after it, messes with it for a second to get it into a good "picking up" position, then brings it back and drops it somewhat close to my feet. Then we repeat. And if I move into another room, she usually will find me and bring the toy with her. Tuxedo doesn't play fetch but he likes to watch TV. We were watching a movie the other night and he was sitting on the living room floor and sat perfectly still, staring at the TV for a good hour. We would call "kitty kitty" to him, and he would turn around and look at us, but only for a second and then his eyes and ears were right back on the TV. He didn't want to miss any of the movie I guess. :)

lasik update two weeks after surgery

Just a very quick update today. I had an appointment Monday. This was after having the bandaid contacts in all weekend. I noticed all weekend that I had trouble keeping my eyes open in bright light (like driving in the sun), even with my sunglasses on. So at my appointment on Monday they took my contacts out and asked how my eyes felt then. They felt a little worse without the contacts so they put them back in. They told me that some of my epithelial cells were trying to grow under my flap and they wanted to check me again on Wednesday and possibly have the surgeon look at them too, and possibly make an appointment to get those cells "cleaned out".

Tuesday and today my eyes felt a LOT better and weren't sensitive to light anymore. Whether it was because I re-started the steroid drops or had a new pair of contacts or what I don't know. But at my appointment today the optometrist said that the cells on the top of the flap near the bottom were healing up nicely, but the cells underneath were still there trying to grow. He caught the opthamologist in between surgeries and had him come take a look, and he concurred. He said to have me come in ASAP to get those cells cleared out, this week even if possible. They are going to lift my flap up slightly and "clean out" the cells. What that all will entail I don't know yet. So I made an appointment for Friday morning to get that done, and another followup on Saturday morning.

cat bathing experience (not as bad as you'd think)

Our kittens are 8 months old now, and despite collars and spray and those little drops that you put on their neck, they still scratch and I still see fleas on them on occasion. So I decided to give them their first bath. I was going to do it this evening after church, when Tim would be home to help me (he is working this afternoon). But we got reminded this morning that there is "Teen Talk" tonight (an additional little Bible study geared towards college-age kids). So I impulsively decided to give them their bath this afternoon... alone. I figured that I would go slowly and be patient with them as they got used to being wet, then being shampooed, then being rinsed off.

Side note here. You know how adrenaline gives you that "fight or flight" feeling? Well our cats are very much "flight" animals. They sometimes fight with each other and roughouse, but usually they do their own thing. They are non-confrontational over all and want to remove themselves from a bad situation. Like when I took them (in turn) over to my aunt's house. She has a grown dachsund (spelling?) and a little puppy dachsund. I took the cats over when I visited her last and they did not want anything to do with that puppy or its mama. They would slink away and try to make themselves small and wanted nothing more than that crazy little bouncy thing with the floppy ears to leave them ALONE. The puppy, of course, just wanted to play and didn't understand why her new friend kept trying to leave and ignore her.

Back to today now. I got everything assembled first, and the cats were both very curious as what was going on. I had two buckets of warm water in the bathtub, a plastic cup, the little bottle of shampoo, and a towel. I decided to bathe Rainy first since she is a little more skittish than her brother. Her claws went out when I set her into the (dry) tub, but I had my hands on her and petted her and tried to help her calm down. As soon as I started pouring water on her though, she decided that this was a very bad situation indeed and kept looking for openings to try to escape. I found that if I kept my hand on the back of her neck she was less likely to try a flying leap out of the tub. I wanted to stop her escaping also so she wouldn't get hurt. I found out that wet cat feet are a little slick when she and her brother slipped in the tub a couple of times. The most rebelling she did was when it was all over and she was rinsed, and I wanted to towel dry her slightly. As bad as the bath situation was, she thought that being briefly confined in a towel was MUCH worse and so I didn't get a lot of drying done. She shook herself off and started to put her hairs back into place as I started in on her brother.

Now Tuxedo is generally a milder cat, but he is much larger and has much thicker fur than his sister. I started to put him in one of the buckets to help me get him wet, since when I just poured water over him it ran off his thick long hair. I got him in maybe as far as his back legs and he would go no further. I relented and put him back into the tub. I didn't want him to thrash around and get stuck underwater and drown. Whenever I would hold my hand on Rainy's back she would stay pretty still, but Tuxedo kept moving around, always looking for a way of escape. When he was rinsed off I towelled him while he was still in the tub, then let him escape to groom himself too.

They are both doing OK now and I think they'll forgive me for this indignity I made them suffer. I went to let them out of the bathroom a moment ago and the came right out like it was no big deal. Tuxedo was still ruffling his feet with every step, but Rainy purred when I scratched her still-wet neck. I am surprised they came out of the bathroom at all since I left the heat lamp on in there to keep it warm. They've never been soaking wet before and I thought they would be cold. But maybe they were just trying to get as far away from the bathtub as possible.

