I just had to adapt a number of famous questionnaires for use at work in our company newsletter. I’ve deleted a few of those questions that wouldn’t have been applicable to people in general but as I love reading these, I thought I’d try my hand at filling one out. If you chose to fill it out as well, please let me know!
1. What’s on your Ipod?
U2, tons of 80’s alternative (Teardrop Explodes, Peter Gabriel, etc…), tons of Celtic trad (Solas, Old Blind Dogs), Sinatra, Lots of Stephen Sondheim musicals, some lovely Gregorian chants……a total mix
2. 5 CDs you’d want with you on a desert island? (in no apparent order)
A. U2 live in Boston (okay, it’s a high quality bootleg but their releasing a lot of the tracks as part of their new remastered set of their first 3 cds). I saw them the week after this was recorded and it was a completely religious experience.
B. Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim- “Quiet Night of Quiet Stars”…..sigh….
C. Arvo Parte: Te Deum – Makes me wish I’d studied Latin in school but absolutely soaring music.
D. Sisters of Mercy: Floodland – The album I want to listen to when I’m pissed off….or just feeling like I can take anything on.
E. Crosby, Stills and Nash: The Greatest Hits – a summer day. Stereo on high……
3. Musical hero you’d most like to meet?
Bono
4. What sound do you love?
Water on a beach.
5. What sound do you hate?
Anger
6. Favorite movie?
Another Country
7. Last good book you read?
Allison Weir’s bio of Henry the VIII
8. Favorite clothing store?
Not sure if there are any left that I like more often than not.
9. Favorite comfort food?
Ice cream, the more hot fudge the better.
10. Role Model?
I don’t really have one but have a number of close friends that inspire me daily.
11. What trait do you most value in your friends?
Intelligence mixed with whimsey
12. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Love
13. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“Like”
14. What is your most treasured possession?
My photograph albums
15. Which talent would you most like to have?
To play the fiddle.
Or to fly.
I always go back and forth on those.
16. What is your Motto?
I’ve been pondering this question for a LONG time. It used to be “hell is other people”. I didn’t really mean it, I was just in high school and thought it sounded cool. 
Part of me would go with “Love is all you need” but I know it isn’t (but it should be).
“Life is a mystery” is something I truly believe but I don’t think it’s a very interesting motto….going to have to work on this one……
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I’ve been fortunate that every single job I’ve ever had has been near a retail area. Until now.
Within a few blocks there are a number of places to eat in all price ranges and for all tastes but the only “shopping” of any sort is a large chain drug store. If I wanted to drive, I’d find everything I could ever want within just a few minutes but while I’m surprisingly enjoying my morning drive to the office, driving on either of the 2 main strips here mid-day just doesn’t excite me.
I will, once the weather breaks, start taking long walks but when it is in the mid-90’s I just can’t talk myself into it. So I use my lunch break to make any calls I need to make and to read, my favorite hobby and one while I’ve been neglecting.
Across the street from my office is a conference/retreat center on 10 acres, with gothic-style buildings (that remind me more than a little of the buildings I wandered around when living in Oxford) and, I discovered today, a medieval labyrinth.
Aside from all of the symbolic uses that the pattern has had, one ws that it represented a path to enlightenment. You’re meant to walk to maze, clear your mind and allow for inspiration.
I didn’t walk it today. But I sat near it, following the path with my eyes. I’ve always been drawn to the symbol and want to walk this one for the first time when my head really IS clear. Today I would have been dwelling on a frustratingly pointless meeting this morning at work and it would have served no purpose.
I’m also slightly nervous of inspiration at the moment. My moments of inspiration usually shake up a lot of status quo things and right now I could use to let this status quo settle in, which it still hasn’t. I’m falling asleep too early, waking up too early, getting to work too early. It’s as if my whole being is out of synch.
Perhaps walking the labyrinth will allow me to realize how to deal with it. Perhaps nothing will happen. Perhaps I’ll get some great inspiration about our current short-term fertility plan for long-shot IUIs or for hubby’s job search (summer is really a horrible time to be looking for a job!).
But whenever I walk it, I want to be ready.
