Well our local evacuation order was lifted because the storm decided to make landfall much further south than first thought. So the Naples area is, as they say, “getting some weather,” but up here they say no storm surge, just some wind and rain.

I’ve decided to leave Olivia and the other cats here at home (now that we can be sure they’ll let us cross the bridge and come home from work tonight). They’ll be much happier here than moved elsewhere. Still doing to bring the dog’s to mom’s. Sammie doesn’t like thunderstorms and Nicky likes having the company.

Still, a much easier day than we expected. Whew!

Good luck to all my friends to the south of here.

As if we don’t have enough to deal with! This afternoon a mandatory evacuation was declared for my area effective 6 a.m. tomorrow.

I am one of those storm-be-damned kind fo people who probably would not go, but because we are separated from the mainland by bridges in both directions, we kind of have to. I don’t want to get stranded because of a closed bridge and end up on the opposite side from where either my pets, or my lupron, are! Especially Olivia, who needs her special food and her meds.

We’ll be holing up at my parents’ place I think, which is nearby but in a safe zone.

The last time we had to evacuate was in August 2004 for Hurricane Charley. It was Friday the 13th. That was the day I had my first miscarriage.

No wonder I am getting the heebie-jeebies today.

Lisa asked why we aren’t doing DE at our local clinic, which is a good question that probably others are wondering too, so here’s the answer.

Our local clinic does indeed do DE but they do not match you to donors themselves. You have to find your own donor or work with an agency. If we do end up doing a cycle with my sister’s eggs we’ll do it locally. But we’ve decided that we’re not comfortable using an agency, for a couple of reasons. If you are using one that’s cool; it’s just not for us. Cornell has a good anonymous program: a very thorough screening program (only about 25 percent of applicants to be donors are accepted) and a very good matching process. We just feel better about going this route. It is actually a bit cheaper than local, because there are no agency fees. There’s travel for us but we should probably still come out ahead. But it isn’t a financial decision for us. Another plus is they will match us pretty quickly, we and they think, because although we are just starting the process we have technically been on the wait list for more than a year now. We don’t think we have any super unique donor criteria that might make finding a match take a while. So I am hopeful we may be able to get matched and do a cycle before the end of the year. That’s pushing it, I know. But hey, a girl can dream.

I never got around to posting much about our last visit to NYC and Cornell. But we’re going ahead and going with donor egg. My doc said he’d cycle me again if we wanted but that he understood if we were feeling “over” that. So DE it is. Some of you may remember my sis had said she would donate her eggs, which made me very happy. But I don’t think she’s ready to do that right now, or anytime soon — and this is no knock on her, she has a lot going on in her life. I think she’d do it but not anytime real soon, and we’re just not willing to wait. So we’re going with Cornell and their anonymous donor program for now. It would be very cool if this worked, and then later my sis chipped in to help make a sibling. But for now, it’s anonymous for us. We’re okay with that. We’re trying to think of it as “trading up in the gene pool.”

So right now I am doing the “prep” cycle, so the docs can see how my body responds to the estrogen patches. This is necessary so when we do the real thing they can sync me up with the donor’s cycle. The prep cycle consists of lupron, then estrogen patches, then PIO. I’ve been on the lupy since Thursday, and the lupron headaches kicked in last night. Last night was a bad one; today it’s there but sort of in the background. I hope it stays back there and doesn’t go full-on. Tomorrow we have to get ready (finish getting ready, really) to evacuate for a hurricane.

Hurricane Fay has us in her sights. Luckily we have a close, convenient, safe place to go — my parents’ — but it’s complicated by the fact that I work at a newspaper (not likely to let me stay home during the storm) and caring for a cat with cancer. Ah well — since when should any cycle, even a prep cycle, be easy?

Normally my overriding emotion is sadness. Today, just for shits and giggles, I am trying something different — anger. Variety being the spice of life and all. I’m not going to post about that here today, though. If I did I’d have to change the name of the blog to It’s Either Sadness, Euphoria, Or Pure White Freaking Fury. Maybe I’ll hop over to the VMB and vent there. *Edited to add: The Rant, at VMB.

Meanwhile…

My usual favorite method of getting out aggression is to go out in the yard and prune. I don’t like gardening much but I like flowers. I like a yard more jungly and happily messy than neat and ordered. My gardening method is to pick plants that are drought-tolerant and like heat and sun, then to plant them and leave them alone. It is survival of the fittest in my yard. Darwin baby — if you can’t survive by yourself you don’t get to live in my yard!

The one chore out there I will happily do is prune. I LOVE me some clippers, oh yeah. Whack whack whack, nothing that stands still is safe from me. Which is unfortunate if you happen to be a plant… One time I went out on a tear, Mike stood by and begged helplessly, “Not that one, Baby, I like that one! … Nooo, not THAT one, I love that one… nooo-o-o-o-ooo! … Can’t we keep THAT one? …” Nope — I was a madwoman with those hedge clippers. Those poor shrubs were short and stubby and bald by the time I was through.

Of course, this being Florida, they all grew back bigger and badder and leafier than before. But this year I’ve been keeping up with the pruning (LOTS of aggression!) and now… there’s nothing left to prune.

Here are pics of the Brassfield Jungle:

This is the side yard. It is wilder now. You have to imagine it at least 3-4 feet taller and filled with both blue and orange flowers. Very leafy.

This is one end of the back yard. That bouganvillea (pink one on the left) — about a third of its width shows in this pic. It’s a lotta thorny shrub! That’s Mike working the soil a week or two before we put down new sod in that little area. It’s very green and grassy there now. It is the only grass we have in our yard.