Before today they LOVED to go play in the bathtub and drag their little balls in there, etc. It will be interesting to see if they continue to play there or if the trauma was too much for them. :)

first night driving since lasik surgery

Tim and I went to another Bible study about the home and marriage last night, and it started at 7:30. We left the apartment at about 7:00 and I decided to try night driving for the first time since my eye surgery 10 days ago. It wasn't too scary, but even so I let Tim drive on the way home so I could close my eyes and rest. Part of that was because we stayed very late singing hymns and I was a little sleepy. :)

Anywho back to the driving experience. You know how if you're driving at night and you squint your eyes, you can make the streetlights and headlights and things have lines coming out of them from the top and the bottom? Well my eyes sometimes would show me two lines coming out of lights... but they were both to the top, like antennas. And sometimes if I concentrated and focused, they would go away. For the most part they were there, though. Not really anything very distracting, it was kindof like seeing reflections in a wet road after a big rain.

I got some groceries today and when I bought some chips, I noticed that Pringles has come out with a variety of their chip that has trivia questions printed right onto the chip. They looked so neat so I had to get a can of them. The chips inside the can looked just like the example on the outside of the can - a very clearly printed question and upside down answer on each chip. What will the food industry think of next?

lasik update 8 days post surgery

I had my one-week followup appointment today. I noticed that from Saturday to yesterday my vision didn't feel like it improved very much, but then today there was a bigger jump in improvement. My right eye still is very blurry though. I went to my appointment and they checked my vision, and with both eyes together I'm seeing 20/25 so that is not too shabby, but it is all being carried by my left eye. The optometrist looked into my eyes and said that my right eye isn't healing as efficiently as it should, so he went ahead and gave me bandaid contacts. He put them in for me and I asked if I should take them out at night or leave them in, and he said to leave them in and that he didn't want me poking around in my eyes, that he would do the poking. They are going to see me again on Monday but he told me that even with the bandaids it would take a week or so for my right eye to get on its way healing.

But I'm just glad that I don't have to use the magnifyer on Windows at my work computer anymore. :)

no trip to alabama after all

The friends we were going to stay with in Alabama when we went over there next week are not going to be able to host us due to some family issues that they need to help with. So Tim and I aren't going to take our little road trip after all. It's probably a good thing, though, since I don't have any paid days off right now anyway. And the cats are still being toilet trained so now I can get back to the regular schedule on that. And there are some things to still be done around the apartment, etc.

We are going to go out to the Wichita Mountains on Saturday though. Friends of ours from church are going out there on Friday night and we are going to go out and spend a few hours there on Saturday, probably singing some hymns and doing a little sightseeing. I got VERY burned out on hiking from the last time we went, when we unknowingly went on a 4-hour round trip hike. But surprisingly I wasn't very sore the next day. Just very tired the evening of the murderous hike.

brief lasik story, and update 5 days post surgery

A tiny bit of background first. My dad had RK surgery back 10 or so years ago, well before laser anything was an option. I remember him telling me about it, and I remember saying something to him like "You mean you were AWAKE while they CUT on your EYES???!?! I could NEVER do that." Funny how time and circumstances will change one's perspective on things. Not only was I not avoiding eye surgery, I was looking forward to it. :)

So anyway Wednesday I slept in a little, then Tim and I ate some breakfast before my 11:00 appointment. We got to the center and they took one more picture of my left eye that the surgeon wanted. When we go into the surgical lobby, a tech has us put those hospital booties on our feet, and has me wash my eyelids and put on a showercap thing to cover my hair. Then she gives me a Valium-type pill and has me wait for an hour or so.

Just before I went into the first laser room, the tech puts the numbing drops in my eye. They sting a little but are not unbearable. I go into the room with the Intralase laser that will cut my flap. Each eye took 60 seconds of laser time. Tim got to watch it all on a monitor. This laser "docked" onto a suction ring that was on my eye and was slightly uncomfortable, but not painful. The worst part was the "eyelid speculum" that held my eyelids open and that was just a small poking sensation like there was something in my eye that I couldn't quite blink away.

After my flaps were made they had me rest with my eyes taped shut for 10 minutes or so while the bubbles dissipated (the laser that made the flap does so by lots of tiny bubbles just under the surface of the cornea). Then I went to the main laser. I had the eyelid speculum again, but no suction ring this time. Tim got to watch this one on a video too. He told me that when they worked my flap open it looked like they used a little hook. My right eye took 36 seconds on this laser and my left took 51. After the laser did its thing they smoothed down the flap with what looked and felt like a little spatula. The surgeon looked at my eyes afterwards and said everything looked good.

