- There are new pictures of that little dude in my flickr account. The breeder is really encouraging us to visit him as often as possible, so I went over yesterday (Rob has a cold so he stayed home) and brought my actual camera, as opposed to just the cameraphone. I’m not sure what day(s) next week I’ll be able to go but there will be more photos then. I will try not to be super obnoxious all the time with the pet photos but yeah, there will probably be a glut of them. Forewarned is forearmed.

- I am getting more and more excited about the end of the school year approaching. Just… completely excited. I know the kids are too, but wow. Rob and I were talking about it and this is going to be a first in our entire relationship: We get to have a summer together, without anyone visiting us for weeks at a time (not saying we won’t welcome houseguests! not at all!), without having to go on long two-week (or, in the case of last summer, month-long) trips anywhere, without any huge event happening that will stress us out. We will be visiting Nova Scotia for a few days, but that’s a happy thing and not a super-long trip. I just want to laze around and not do anything but hang around with my husband, my puppy, and my garden.

- My parents are moving to town in a month. They’ve found a house, so that’s good. They haven’t sold THEIR house yet, but hopefully that happens soon. They could rent their place out if it doesn’t sell right away. This means that I will get to babysit my nephews less often because the house my parents are buying is just what they were hoping to get: a house with an apartment attached. Mom and Dad will live in the apartment, and my brother’s family will live in the main part of the house. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. This is:

On MSN the other day Mom was explaining to me the features of the new place. She was saying how they were going to try and get rid of a great deal of ‘stuff’ before they moved.
“So you should come and take whatever you want, we have a ton of tools and furniture and things here that we need to get rid of”
“Like what?”
“We have a stapler here…”

I laughed and laughed. The plethora of *things* that she has, and for me, a stapler? WHOA THE LUXURY.
It turns out that she meant a staple gun. She knew that I have been meaning to get one and that I never do. So that was funny. To me, at least.

- Charlaine Harris is a pretty good writer. I have read all the books so far in the Southern Vampire series (the ones the TV show True Blood are based on), all of the Aurora Teagarden mysteries, all of the Shakespeare series, and am now on the second (of three so far) of the Harper Connolly series (ghosts!). They’re good. I’d highly recommend them.

- There’s a new TV show I’m kind of interested in but kind of afraid of. It’s called The Vampire Diaries (vampires again! hey, I didn’t like Twilight, but vampires in general are okay). See, I’m kind of interested because when I was 14, I read the series of books it’s based on, and they are what influenced me to start keeping a diary (and thus, indirectly, leading me to blogging). I loved those books, and every now and then I crack open the box that they’re in and read a chapter or two, just for nostalgia’s sake. I’m also kind of afraid because I’ve seen the previews, and it looks all goth-y and dark. I mean, yes I know that I shouldn’t expect it to be exactly like the books, but at least make the characters have similar physical attributes. They’ve changed details that are important, like peoples’ names (Stefan WHITMORE? Really?), their relationships to each other (making certain characters into siblings, who in the book, were DATING…), getting rid of key characters entirely… it all just looks hastily thrown together, so that the CW can cash in on the Twilight fanaticism that’s going on. I suppose I’ll give it a try, for nostalgia’s sake, but I’m not expecting to enjoy it.

My doctor’s appointment (the one that got switched at the last minute last time) was yesterday, so I thought I’d tell you about it. This is a whole other doctor than the RE who I’ve been seeing for a year. This guy does actual surgery.

So, just as a refresher: My HSG was mental. The RE says I more than likely have a unicornuate uterus, but she’s not sure. The only way to be sure is to get some surgery, which this new doctor would do.

My appointment was at 2 pm. I took the whole day off, because honestly? This cold is kicking my ass, and I wanted to sleep in. Which I did, until 8:30. Then I got into a hot bath, finished my book, and tried to relax because how nervous was I?

We left home at noon. We stopped at the bank (which took no more than 10 minutes) and were on our way. As I’ve mentioned before, I like being at appointments at least 10 or 15 minutes early. Then we were on the road. I figured that since we’d left 2 hours (well, one hour and 50 minutes) before my appointment, and it’s a one-hour drive, tops, that we’d be there in plenty of time.