I don’t have any new pics of the rest of the yard. There’s a patio with a semi-circular area full of tropical plants and flowers, and there’s palms, flowers etc., all along the other side and back edge. It’s a lot of vegetation. Hopefully it continues to grow fast, so I can PRUNE it again! Bwa-hahahahah…

PS — ok, I lied, I am going to vent here a little bit. I just turned around to check on the Olympics. These words dance across the screen: “Panda Baby Freaking Making.” (ok the freaking was my edit) Even the damn PANDAS can do it… Good thing I can’t reach their bamboo from here…

SHITBUCKET
damndamndamn

We found out today that our kittycat Olivia has cancer. It’s bad.
Radiation therapy is a possibilty and works well on dogs with her kind of cancer, but it doesn’t work much on cats.
If she were my vet’s cat, he wouldn’t put her through that and thinks she probably couldn’t survive it.
Three months.

That’s Olivia there on the left. Next to her is her son Max, and behind them is Nicky.

Olivia was marked out for me before she was even weaned. When I interviewed for my first post-college job, in Anderson, S.C., a photographer I made friends with said I just had to have one of her cat’s kittens, it was the cutest one, I just had to get the job so I could have this kitten. Well, I did get the job, and a few weeks after I moved down there and got settled I went to fetch Olivia. I didn’t want her to be lonely so I took a littermate too, Daphne.

That was about 14 and a half years ago. So she’s not a young cat, but she’s not old either. (I’ve also had Mike for about 14 and a half years. He was allergic so he wasn’t big on my kindle, as we called them, but I told him in my experience cats hung around longer than boyfriends. Turned out they all stuck around, so it was a good deal for me.)

She’s a hilarious cat. She knows her name, comes when called, and practically speaks English. The swear words anyway. (You scoff, but I’ve heard her. I don’t know where she could’ve picked up such language…)

I am devastated, as you can well imagine. My eyes hurt from crying. And from trying not to cry.

Shitbucket.

Ok, I’d like to share a newspaper story with you, because it is an incredible story about an amazing family and a little girl they adopted. You may not want to read it, because it describes some very, very severe child neglect, probably the worst you’ve ever heard of. But the story doesn’t dwell on that; the heart of it is about the girl’s present and future, not her past. It’s written by one of the best feature writers in the business, and she did a lovely job. She wrote it with caring and insight and beauty.

Again, I want to warn you, if you don’t like reading about children in danger or are not in a space where you can hear about children and adoption, don’t follow this link. Or, follow it but be ready to skim over the first section, at least, and then hop down to Part 2, “Becoming Dani,” and go from there.

It’s long, but it is very worth the time. I doubt you’ll read a better newspaper story this year.
In my humble opinion.

The Girl in the Window.

Well, tomorrow morning we are off to NYC, back to the big clinic. We are going to play for 2-3 days, then go spend a day with the docs, mostly to discuss DE and get that ball rolling. We are bunking with friends who have graciously offered their spare rooms/couches/floors/whatever. It’s super nice of them and it saves us a ton of money. And both friends who are putting us up (one for two nights, the other for one night) are friends I’ve met online, because of IF. I wish none of us had ever had occasion to ever hear of the others — but since we did, I am SO glad to have met them and to know them.

Unfortunately I am leaving just as the Roundup Extravaganza was posted, so I haven’t been able to read many of those astounding posts. It will be something to look forward to when I get back. And to any of you who find me because of that, welcome, grab some chocolate and stay awhile!!

So I got this book club invitation in the mail today, from a member of the actual, IRL book club I belong to. It is like one of those chain letter thingies, you know the kind, where you send one dollar or one recipe or one some such, and eventually get a bunch of recipes or whatever sent to you.

This one is better though, because you give and receive BOOKS! How freaking cool is that?

You are supposed to mail one paperback book you have at home and are done reading. Then you send a copy of the letter to six people, and somehow you allegedly get 36 books sent to you in the deal. I’m not good at math so I don’t quite understand how it all works. But I’m going to do it because even if I get NO books back, I will get rid of one that I have already read and that is just hanging around. If I get more, cool. If not, fine.

The problem is, the person who sent me the letter and I have all the same (IRL) friends — so I don’t want to send it to them again. That’s where YOU come in. Do you want to play?

If so, leave me a comment that you want to join and some way to contact you (like email) so we can exchange addresses. Then I’ll mail you a copy of the letter and you can get started getting books! (I won’t be sending you my book, mine goes to whoever’s name is on the chain before me.) I need to send it out to six people. (Oh, and I promise I won’t give your address to anyone else or ever use it again for anything else.)

If I get more than six names, I’ll take the first six, then let the others know how to start their own chains if they want.

I’m told it’s legal because it does not involve sending money. If it’s not — pls don’t sue me! Or report me to the Post Office Police or whoever cares about such things.

New books! Woo-hoo!!!!

I am such a bookworm, I read all the time. I read while I eat (though not when other people are with me), I even read while I brush my teeth and blow dry my hair. (I have a lot of hair, I can get a few pages read in that time!) I like mysteries, historical fiction, adventure/thrillers, and anything else if it is well-written.

Just to tease you a little, the book I will be sending to the person on my letter is Wicked, by Gregory Maguire (the one the musical is based on). I read it earlier this summer.

So come on — join my book club!!!

I just want to tell the person who finds me by googling “egger suit” — I LOVE that!! Whenever that pops up in my blog stats under “search engine terms” I get a huge smile on my face. Plus it reminds me of that silly movie it’s from, Men In Black, which I love because Tommy Lee Jones rules. So it’s a double-mint-pleasure thing.

The poor person who foudn me via “hanmade speculum,” however, I am frightened for and worried about. Not sure how that search found me as I don’t think I’ve ever written about ANYthing homemade and especially not a speculum. I hope all is well with you, whoever you are.