Orientation

Well, we've been sufficiently counselled, oriented, scared shitless and Al wished happy birthday by any number of medical staff who thought that IVF orientation was a rather horrific way to spend your 30th birthday, all things considered. But, aside from crawling home sporting a flaming headache, I'm feeling good, or at least better, and so is Al. I think the headache is purely a build up of tension pre-orientation eeking itself out. It all seems less scarey now, and however we cope or don't when the time comes, we know it's ok and normal and nothing more than what we need to do is expected of us. The clinic isn't imposing, the medical staff were absolutely lovely, and probably most importantly for me, I've seen the tools they use for egg pick up which was the one thing that was really bothering me. That doesn't seem so bad now either, although it is an effing long needle.

The counsellor took in both of our naked wedding ring fingers and queried straight off the bat if we were in fact married. I don't know if our respective stories of why we weren't wearing our rings (I lost mine, Al hung himself off a plane with his) inspired confidence, but at least the telling of the stories took some of the edge off the counselling session. Having to do the counselling thing was the worst because she wanted to know about the early parts of our journey when things were at their worst, and I'd rather not remember. There was also a tense moment where the nurse had to check that my being a rhesus negative blood type and not having had an anti-D (I think that's what she called it) injection after my miscarriage would possibly compromise an IVF pregnancy, but the answer to that was no. All of our tests pre-orientation came back with excellent results, so even though the chance of success through the cycle is a statistical average of 25% - 40%, we're on the higher side of that.

We were given an indicative time frame of March/April when we got our orientation advice, and the cycle month has been confirmed as March today. I have a good idea now exactly when it'll start, but I'll have a better idea by February and I'll let you know then probably.

Say what?

The plasterer, who was due to start on Monday, forgot about us. Forgot about us!! How on earth does someone forget about us? Honestly. On the bright side, he started today and it looks great so far ... good enough that I'm not even going to whinge that the house smells like wees (from the lime in the gib compound apparently).

Other redec progress is as follows ...

The electricians have been and gone and forgotten to send us a bill. Woohoo! No doubt they'll work that out pretty quickly, but in the meantime I'll live in hope. Le sparkies put the much needed extractor fan above the shower in the bathroom and my only gripes are that said fan comes with a very bright light which is a bit rough at 6am when you've just woken up, and also the husband has taken great delight in pointing out that now the shower looks like a display case. Pervy bastard that he is, he finds this inordinately funny. Me? I'm getting a builder in to put a lock on the bathroom door. We also had the power point for the fridge moved so that it now lives at the back of the fridge cavity (behind the fridge) instead of at the side. We have a fridge-hole in the wall which the fridge almost fills (it's a seriously tight squeeze - we even had to remove the skirting to wiggle it in there), so there's never been enough room to plug the fridge in where it should be - we've been running an extension cord into the pantry for 4 years. Various new kitchen power points were added to. Very exciting. We just need the new kitchen now ...

Speaking of which ...the kitchen design has been finalised (including redoing the pantry/scullery) and the quote gave us a collective heart attack. Enough said. The kitchen is booked to go in towards the end of January. Happy joy.

The accessories for the bathroom and toilet are all sorted. Towel rail, robe hooks, toilet roll holder. The bathroom is finally completely finished! The toilet is no where even close, but has a nice shiny (double!!) toilet roll holder at least.

Bedspreads for the bedrooms have finally been chosen and cost a fortune, but I swear the money was worth it just so I didn't have to look at any more duvet covers and bedspreads. Bless you Harrowset & Hall for providing all the help a girl could want, as well as stocking scrummy linen. And, as always, the big finger to the unhelpful ponce at Emma Lea who just looked at my wall colour and curtain samples and told me I'd never find anything to match, then proceeded to tell me that I should have chosen my duvet first and decorated around that. I wonder if he'd have been more helpful if he had a crystal ball and saw how many dollars Harrowset & Hall was on the receiving end of ... Plus, seriously, what an arse - who does that? Decorates around the least expensive furnishing in a room? (and, erm ... no offence if any of you have done that ... ahem)

Two sets of curtains have come back, and they look so cool. I'm busting for the plasterer to finish so I can hang them up. The other two sets have gone off for altering now too, and are due back early next year.

