Hi again

I'm experimenting with good old Blogger and word press...not sure which I like yet, but so far Word Press seems a lot more user friendly. I may just have to switch.

It's June already?

Where did the first half of the year go?

Anyway...
My lack of posting lately has been due to me not having any ANY spare minutes when I wasn't working, talking to people at work, going to work, coming home from work, or sleeping. I may be exaggerating just a tad. I do work a lot though. Most of the time I'm too exhausted to even think much less type out something coherent. Also, much of what I've had to say lately has been about (in)fertility or home improvement or assholes that I have the misfortune of meeting while driving to or from my job(s). While everyone can relate to stupid maniac drivers, and most people have done a home improvement project at some point, not many people have had to deal with infertility. I feel like I would need a whole other blog just to dedicate to all of the (too much) information about it. There's a lot of checking of temeratures and bodily fluids and body organ positions and it's all a little bit overwhelming at times even for me so I can only imagine how gross and just too much it is for the average person.
Thus, I have made a decision to kind of put the blogging on hold for a bit. It's pretty much been on hold for the last year anyway because I have a very boring life or I have run out of things to talk about...or something. It's harder to come up with random things when I'm not sitting bored at a desk, which is where I was when I first started this blog.
So that's pretty much that.
And, in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.
=)

Morons...

Why do people think I am going to pull over when they are gesturing to me in traffic?

New job(s)+new house= ??

Just when I got used to staying home, I went out and got not one, but TWO jobs. The last time I had 2 jobs I was a newly divorced single mom making slightly more than minimum wage and struggling (sometimes failing) to make ends meet.
So how did I come back to having to have 2 jobs? It's called starting over in a different career....gotta climb a different ladder. Tech support was beginning to wear on me. It's obviously not a creative field. I'm not entirely sure if that's what the problem was or if I was just burned out and bored with it. I'm not even sure I will like doing cakes as a "career" but it's not terrible which is a start I suppose. I like to cook but I don't have a feel for how to put recipes together very well. Having a meat and potatoes type of family definitely doesn't help that very much. Baking is very measured and precise. It's chemistry. And almost everyone likes cake.
I am currently a cake decorator at Cold Stone Creamery AND teaching cake decorating at Michael's. I hope to one day gain enough experience to work in a proper bakery or a grocery store bakery or some such place. Ultimately though I want to do what my good friend does and just do cakes for people and make them pay me for it. Who knows if that's even a real possibility for me who is sorely unmotivated and a big time procrastinator. But you have to start somewhere.
In other news...
We closed on our house yesterday. We even have KEYS. The first items have already been moved over. Those things we don't use very often and storage stuff. One of the first things we did was tear down the hidious wallpaper in the kitchen. All of the seams were visible so it was not a hard thing to do. I have a weird thing about peeling things. If I get a sunburn I can't ignore the peeling skin.I try to get it off in one big sheet. If I get a zit, I mess with it until it's a hugesss blemish. I think when I'm old and senile I'm going to probably have to wear mittens taped to my hands. The best thing is that it's OUR house so we can go into the kitchen and peel off the shitty wallpaper and not have to worry about security deposits and all of that lovely crappy stuff that goes with renting. I can't wait to get out of here and into OUR NEW HOUSE.

Jobby Jobs

Why is it people pay you big bucks to do things you loathe but if you want to do something you actually enjoy, they can barely manage to scrape together a few pennies?
I am now officially (well, almost) a Wilton Method Instructor. What this means is I am taking my cake decorating non-talent and passing it on to others who would like to learn. I'm doing this mostly because I want to work in a job where the main thing is not talking to people on the phone about how to locate the Start button or explaining to them why it's a good idea to save their work frequently when working on documents that takes 3 hours to compose. The pay is NOT good, the hours couldn't be better, and there are a number of perks that go along with it, not the least of which is a 40% discount (woohoo!). Having finally procured this job, after a couple of months of limbo over another job that I ended up NOT getting because I bounced a check 10 years ago, I got an email from a head hunter today offering me a help desk job in Chesapeake. While I said I would never get a tech job again, the money might just be too good to pass up, especially since we will be basically drawing from savings every month to live in our new house if I can't pull in the extra. Then again, if it's not, do I take the crappy job at the crappy pay just because I would be making more at that than doing cake stuff?

Etc.

My back...hurts.
I don't know what the hell I did to it. Maybe it's because I have no access to the chiropractor. Maybe I strained it emptying the catbox. For almost 2 weeks now I've had lower back pain and I don't like it! I can't sit for long before it starts aching. Not a sharp pain, but a dull ache. For a while I was sitting on my exercise ball instead of my regular office chair but my stupid cat popped it so now I have to try to use my chair again. One of the good side effects of not being able to sit for that long is that I'm getting more done around the house, which is always a good thing.