And then, there was this:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3649/3568487250_c6abb1ea21.jpg

Road construction. We sat for half an hour, waiting for the flagperson to let us through, and I became more and more frustrated. She finally did let us through, and we started on our way, me thinking “well, we’ll still be about 20 minutes early!” until… we were stuck behind a tractor. For 20 minutes. No passing lanes. By the time we found parking, ran into the building, and made it up to the 4th floor, we were about 5 minutes late. Luckily, they were running a bit late, themselves, so they weren’t upset.

We were led into an exam room. The nurse told me that he might want to do a pap test (which wasn’t exciting for me at all), but that he would let us know when he got in there. We waited for a couple of minutes, and he came in. He was very personable, and I liked him right away. He explained what would be happening with this surgery. Again, this is ladybusiness business. If you’re squicked out, then look away (but come back later because there’s something cool!):

It is day surgery, so I’ll get to go home after. That’s a plus. They’ll put me totally to sleep (not like when I got my wisdom teeth out and woke up in the middle of it), so that’s another plus. As for the surgery itself: First they will pump my belly up with some gas. Then they’re going to put a camera up in my uterus through, well, the usual entryway, and look around some. This will be to show if there’s any endometriosis or adhesions inside there. They’re also going to do at least two, possibly four incisions in my belly (one through my belly button, one above the pubic bone, and possibly two more above the ovaries – there’s an image here, if you want to take a look. Obviously that is not my belly, because if it was you’d need a bigger browser window), and put cameras through there. This will show them if there are any bent tubes and if my uterus really is unicornuate. There will also be some dye involved, somehow, but I don’t know when that will come into play. The surgery could take anywhere from half an hour to 4 hours, depending on what he finds up in there. He said that if he does find anything in there that’s fixable, he will fix it – endometriosis would be removed, if there were adhesions that could be unstuck, he’d unstick them, and if a tube is bent (like when your garden hose gets bent and the water won’t come out) he’ll try his best to un-bend it. Of course he also made it clear that there may be absolutely nothing he can do, and he wanted me to know that this wasn’t going to be any kind of miracle surgery if things weren’t looking good in there. I told him that I was fully prepared for it not to go well (and then Rob cut in with “Knowing Louise, she’s expecting it to all go wrong” – he knows me so well. Don’t expect things to go well, you won’t be disappointed when it goes badly). He explained the risks (perforation of the uterus, complications from the anaesthetic), and we read and signed the consent forms (if they take any tissue out of me, I can’t keep it! I consent to letting them dispose of it!). He told us that his wife is a teacher, and that I should plan to take two weeks (TWO WEEKS!) off work for recovery because if they do poke around in there very much, I’m going to hurt so much that I won’t want to be on my feet at all for at least two weeks. We’ll see about that. I don’t like using up my sick days. I asked when the surgery would be, and he said it was looking like they didn’t have any openings until the fall, but that they would try to get me in as soon as possible. If they have any dates during the summer, that’s when they’ll do it.

So now we wait for them to call and give a surgery date.

Now for the surprise part!
Read the rest of this entry →

As a capper to the awesome weekend we’ve had, today I started feeling really sickly around 10 this morning. Well, I mean, I knew I didn’t feel that great when I got up, but I attributed that to it being 6 o’clock on a Sunday morning and not being all that happy about heading out to drag myself around the neighbourhood. But at around 10, maybe a bit later, I started feeling headachy and body achy. My nose started filling up. My throat was scratchy.

This can be attributed to one of two things: allergies (we all know that I’m allergic to EVERYTHING, and Spring seems to be the time that EVERYTHING tries to fly up my nose) or a cold virus.

It’s kind of sad that I was actually hoping against hope that it was allergies. Allergies, I can take some measures against (hello Claritin and Benadryl!). But colds? I can’t do anything for a cold. Ironically (oh man, again – I don’t know if I’m using ‘irony’ correctly. Alanis has confused me forever), I’m allergic to cold medication.

