Oklahoma as beach front property

I do love living in a place with really unpredictable weather. Keeps one on one's toes. Did I say love? Well, that's exaggerating. Ok, well, that's just a down-right lie.

Oklahoma has crazy weather. Temperatures jumping 20 degrees from day to day is pretty common. Everyone knows, of course, about the tornadoes we get here. Oh, and did I mention, now we apparently get TROPICAL STORMS!

I have to side track here to mention something funny (!) that I just remembered about our time in Okinawa, Japan. During the spring of 2002, there was a tornado that hit one of the base housing areas. We didn't live near there, but the joke went that because of all the folks who transfer back and forth from Oklahoma to Okinawa, the two were starting to merge in some weird space-time continuum way. And now? PROOF, I say!! Go here for the satellite image of Tropical Storm Erin, the storm that ripped through Oklahoma in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 19th. At one point, apparently, there was even a well defined eye to the storm. Jeez.

The most fun of all, of course, was the loud "THUMP" I heard at about 5:30 Sunday morning. (click on pictures to enlarge)

The 50 mph winds caused several branches from the trees in my back yard to come down, one on my house. (really lucky, actually! could have been SO much worse) I crept out in the dark with flash light in hand and saw the branch on the roof, above my bedroom. What I didn't see at that point was the 2 ft hole in my roof. And it wasn't until about a half hour later that the rain picked up and the water started coming in through the hole enough to start leaking into the bedroom.

As soon as I realized that the branch did more damage than I'd originally thought, my oldest niece (who'd stayed the night) and I knocked on my neighbors doors with pleas for assistance. Sawing and heaving ensued, and we were able to get the branch off the roof. One layer of plastic was laid down, a board was drilled into place over the hole, and another layer of plastic was added over the top. All-in-all, and pretty good patch.

Then we wet, bedraggled, and tired warriors against Mother Nature went off to breakfast in town, because, as luck would have it, there was also no power with which to make coffee. And wouldn't be for 8 more hours.

To the tune of Boomer Sooner, the University of Oklahoma fight song, sing along with me:

Oklahoma, Oklahoma... !

"Ronery, I'm so ronery..."

Sorry, that's supposed to be "lonely." Channeling Kim Jong-il from Team America: World Police. I suppose the rest of the song doesn't apply, just the first couple lines. Don't have plans for world domination.

After a very long, wonderful, blissful time of having my husband at home most every night, he is gone. Five years is really a very long time for a military spouse to have their other half home on a continuous basis. Sure, he would go away for a week at a time, just long enough for me to start to miss him. It's been two weeks now. And it's starting to sink in, I guess. Four months to go.

"Ronery..."

I figured it out

I read through my blog the other day. Short, with infrequent posts, I know. But I figured out what I have lost, and why I haven't been posting. I have lost my hope and my sense of humor.

I promise you, nobody goes through infertility treatment - the procedures, the pills and injections, the emptying of the bank accounts - unless they have hope that all of this will result in a baby. I find the lack of success with IUI frustrating because our diagnosis made it seem like if we could just get the sperm past the first big hurdle, the TVOD, they would have smooth sailing (er, swimming?), be able to party with the egg, et voila', babyville! And since today is cycle day 1, meaning that IUI cycle 3 was a bust, clearly IUI has not been the solution we thought it would be. But it is comparatively inexpensive next to IVF, and our RE wants to do 4 cycles of IUI before moving on, so we will do another, even if hope is in extremely short supply around here regarding that particular "treatment."

So many of my previous posts have shown a sense of humor, even if it is odd. And that is such a critical ingredient to not losing one's mind when going through infertility. With my sense of hope, so has gone my humor. I have been lucky, lately, to have found some borrowed humor. There is a lady in South Africa, Tertia Albertyn, who began her blog, So Close, on the eve of her 9th IVF cycle in 2004 (yes, 9th! IVF is cheaper in SA than in the US). What an amazing woman. That she still had a sense of humor, albeit slightly black, after all that she had been through was amazing to me. Much of what she said over the course of the first year of her blog was so profound, so cathartic for me. I refer to her a lot lately, and I am feeling much more like myself.

And to comment on hope again, Tertia and some of the other infertility bloggers have something very important in common: all of these women have succeeded. And they all succeeded with IVF. So maybe that is what will work for us. Maybe not. But I will take a page out of Tertia's book. She was so stubborn, unwilling to give up, unwilling to let "fate" or "chance" or whatever control whether or not she would be a mother. "Fuck you, infertility. I will beat you. Just watch me." This is what she said, and it has become Dear Hubby's new mantra.