I also went back to the gym this week. It's been since before Christmas that I've been. I got a cold right before Christmas and couldn't breathe so, therefore I stopped going. I made a couple attempts to workout at home, but once we got new furniture there was no room to workout anymore. All of that's behind me now though because I'm starting again. After having been out of it for so long I feel like I'm starting from scratch. But starting slow is better than not starting at all I suppose. I've managed to avoid the annual Girl Scout Cookie conspiracy this year so that's about 5 unnecessary pounds I won't be gaining this year. Yay. I weighed myself this morning and discovered that I have lost about 5 pounds since January 1. While this is no great feat, I'm happy with it. Small victories or something like that.

I am more motivated to lose weight now that I've been to the Reproductive Endocrinologist(RE) last week. He said I may have a condition called PCOS and that "diet and exercise" may improve my fertility. I still will have to take medicine though. He told me a lot of things actually. I am to go in for an HSG (see I told you there were a lot of acronyms dealing with infertility) after the start of my next cycle. I've not read a whole lot about HSG's but what I have read is that they are uncomfortable to say the least. I'm not looking forward to it. Why is it that all of the female tests and procedures for diagnosing infertility problems are painful or inconvenient while the male part in it comes down to not wearing tight underwear and getting to masturbate into a cup? NOT FAIR I say... Jeff is being a good sport about it though. I've read stories of some women's husbands who balk at the idea that there might be something wrong with their testicles and refuse to get the test done. Hopefully all of that time around a nuclear reactor didn't hurt his little guys too much.

Apparently I've been writing web pages in my sleep. My husband told me this morning that I asked him for the keywords. I did the same thing yesterday morning. I don't remember any of it. I've been ask by a friend of mine to administer a message board that her and another gal have just started up. It's a message board for cake decorators called The Baker's Bar. It still looks ugly and needs some tweaking, but at least it works. It was the first time I had worked with php or mysql. Fortunately I know people who aren't as dumb about this as I.

We will be moving to a new house in about a month. When we first moved to Norfolk, we didn't know anything about the area or where we should live. Let's just say we didn't choose well and now we're moving to a better area; one where our neighbors will not see fit to put their major appliances and furniture in their front yards to be picked up as trash. It gets a little ridiculouse. How many couches and old stoves do these people have?? Ah, and the music will now be something that I pick for myself instead of someting I'm forced to listen to,in another language, at top volume, at 1am. Fortunately my daughter will stay in the same school. I'm excited about living in the new house and fixing it up to sell, but I ABSOLUTELY despise moving. I wish I could be one of those uber-organized,have-everything-packed-a-month-ahead-of-time type of people. I still have boxes in my house that I haven't unpacked from when we moved her...almost a year ago. Hopefully that's not an indicator of the next one.

FRER gave me a BFN

Many people don't realize that there is a whole subculture out there. One full of acronyms, obsessive compulsive behavior, probing into regions of the body that usually only one person (an OBGYN) sees.
You see I am anywhere from 16-18 DPO right now (depending on if you ask TCOYF or FF) and I'm on CD33. My AF hasn't shown up yet so I am in the 2WW still. We were doing the SMEP this month so I was sure this would be a god month. I haven't had many symptoms, bb's don't really hurt, and my CM has all but dried up...not to mention that my CP is still high and soft. I have had 2 temps below my CL, but I'm not sure if that means anything. This morning I tested with FRER and got a BFN. Tomorrow I have an appointment with an RE to find out why my husband and I have been TTC for a year now and still don't have a baby.

See what I mean? It's like a whole other language that must be learned. Basically what I just said was that I ovulated 16-18 days ago (depending on which chart you look at). I haven't gotten my period yet so I took a pregnancy test this morning (First Response Early Response) and got a Big Fat Negative. I don't know why this negative was any more fat than normal negatives, but it seems that in the world of Trying To Conceive that it's not just negative it's Big and Fat (same goes if you happen to get a positive result). Tomorrow morning I have an appointment with a Reproductive Endocrinologist. They are the people you go to see when the OBGYN just isn't cutting it and you need the "real stuff". These doctors specialize in the why's and how's of why people can't get pregnant. That's definitely the man (or woman) for me! There was a time when I would be very depressed about getting a negative pregnancy test, but now I just want to get whatever the problem is sorted out and get on with the baby makin'!
The rest of the stuff mentioned above...you just don't want to know, believe me. I mean I suppose you could look it up if you are so inclined, but I'll let you figure that out.