Out, damned spot!

In my head, as I start writing this, I intend for it to be a quick, short post. NoodleGuy is on our cleared porch (patio furniture put away for the season) BBQing a flank steak for our dinner. I'll do a little work after dinner and he'll watch an episode or two of Batt.lestar G.alacti.ca. I'm planning on making Tollh.ouse cookies after I finish work (screw you, fertility diet, you haven't helped me so far) and then we'll watch De.xter before bed. If anyone else watches De.xter , are you as impressed with Jenn.ifer Carp.enter's acting as we are? It's hard to play a spazz and still be so likeable and believably competent, she's been aces this season. As far as the short post goes, I know it's useless. I'm a chatty and long-winded blogger and message board poster. I try to be succinct and fail, miserably. Tell me, fair maidens (and the occasional knight), if I lose you with my blathering, please, and I'll try to clean up my act.

In TTC news, I'm on CD31 which is long for me and my temps continue to be astoundingly low and erratic. I'm also on about day 12 of spotting. Frustrating because 4 weeks after the D&E, I seemed to have a pretty normal AF, so I'm a bit confused by this bizarro cycle, but Dr. B was not concerned. My layman's explanation for the long cycle & ongoing spotting is that since I didn't O this cycle and thus my progesterone didn't climb, I did not have the sharp progesterone drop that would normally trigger AF. Instead my lining is just shedding slowly, not by bodily triggers but by gravity and just sheer disinterest in sticking around, like a company holiday party in my uterus.

I go in for b/w tomorrow as I mentioned a few days ago, though I got more info on Dr. B's plan for me from Nurse D. The plan is still to check my E2/LH/Progesterone to see what my body is doing ovulation-wise. But unlike my belief that if it's not doing anything, we'll just keep testing until a cutoff point of about November 18th (timing this all to be done before Christmas), instead, if I'm still baseline tomorrow, we'll just get started with the stimming. ACK! Not. mentally. prepared! On the one hand, I'm psyched, let's just get this show on the road, less holiday stress, easier to get these next three IVFs out of the way and move on to Plan Z if they go as badly as I predict. On the other hand, a girl needs a little mental preparation for this stuff, where's my OCD time in all this?? I'll be cheated out of obsessively rearranging dates in Go.ogle calendar, trying to play out every possible scenario of ER and ET and then forgetting it all and doing it again three hours later. Every day. For the 2 weeks leading up to the start of stims. Where is the justice in that?!

I'll find out on Tuesday what the deal is, next day results because I'm saving myself the 45 minute drive into the clinic and just going to my local Q.uest for the b/w. I'm not sure which scenario I'm rooting for right now; it'd be nice to hear that my hormones are starting to behave and I can expect to O naturally this cycle and can do the estrogen priming at the end of this cycle. But I'll be a little let down now that they've dangled the immediate gratification carrot in front of me. Oh well, patience is a virtue, I suppose. And area in which I am not nearly virtuous enough. I'm a patience floozy.

In other big Noodle News, with some of my birthday loot (Apple giftcard and moola), I have procured myself an iPh.one! I'm in lust with it. It's dirty and one-sided and all about looks and servicing my needs, so I can't call it love. But I sure do lust it. I spent yesterday setting it up and downloading a bunch of apps, the first of which was Sk.ype. At my job we use Sk.ype as our IM client and, as such, it's the defacto way to tell if someone is working. My company has people all over the country, so IM is how we keep track, not in person. Now, I certainly don't cheat the system, I work waaaay more than my allotted 37.5 hours per week and never complain about weekend launches or the occasional 2am kerfuffle. But I would like to be able to go to my IF appts midday without people necessarily knowing that I'll be away from my desk for 2.5 hours, as even b/w usually takes me over 2 hours since the clinic is 45 minutes away without traffic, and there's always traffic. So now, I can go to the clinic with no one at work the wiser, haha! Take that potentially imaginary co-workers! The sad thing is, I think I'm so clever, and I bet my co-workers have been doing this for a year.

Finally,I was also going to include answers to some questions that have come up in my comments over the past few weeks. As I've lamented before, G.oogle doesn't allow you to respond directly to comments -- grrr -- so I never know whether to post replies in my own comments (where they might never be seen), email the person directly (which doesn't help other readers who may have wondered the same thing) or address it in a later post (which may seem random). So, I figure I'll try and compile them (unless they seem urgent, and then it'll be an email) and post the answers on a day when I have nothing else to say. And today clearly is not it.

The quest for a short and cute post is still in the works.