ender

Okay, I haven't been posting over here at all because I'm usually just doing random updates on facebook. And I've always felt weird about posting things that were too easy to connect to real life on LJ. But here's my 6 month baby bump picture just in case anyone still checks this and isn't on LJ. It's a girl, btw. Jeff and I are in negotiations about names. I should probably try and find a place to host a bigger version, but I'm way too lazy for that.

Was over at TWOP looking around on the Sci-Fi boards and clicked on Roswell just for fun. Guess what they were talking about? Cliffie Fanfic! Kare and Janelle both were getting shout-outs. Oh, the memories!

Because my boss was driving me absolutely crazy today. She got promoted and I'm applying for her job, but by the end of our leadership meeting today I was more than halfway convinced that I should remove my application from consideration. I would not mind having a different boss for a while. In so many ways she's supportive, but when she gets her mind set on something it's impossible to move her off of it. And unfortunately what she seems to have her mind set on is that my staff are lazy and don't do enough of their work. Forget that most of them are working 50 hours a week to keep up with what they do have (and they don't get paid for overtime). Forget that their job involves all the job duties of three different jobs and yet they have the same number of clients as these other positions do. Fuck it.

I'm pregnant! Only about 4 1/2 weeks along. I don't think I posted over here, but we went to a fertility specialist last month, and they put me on this whole hormone regimen and then inseminated me. I can't believe it worked the first time. I go in for my first scan next Wednesday to see if everything's developing normally. They had me do a second blood test this week, and my hormone levels are rising the way they're supposed to. I alternate between being giddy and anxious.

Okay, I know I posted this to facebook already, but this is the coolest thing ever. Elephant giving birth!

http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/656611/d1dfcfee/live_olifant_geboorte_tv.html

Why, why, why is it still so hard to set limits with my dad?

Maternal grandparents are in town for their annual 3-4 week stay. This is usually an excellent time to avoid my father because he is super-irritable and wants to complain about them 24/7. Unfortunately when I was over at Mom and Dad's last night, he waved me outside for a bitch session. No way to gracefully get out of it. With anyone else in my life, I would say something to make it clear that I didn't want to have the conversation or steer it in a different direction. But Dad was the one I always went to when I was younger when Mom was driving me crazy with her passive-aggressive criticism. He was a refuge. I'd complain. He'd complain. Of course I can see now the inappropriate emotional incestuousness of it. It's just hard to break out of the role of being Dad's sounding board. Ironically, my relationship with my mom is generally awesome because I finally yelled at her about the criticism in college, and she's never done it again. Someday I will get the nerve up to do the same with Dad.

And am getting ready for my session with my webcam client. I always feel weirdly nervous about this and I have no idea why. I just feel like I need to be more on with this client, maybe because she's an adult. And the webcam thing really is awkward with being able to see myself while I'm talking. All I can think about is how beige and old I look.

And randomly, tv season just feels weird to me this year. I didn't even realize Dollhouse had started until I was looking at the tv guide last night looking for something to watch and saw it was a new episode. For some reason I thought it wasn't coming back until January again. I'm enjoying Supernatural but don't have a strong emotional connection to it anymore. I'm not so much on the Dean train and mostly all about Castiel. I like the couple of episodes of Glee I saw, can understand some of the criticisms and agree with them, but just can't get worked up over it. It's a fun show. Life is depressing enough without getting overwrought about television right now.

And the big question, do I try to drag Jeff out to see Zombieland or just see if my brother wants to go?

My body is in the middle of some major freaking out right now. I got another cold sore, only about 4-5 weeks after the last one. It must be stress because I usually only get them once every year or two. I had a major tension headache last night stretching up the back of my neck and around behind my eyes. A little blurry vision tossed in. And I woke up at 3 and couldn't get back to sleep. Probably a combination of PMS and having to do performance evals with staff. I'm trying to be more objective and less focused on keeping staff happy, so they're not going to be as good as they have been in the past. People's reactions have been mixed so far. It never ceases to amaze me, though, how people won't take responsibility for the things that they've done (or haven't done).