So, I took a couple of allergy pills, and some Advil for the headache, and napped. And woke up feeling cruddy. Which indicates a cold. Which sucks the bone. THE BONE I SAY! I feel like I’ve been sick enough this year! And that I’ve complained enough about my health lately! So tonight, I am going to eat the delicious stew that Rob made, and watch Northern Exposure until this infernal season is over (I hate it! I HATE IT!), and NOT grumble at all about anything. Because I always look on the bright side of life.

Ahem.

C and I got to Old Navy at about 8:45. The store opened at 9. There were people crowded around the outside. It was sort of like this.

That kind of thing never happens here.

Never, ever, ever.

The store opened, and throngs of people all headed toward the flip-flop area. Seriously, it was like what you see on TV, where people are pushing and shoving and grabbing things out of peoples’ hands. Luckily for me, though, I have huge feet, so no one was going for my size (ha ha, all you tiny-footed people! Size 9/10 all the way!!!). I bought my first 5 pair (because it turns out that it was a limit of 5, not 6, per customer), C. bought hers, then we left the store and met up with our friend S. He didn’t really want any flip flops, so we figured we could get him to buy some for us.

So S. got there and picked up 3 pair for himself, 2 for C. I was like “What are they gonna do? Tell me I can’t buy more? I’ll go to a different cashier and if they say anything I’ll tell them I’m my twin”. So I got 2 more pair for me/my mother-in law, one pair for C., and 1 pair each for my nephews. At that point the lineups were about 50 people long per cashier, so no one said anything, because I’m sure that my original cashier wouldn’t have remembered me even if I’d ended up at her cash, which I didn’t.

Afterward we went to the Dollar Store (yes we know how to TEAR IT UP!) where C. bought scrapbooking stuff, and S. bought a Ped Egg (well, a knockoff of the Ped Egg). I din’t get nothin ’cause I’d only brought $10 with me. Later we went to the Starbucks (well, it’s not called Starbucks, but they sell Starbucks products? I don’t know how that works) that’s in the basement of the Confed Centre (oh look! I found the website for it! Mavor’s Bistro). S. treated me to an iced chai (I asked for tall, he got me venti – he loves me, always has always will, although he is “otherwise inclined“) and we sat out in the courtyard next to the fountain, talked about husbands and what S. wants in one and what C. and I like about ours. C. is on some kind of diet and was telling us about all the diet pill reviews she’s been reading to try and find the right one. I talked about my dragging-my-ass-out-of-bed-in-the-morning plan. S. had walked all the way from Stratford (where he lives) to where we were on University – which is about a 4 mile walk. And he does this every day. Needless to say he has no worries about his weight (we were talking about another friend of ours, G., who in the distant past when we were teenagers had stolen not one but TWO of S’s boyfriends, and was always saying how he was so much more attractive than S., because S. was your typical tall, gawky teenager with like, a huge ‘fro – yeah, not much of a friend, huh?- and how G. is now balding and growing a potbelly, while S. is like, super handsome with a decent haircut now). It’s nice to get together with people you’ve known since small times, and have a history with. You don’t have to talk a whole lot or explain backstory or anything because hey, they were there too.

And then a bird pooped near us so we abandoned the courtyard, dropped S. off at his house, and off C. & I came back home. Rob is amazed at all the flip flops, and I have a venti latte belly so I think I am going to nap now. Once again: Great success!

I have a song stuck in my head. To the tune of the “spider hangout” song that I posted the other day.

“Flip flop adventure
that’s where I’m going to gooooo
with [friend C.]
in the morning
we will buy flip flops
li-mit six per cus-to-mer”

And people say I don’t have a life!

The local (well, it’s in a whole other city… so I guess I should call it the provincial) Old Navy has a sale on flip-flops. One dollar a pair. Limit six pair per customer. My friend C. called me last night and asked me to go with her, because her husband didn’t want to go (what? WHAT IS WRONG WITH HUSBANDS THESE DAYS? I asked Rob, and he was all “Bead shop”. Which is a secret code around our house, referring to this – something that one person is super interested in, but it makes the other person die a little inside. Like when I drag Rob to the yarn store, or he takes me to look at computer parts). The store opens at 9 am, so she’s going to be here at 8 to pick me up. We need to get there when the good flip-flops are still available! Dangit!