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Since I haven’t finished the actual post that I’ve been composing in my head, I thought I’d borrow this meme from TryingtoConceive at InfertilityBites.
Here’s how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE – mine are in purple
4) Reprint this list in your blog.
The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
1 Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (okay, I’ve read most of them)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables- LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down- Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
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I have a long history of putting all my proverbial eggs in one proverbial basket and having things work out. I won’t bore you with the details but nothing has spurned me on as much as someone telling me that I can’t do something.
I may gripe about it but I always rise to a challenge.
That’s pretty much the attitude I took going into the whole infertility process. But now I’m having a problem finding that “screw you” attitude. And I’m not sure what to do about it.
I’m happy that we’re going to try a few more IUIs despite the odds being against us, despite the cost, despite the timing. I find some peace from having a plan.
But the “can’t get a break” thing is just wearing me down. In the past few days, I’ve found out:
- I can’t pay for COBRA with a credit card and so will have to take a cash advance off a credit card. There is a fee for doing this. Not a large fee but still.
- My company won’t, as I’d hoped, reimburse me for not taking their insurance while I’m doing COBRA because their lawyer says that it would be partially paying for a plan that’s better than their own and better than what they’re offering their other employees and therefore opens them up to lawsuits. (I can’t even comment on the ridiculousness of this….)
- I can’t get in for a consult until August 5th. That means that I’ll miss starting with next cycle. The only good thing about that is that I’ll be able to drink over my birthday on the 12th but really, I’d rather not be paying for most of a month that we won’t be cycling on. What puzzles me most about this is that the consult is meant to take 2.5 hours. What can they possibly do for so long?????
Hubby and I agreed that we’d do 6 months of COBRA before getting off this whole crazy roller coaster. I’m personally committing to 2 and then we’ll see where we are and where hubby is in his job search. Part of me just wants to start researching and head into adoption if it looks like that’s a viable option.
On other fronts, work is going well although the powers that be don’t understand that while I’m overhauling their poorly managed website, I’m not also learning the ins and outs of the industry and thinking of strategic plans to increase customers. Hello!! I’ve only been here for two weeks!
I do have some fun freelance work coming in though – some from my old company and some from a publisher that I worked with YEARS ago (and who actually gave me a book credit for one of the projects I worked on). All of this is good resume stuff as well as a little more money coming in.
I’m still too darned tired (and can’t figure out why) to take advantage of much here but I try to remind myself that it’s only been a few weeks and we aren’t even fully unpacked yet (although 90% of the way there!).
I need time off to sit with hubby on the deck and watch squirrels and drink wine. I need a major break. Maybe I can schedule one in for 2009…….
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I know that sounds either like something obscene or like a strange yoga position but actually that’s what we tried to do this weekend.
Aside from the 2 weeks after her birth when she lived somewhere on the streets of the Bronx, my cat has no idea of the greater outside. Our apartment windows in NY pretty much overlooked brick walls and I’ve no idea where she thought we went when we too the dog out and thankfully, she never tried to run out to see.
All that changed with our move. We have a huge backyard so whenever we go out there with the dog she stands at the door and meows pitifully. She’s such a nutcase that I wasn’t about to try to just let her out so yesterday we bought her a harness and leash. And she actually seems to like it. We tied it to the end of the deck so that she could sit with us but not get too far away and while that ended up with the dog wearing her like a fur scarf at one point when when she went exploring, it seemed to work overall.
We also discovered a ton of shopping this weekend. It’s very funny because my husband loves the country and I love the city but we were both overjoyed to find middle American suburbia. Tar.get just made both of us squeal with joy as we stocked up on all sorts of things we thought we needed.
In weightier news, I think we have a fertility plan.
As much as we both want to do IVF, the cost at the local clinics just can’t be justified given their success rates in my age group.
My COBRA insurance covers IUIs with only a co-pay and covers the drugs as well for about $50. So I’m going to call what seems to be the better of the 2 clinics tomorrow and see if I can get in for a consult and then we’ll go from there.
In the meantime, I’m going to research, but not proceed on, adoption. Once hubby is working and we see what happens with the IUIs, we’ll make a decision then. I know that hubby is worried about the financial aspects of this, as am I, but I’m completely relieved to now have a plan.
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