No changes on the baby front so far. I went and invested in the $200 ovulation kit with the $50 pee-stick pack. It's better than the disposable kind. It can tell you days ahead when you're most likely to ovulate so you can get more tries in. Also went to get bloodwork last week to make sure I'm actually ovulating. The doctor is pretty sure I am since I've been so regular, but the only way to know for sure is the blood test. If I get my period this weekend, I'll be going next week to get an X-ray to see if I've got scarring/blockage in my fallopian (sp?) tubes. It's nice to feel like I'm doing something. It's probably going to not be nice when I find out how much our insurance won't pay for.

I've been Netflixing "In Treatment." I don't know why I keep letting myself get hooked on shows so long after they started. I'm only on Season 1, week 3. I can't go anywhere to talk about it because everyone else is already on season 2. It's both hilarious and frustrating to go and see the old TWOP messages about the shows I'm watching now. I never realized how much people don't know about therapy. Some people thought that Paul shouldn't be treating patients if he was in therapy/consulation for himself. A lot of people didn't realize that some practitioners have their practices out of their homes. (It's a tax write-off and not a problem if you make sure family and patients don't interact. Also, when you're seeing private pay clients, they're usually higher functioning and less likely to do something nutty and dangerous.) And his Monday patient Laura is showing pretty blatant borderline characteristics, but no one seems to recognize that. A lot of it's overly melodramatic and stagey, but some of the therapy moments are so true, and it's fascinating to watch him be so great with the clients one minute and totally struggling the next. Plus I get to sit there and critique him and figure out how I'd do things differently. Very different and way more realistic than how therapists are usually portrayed on television or movies.

You know I never post the results of these things when I actually do them. This one was kind of cool, though. I don't know about me being tranquil, but the thing about feeling closer to people when I understand their imperfections is perfect considering my job.

I really need to cut down on the amount of television I'm watching. It's probably good that BSG is over and TSCC season is almost over (and hopefully not forever).

( BSG finale )I admit that I was one of those people who always hated the mythology aspects of the show. I preferred the gritty survival/war stuff. So it's not a surprise that the finale sucked for me. The opera house, Kara being an angel who disappears, whatever. The very ending with Hera being the beginning of the human race. The whole wink-wink with head Six and head Baltar was incredibly tired and unoriginal. About the only thing that made me happy was Roslin's good-bye and Tyrol finding out how Callie died. Overall this was a good reminder why sometimes it'd good to jump off the ship before it actually sinks.



( Supernatural )And speaking of not being into the mythology of a show...I think Kripke's lost me again with the angels and demons stuff. I was all on board with the Castiel stuff early in the season, but they never can seem to do anything truly interesting with the mythology arc. I don't think they'll actually have Sam go truly evil, so no reason to get invested in his "darkness." Castiel is still hot and still has chemistry with Dean, but he's apparently the wimpiest angel in terms of fighting. And the gospels of the Winchesters? :::shudders::: I love the show when it's about two unknown guys going up against evil and snarking at each other. When the show starts taking itself too seriously, it sucks. Did enjoy the way they poked fun at themselves this week, though. But when I'm becoming bored even with Dean? You know the show's in trouble.



( Sarah Connor Chronicles )Whoa! Where did all that come from? I feel like I spent most of the season bored out of my mind and bitching about how the storylines weren't going anywhere, and suddenly bam! Everything's coming together in the most awesome and terrible way. My only gripe is why the hell couldn't they have done more of this sooner instead of making me sit through pointless episodes of coyotes and dream clinics that didn't really advance the storyline? There was almost too much going on in last night's episode. It makes it hard to process it all. I can't believe they killed Derek. It was so out of the blue. I don't want him to be dead, but in a way the anticlimactic way they did it was perfect. No slo-mo, no swell of music with Sarah being too late to save hime. Just bam! Gone. I have no idea what Weaver's end game is, and I really want to know. And Sarah being arrested with John threatening former FBI guy whose name I'm blanking on right now. Wow. I really hope they renew. And if they do renew, I really hope we get more movement next season and less of the artsy-fartsy episodes.