Meanwhile I’m fully aware that there are probably flip-flops at our local dollar store nestled between the cat supplies and the (I’m not joking, they have this) “Spanish Clean” brand cleaning products, and that by the time we get to Cold Gravy, after paying for gas and everything, the $1 flip-flops are going to be more like $10. But I think it’s also an opportunity for her to get out of the house and away from her three little boys who are all fantastic and wonderful but she wants some adult conversation.

Yeah, I giggle at “adult conversation”, too. Especially since she expects to have it with me! I’m the least adult adult I know.

On Tuesday, I get to go in (again) and see about this surgery I’m supposed to have. I have all kinds of scenarios running through my mind, none of them good:

1) The doctor will not be there, again, and I’ll have wasted ANOTHER sick day on nothing. In that case I will go nuts because hi, two hours round trip! NO THANK YOU.
2) There will be some kind of horrible road thing on the way there (now is the time for construction) and it will make me three hours late although I usually leave 2 hours early, and they will tell me to never come back because obviously I can’t respect their appointment times and who wants me around if that’s the way I am? Not them! In which case I will go nuts, again, because… why not go nuts?
3) The doctor will look at me and say “You are Fat! You need to lose 4000 pounds before I can do this surgery, you big fat lady!” in which case he’d better prescribe some amazing fat burner pills because I’m not managing to lose much through diet and exercise.
4) BEES! KILLER BEES!

So yes. I am pretty nervous, and pretty… I’m not sure what. I kind of look forward to it, in a perverse way. Because then at least we will know what is wrong and what our options are. At the same time, I’m terrified at what those results might be. I mean, what if there are gnomes in there?

I guess I will never know until it actually happens though. And maybe the gnomes are friendly.

So, the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting up and immediately, before my brain can start functioning to talk me out of it, putting on my sneakers and heading out for a walk (okay, so I put on more than my sneakers because I’m fairly sure that whichever neighbours are up at 6 am don’t want to see me walking around without all my clothes). Sometimes it sucks (rainy mornings! eugh!) but other times (like yesterday and today, when the temperatures are expected to hit about 24C) it’s beautiful out and I love it.

I took a different route today (I try to change it up fairly often, because otherwise I get soooo bored – and I don’t have an iPod to take with me. Well, I do technically own one, somewhere, but I think it’s been co-opted and loaded solely with music from Nintendo games or something) so I didn’t really know the street I was walking on. I was walking by this one house that had an rv parked in the yard and all of a sudden it was like that rv was Noah’s Ark, but in reverse. I swear to Gord that as I walked by, about 5 cats, a couple of birds, and a dog all came bursting out from under the rv – I don’t know what they were doing under there in the first place because there was absolutely no sound, but all of a sudden whammo! They just all ran and flew out from under there as if they were being chased.

Or maybe they were chasing each other. I don’t know.

I’ve mentioned before that we don’t watch a whole heck of a lot of TV around here, but that I will occasionally go on “tv binges” where I get Rob to find me full seasons of certain shows, and then I watch them. Like a crazy woman. As many episodes as I can.

So far this year (since the Fall) it’s been Night Court, Golden Girls, Big Love, Quantum Leap, and now it’s Northern_Exposure.

I was a HUGE Northern Exposure fan back in the day. I loved that show. LOVED it. Which was odd enough, for a 13-year-old (that’s how old I was when it started, not when it finished). But, I realized that I never did see the final season. The final season took place in 1994/95, which was my freshman year in university. Not only was there only one TV in my dorm, it was habitually taken over by these two really creepy guys who wanted to watch Star Trek all the time, so I usually avoided venturing into the lounge.

Well. I’ve watched Seasons one through five, and they were as awesome as I remember them. And now? I’m watching Season Six for the first time.

It’s not good. I wish I could say otherwise but seriously, it’s just not good.