We got my post-op instructions and drops, etc and then came home. I rested on the couch for the rest of the evening, getting up twice to do my series of medicated drops. The next day Tim gave me a ride to work and I tried to work as best I could... because I was not seeing 20/20. I wasn't even seeing 20/40. I took a few phone calls and made heavy use of the magnifyer on the computer (a neat thing to play with when you don't need it, but a pain in the bootie when you depend on it... Start, Programs, Accessories, Accessibility, Magnifyer). I had my 1-day followup on Thursday afternoon and they told me that my vision w/o glasses before was 20/2200, and now it was 20/100, so even that was a big improvement. They check my eyes and said that there are some rough spots on the top layer of my cornea that would heal up on their own in time. They requested I come in again on Saturday.

Saturday I'm still not seeing clearly. They check my eyes again and my cornea is apparently still rough. They ask me if I'm having any pain and I tell them that I'm not. My eyes are dry and itchy, but not painful. They told me that if they were hurting me then they could give me some "bandaid contacts". I had never heard of such a thing and almost thought that it was too bad that I couldn't try them out. :P

Sunday I was seeing a little better than Saturday (very VERY gradual and slow improvements and healing), but then today it almost feels like I've had a regression again and that I'm back to Saturday's or even Friday's vision. I know I need to be patient and they said that my vision would fluctuate, but I just wish I healed up faster than this. I got the Intralase and the CustonVue (using wavefront measurements instead of just a straight perscription) to get the best results possible. I just wish the wait wasn't so long. I've been using all my drops as instructed, and not rubbing my eyes, or anything. I need to be patient. I've heard of delayed gratification. The tech who put my numbing drops in told me that I wouldn't see very well on Wednesday but that the next day would be "like Christmas." Maybe my Christmas will be in March instead of February. More updates to come in a few days.

2 day countdown for my lasik surgery

Well I had my final pre-op appointment today. They took measurements of my eyes again and put green drops in them, shined a blue light on them, and had me look into a purple whirlpool. Not all at the same time. The first thing they did was check my vision using one of those "standard" machines at every optometrist's office (you know, the one where they keep flipping lenses on you and say "which one is clearer, #1 or #2..... #2 or #3.... etc.), then they did other measurements, and at the very end they checked my right eye's vision again based on some of those middle measurements. I hope everything will turn out OK. I am getting excited. :)

my rotary cutter will be the best thing that happened to my sewing

Wow. I should have splurged and bought a rotary cutter and cutting mat a long time ago. I haven't sewn in a while because of time and space issues, but the last several times I did, I would have my fabric laid out on the carpet, and I would be kneeled over it with my scissors, turning every which way to get the curves, etc cut out of the different pattern pieces.

Well, several months ago, rotary cutters and mats went on sale at the fabric store I like. They were half off. So I bought the largest mat they had (34" by 36"), the smallest cutter they had (1" or so diameter so I can do the tight curves), and several extra blades. I got motivated yesterday evening to do a little sewing, so I dug out a pattern and some fabric from my stash and got to it. I had the mat on the table, with the fabric and pattern laid over it, and I got the cutter and started cutting. Before ever using it I was skeptical because fabric is pretty sturdy (so is paper for that matter), and if I tried to cut fabric or paper using, say, a knife... or just one side of a pair of scissors, it wouldn't work and I would just end up with creases or maybe tiny tears.

But I used the rotary cutter and WOW. It sliced it through neatly like butter, completely effortless. I've never cut out an entire pattern so quickly before. Unfortunately I put a tiny cut in the dining room table too, but oh well. Now it will look lived on instead of pristine and untouchable. :) I can hardly wait to finish this dress so I can cut out another one. :P But I must work more on my drawings first.

how to play an extra large joke on someone

One of my coworkers, L, has a husband, G, who is out on the road a lot. A few months ago, they traded in the pickup they had for a different one that would get better gas mileage for their horse trailer. While they were out shopping, they looked at this one Chevy crew cab that has a TON of enhancements and decorations, etc. Wood trimmed dash, nice interior and exterior package, etc. MSRP around 68,000 - same price as a fairly decent starter home around here. So anyway L has been talking for a few days that she has a friend over at the dealership and wondered if he would let her "test drive" that truck and take it home, stashing her other two vehicles at a friend's house, and pretending that she bought herself a new truck when G came home the next time. We all would laugh at what his reaction would be but no definite plans were made until today. L even called their contact at the bank and got him in on the deal too. He was more than happy to help her play this joke on G. She had to leave early because he was getting home close to the time we were getting off work, and she called us on the road and is going to meet him at a restaurant... in "her" new truck. We are all excited to hear "the rest of the story" tomorrow.