( Dollhouse )I keep bouncing back and forth about this show. I'm not going to get into the feminist outrage that everyone seems to be feeling about the premise. I get why people are upset. I see it in the show and especially in the way Fox is marketing the show, which is disgusting. But I think that the way that people are so frothing at the mouth angry about it makes me not want to be angry about it. I don't know. Mostly I'm curious now. I think Fox screwed the show a bit like they did with Firefly with their tinkering. The show has slowly become more interesting and complex. The main structural problem is that the main character has no personality, so it's really hard to relate to her and root for her. The other characters we know are basically the bad guys. FBI Helo is getting better, but still fairly boring at this point. I may have blanked it out because the first episode was so underwhelming, but did they ever explain why he's so obsessed with the Dollhouse? Anyway, I really liked last night's episode, but it's going to make it really hard to see the actives go back out on engagements since we finally got a taste of who they really are. Especially Sierra. I'm not sure how Joss and Co are going to hold a balance with that. Because if she has to go out on another engagement with that Nolan guy, I really want her to be able to just shoot him in the face. Part of me wishes the show would just come out and do the public service type of black/white, this is wrong sermonizing. On the other hand, that would be incredibly annoying and really bad story-telling. I guess it depends on what exactly they're trying to tell us in this story. I'm curious enough to wait and find out. I reserve the right to bitch a lot if it ends up being a story I don't like.

The following is a lot of extremely depressed stuff about trying to get pregnant. Just a warning.

So I kind of hit bottom again yesterday with the baby-making stuff after I got my period. It's really hard to stay positive and keep trying when I feel like there's so much out of my control. My mom never had trouble getting pregnant, so it never occurred to me we might have any problems. It probably sounds arrogant, but I've always been so lucky with most things in my life. If I really tried, I could usually do it. Usually without a lot of effort. But it's been about two years. It's hard to say even now if I do have any physical problems. Jeff's impotence has clouded pretty much everything. And it's hard to talk about his issues without betraying him. There are only a few people I've really been honest about that with because I know he'd be humiliated if he knew I had told anybody about it. It's hard to talk with him about it because it seems to be stress-related, and the more he thinks about it the worse it seems to get. I know he's carrying a lot of guilt and shame about it. I want to make that better for him, but there's nothing I can do except to keep talking with him about it. I think I convinced him last night to go to couples' counseling, basically because I broke down crying for a half hour. I kind of feel like I"m manipulating him when I do that except that the depression and fear are real. I also know I'm probably going to have to have that kind of breakdown with him again before I'm able to actually get him in the room with a therapist. The real irony? This is the probably the best our relationship's ever been overall. We're communicating really well, having fun, spending real time together. If it wasn't for the trying to get pregnant stuff, him not being able to orgasm wouldn't even be something I'd be really worrying about as long as we were having fun in bed. And even with the stress, we have been having more fun in bed than we've had in a while.

I have no idea how my friend Molly went through so many years of this.There's no way I'm going to make it trying for as long as she did. I figure another two months more of trying, hopefully with the counseling being part of it. Then I go back to the doctor to see what tests they can do on me. I haven't bothered to go back so far mostly because Jeff and I haven't had enough "successful" attempts for me to even evaluate if there's a problem on my end. But three out of my four aunts had endometriosis. I don't know. All of the women tests pretty much involve somewhat invasive procedures. We'll have to figure out if/what the insurance will pay for if it comes to that.

But it does feel better to get some of this down in writing. I should be journaling more but I guess I've been hiding out from myself emotionally. In a way finding out for sure that there's nothing physically wrong with Jeff has put more pressure on the situation. I really hate not having control of stuff, and there's nothing I can do to control his thinking.