Characters are all weird-acting. I mean, totally different character traits. It’s a “darker” show. Everything’s depressing. Dr. Fleischman (Rob Morrow, hello handsome) has gone off to live in the bush, and they’ve brought in some horrible new doctor and his wife to replace him. Maurice is boring, Holling is boring, Shelly is boring, Ed is boring, Chris In The Morning is boring, Ruth-Anne does pretty much nothing, and I’ve only seen Marilyn for a grand total of 5 minutes so far in the season… I don’t like it. Of course I’m only up to the 7th episode, so maybe it gets better, but I really think it probably won’t. Which could be why it got canceled after its sixth season. Gee, ya think?

Okay that’s all. I just thought I’d use the old blog as a platform for complaining about a TV show that hasn’t been on the air in almost 15 years. Because, you know, that would somehow inspire Joshua Brand and John Falsey to bring the show back and FIX IT, just to make me happy. Oh c’mon, you know they totally would.

And now, for your listening pleasure, here is the opening theme of Northern Exposure. Yes, I’ve made up lyrics to this one, too. No, I won’t tell you what they are. I want you to have at least some modicum of respect for me.

So, my dad came home yesterday afternoon. His test results? Yeah, they don’t know what was wrong with him. They’ve taken him off the blood thinner that he was on, put him on 14 other pills, including some nutritional health supplements because he has lost so much weight in the past year, and a couple of puffers. He still has blood in his lungs (sorry to anyone who was eating when they started reading this!) and is still coughing some up now and then (sorry again!) but much less than before, so they sent him home.

Now my parents are hoping to sell their house and move into town, instead of half an hour outside of town. I think that’s a fantastic idea – I mean they waited almost 45 minutes for an ambulance when this happened to Dad, and this was in good weather. About 10 years ago, my mom fell off the front step of our house right after an ice storm and broke her femur in a few places. Dad and I couldn’t move her, because she was in so much pain. It was January. The temperatures were well below freezing. As I mentioned, there had been an ice storm, so of course the roads were bad – and it took a little more than an hour and a half before the ambulance got to us. Dad and I had piled blankets upon blankets on Mom, but still. January.

Anyway. They’re hoping to buy a house in town that is a main house with an in-law suite, or a duplex. The idea is that they will take the smaller of the two, because there’s just the two of them, and my brother and his family will take the bigger one (bro and his wife have been looking to buy a house anyway so this works out well). That way my dad wouldn’t have to worry about mowing lawns or shoveling driveways, and they’d be right in town in case anything like this ever happened again.

So. I’m glad my dad is no longer in the ICU (I bet he is, too). Hopefully their house sells soon (even though I know it’s not a great house-selling economy and all that blah blah – it’s a beautiful house, if anyone wants to live in the country). And hopefully there will be no more hospital visits for anyone in the near future.

My Dad is still in the hospital. He had a scan today for cancer, but no news yet.
I went to visit him after work today and he was smiley and happy. Then I gave him a message from my mother and he got angry and agitated. Not because it was from my mother, just that he had understood one thing was happening, and she told him something else was happening, and he’s frustrated. He’s worried about missing work, he’s worried about Mom being at home alone, and of course he’s worried about his own health. On top of that, they’re trying to sell their house so that they can move closer to town, so that’s a lot of pressure.

Add to that the fact that he was starving today. His scan (I’m not sure if it was a CAT scan or an MRI or what) was at 1:30 pm today, and he wasn’t allowed to eat for 12 hours beforehand. Of course his last meal was at 5 pm yesterday so he was pretty hungry by the time he headed to radiology this afternoon. They told him that as soon as he was done, they’d get him a sandwich or something to eat. Well, his scan came and went (no results yet, though). They brought him back to his room and said he’d be getting something to eat in a couple of minutes. He called the nurse to his room at 2:30 and asked, again, for some food. She said she’d be right back. I got there at 3:30, and he still hadn’t eaten. Finally at about 4:00 I went and got him a sandwich. The nurse came back in and was like, “Oops, sorry… I got caught up with some paperwork”. Yeah, meanwhile my old dad was starving it up. If you knew my family, you’d know that you don’t promise one of us a meal and not follow through. I mean, my dad’s super skinny, but he’s an eater, yo.