We've got the blinds for the kitchen and the weird shaped window in the end guest room which proved a 'mare to find a curtain for. We were going for cedar/wooden blinds but it turns out they cost lots and our windows are all weird shapes apparently. So, hats off to Freedom Furniture for their eco blinds which are recycled plastic and wood, cost a fraction of wooden blinds and are designed to be cut to fit. Oh, and yay for their pre-Christmas sale too which made it even more economical. Kind of sets off the Harrowset & Hall visit. Slightly. That's what I'm telling the husband anyway.

The first lot of insulation went in last week (1x internal wall), and you saw yesterday what happened with the second lot. Ahem. We'll give that another go at the weekend and hope for a slightly less messy result. I have to say though that the stuff we already have in is great.

The plumber didn't turn up. Why doesn't that surprise me?

When Air Foam goes bad

Air foam is insulation that gets pumped into the walls - it goes in as a dense liquid, foams up, fills the wall cavity and does its insulationy thing. Hehe. It also does this if you've got a special combination of factors in play ...

I would have taken a photo of the inside of the cabinet that had the drawers in, but I got chased out of the kitchen so all I got was the drawers. The chasing also resulted in the fuzzy pic quality sorry. Who knew that a highly amused Ginger leaping around in the rapidly expanding (where it shouldn't be) insulation brandishing a camera wouldn't be appreciated?

(Fantastic product by the way - completely not their fault that we have shite gib in the kitchen)

Motorway ponderings

I have decided to end a week (and let off some of the steam which seems to be steadily gathering in the midst of the redec!) in which an extraordinary amount of time has been spent sitting in my car on the Southern Carpark wondering how it is that Aucklanders don't seem to be able to drive in the rain, by picking on middle aged blokes.

Two things.

Firstly, what on earth possessed Porsche to make a lilac 911?? And what on earth possesses someone to buy one? I mean, you're a middle aged bloke, feeling the decline a bit, so you decide to buy a Porsche. You walk into a dealer, past all manner of lovely shiny sleek black/grey/cool coloured European cars, spot the lilac Porsche, clap your hands in glee and hand over your American Express? Seriously? Doesn't buying a lilac Porsche, to compensate for whatever one buys a Porsche to compensate for, negate the purpose altogether?

I don't think even a hairdresser could get away with a lilac Porsche.

And secondly, full kudos to the middle aged bloke I saw driving an MX-5 to work the other day, sporting the number plate DWIFED. You've got to give a guy a cigar for being prepared to advertised that a) someone stole his wife b) he's having a midlife crisis and c) that the wife didn't leave him with enough money to buy a decent convertible by which to express his midlife crisis.

Meow.

'twas three weeks before Christmas

and the redec at home is kicking up a notch so it's going to be veeery quiet from me over the next week because the plasterer starts on Monday and we have a power of prep work to do between now and then so not much time for bloggy puddling come an evening. I don't even want to think about what sort of state we're going to be living in while they're working. As it is, our furniture and worldly goods are mostly being relegated to the garage, and good luck to you if you try to find linen in our linen closet - you'll find booze, books and general crap, but no linen. To be honest, I can't actually remember what I did with the linen ...

So kiddies, over and out for a day or two. Or three. Maybe. We'll see how it goes.

And just as an aside - apologies for the sudden addition of word verification for comments, but I've had to delete a couple of spammy ones lately so I'm hoping to nip that in the bud.

Curiosity and all that ... well, Jazz.

The problem with this (pic below) is that that hole leads to two cavities - the roof, and the wall. Very, very easily the little bugger could have either fallen, or, more likely, jumped down the wall cavity (and having her running around in the roof was less than desirable also). Getting back up would be the problem because there aint much room in the wall cavity, so it would have involved removing walls (and kitchen cabinets) to get her out again. We won't think of how le feline may have injured herself.

It took quite some time, a lot of calling, talking, encouraging, waving smelly cat meat across the hole, and, in the end, brute force executed at just the right moment to remove her. I doubt she'll be talking to the husband for a few days , though she's already been back on top of the microwave trying to work out how to get past the newly installed barriers.

Today's lesson kiddies ...

Always check with the husband how he intends to spend his day before doing the vacuuming