However parenthood comes to us, we will not give up either. We will be parents.

Avoidance as a strategy

I cannot believe it has been almost TWO MONTHS since I posted!! That is not possible. Surely the dates are wrong. Right? No? Well.

That must mean I am avoiding ya'll. Actually come to think of it, I HAVE been avoiding ya'll! Why, you might ask, would I wish to avoid all of my lovely, supportive family and friends who have been, well, lovely and supportive? Well.

Mostly, lately, I am not sure from one moment to the next what I feel or think. Our second cycle of IUI was a bust. All of Dear Hubby's swimmers were thwarted. Cycle number three is in process as we speak, and we're post-insemination...waiting. Those are the hard and fast facts of the deal.

The rest of the deal is that I've been an emotionally messy wreck most of the time. And I am, quite frankly, embarrassed by it. So I didn't really feel like sharing much.

See I have this thing. I've mentioned it before. I greatly dislike people who whine on endlessly about how their lives suck. I also greatly dislike the behavior in myself. My motto: Change the situation or shut the hell up! So the IUI's aren't working. And now, I really just don't want to talk about it. The next thing you're likely to hear on the subject is if we actually do get pregnant or start IVF.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Infertility humor

Yesterday afternoon, Dear Hubby forwarded me an e-mail exchange with one of his co-workers regarding our most recent IUI attempt. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I read it.

Flipper,

Ah, yes. I remember my days training Iki. Always an adventure, no?

P.S. Package delivered, expected BDA 4 Jun. Payload was determined to be 48% active with over 70M sub-munitions.

Gonk


Gonk,

Awesome MISREP, dude. I dearly hope there are secondary explosions.

Flipper


Flipper,

Based on satellite intelligence, we had solid data on three hard targets. With any luck, our combined forces have infiltrated her perimeter wall and are holding fast in a defensive position and building in strength.

P.S. Yes, I am a big, big geek.

Gonk


Gonk,

I just shot really cold water out of my nose.

Flipper

Just in case you were wondering

I'm not writing about my post-insemination days this month because I have my head well and firmly stuck in the sand about it. I am not paying any attention, other than taking my daily temperature for my BBT chart. I'll let you know when my next cycle starts. Or not.

I am instead focusing on the wonderful progress that Dear Hubby and I are making in the front yard, and the impending move of my mother and sister-in-law.

Mom is coming from my home town in New Mexico. She has finally decided that there is nothing left for her there, and is interested in a change of scenery. I applaud this momentous change she is making! She has never been known to make momentous changes in her life without a looonnngggg period of deliberation beforehand. But this will be her 2nd momentous life change in 4 years, which is almost spur-of-the-moment for her! So, Dear Hubby will fly out in a couple of weeks to pack up her entire life and move it to the flatlands of Oklahoma.

The sister-in-law is moving back here from Texas. She moved there when my brother came back from Korea. But now that he has been extended in the desert, she is tired of living amongst other military wives who live in constant fear that the next knock on the door will bring the unit commander bearing the worst sort of tidings a wife who's husband is in a war zone can get.

And given that Dear Hubby and I have been in the military for so many years, this abundance of family coming to live so near is exciting. And a little scary.

And now, a refreshing sidebar

My cat licks windows. Information I've gotten on the Web says that he might have anemia or a vitamin deficiency. I plan to get it checked out. In the meantime, I'll just continue to think he's odd.

He's a snuggle kitty at night, but like clockwork every morning at 6:00 a.m., he makes his way from the bed to the bedroom window farthest from me. This is probably because he knows that the further the target, the worse my aim. Then he starts licking the window like it's the yummiest thing in his little kitty world. And I'm a light sleeper, so as soon as the licking begins, I'm awake. At 6:00 a.m. Which would be fine except that I don't have to get up for work until 7:00. So after I have thrown at him whatever I can reach, I try to go back to sleep.

But it gets worse! As if to make up to me for his early morning transgression, he climbs back on the bed and asks to get under the covers with me next to my pillow to snuggle! So now, I'm falling back asleep, and the snuggle ensues such that when my alarm goes off at 7:00, I oversleep and am then late for work.

This is just not fair.