It's not a googly-eyed fish like I wanted...but....

So Lightning the desert tortoise is now a permanent member of the Dixon zoo. Well, at least until he's too big to be inside anymore. Then I'm not sure whether we'll have to find him another home because our Sulcata, Bailey, can't live in the yard with him because of all of the prohibited inter species mingling (even tortoises from different races can't even get along, what's up with THAT) so perhaps we're more like a foster home. I don't know. But I couldn't send him back to the school, where despite all good intentions, he was not getting the appropriate food/lighting/temperatures and was nearly dead when he came to visit us again over Christmas break. Fear not, I did not tortoisenap him. The science teacher, after losing another tortoise to metabolic disease (easily preventable with proper care) realized his soft-shelled friend might meet a similar fate and offered him to me. Chad, of course, was extremely enthusiastic about me taking in yet another reject pet. (Don't ask about Winston right now, his doggie dementia is currently testing our patience.) And because I always obey my husband's every whim like a good wife I firmly made the decision to keep him after Chad said NO. (Seriously, though, he mostly just sighed resignedly.)

Little Dude is already a lot stronger and eating and pooping and behaving in the proper grumpy manner that tiny tortoises should. 

Another Crankyface for me to love.

My internal clock is all messed up again as usual, since I only work hours when the dead walk. As it's now 11 pm and I am waiting for my blueberry muffins to bake (in my new awesome ovens!) I think I'll jump on here and throw out all of those random thoughts that are stampeding through my brain.

Gardening!  Anyone who knows me understands that I'm a little obsessed over things that grow. So I'm excited to show you the first little bit of gardening we've started in the new house. Johnny Jump-Ups remind me of my grandma, who, it turns out, never really liked me because she thought I was a brat.  (Good thing she doesn't know me now.) I do have false fond memories of thinking she liked me so I'll just hang on to those and plant her favorite flower anyway, like I always do. (And try to forget that time she yelled and scared the crap out of me and my sister on Christmas because we snuck downstairs to get a peek at Santa and instead unexpectedly found Grandma sleeping on the couch.)

Military Man was nice enough to help me dig up the numerous large chunks of concrete and boxes of rusty nails from the flowerbeds (thank you, construction workers) and quickly get these little guys in the ground before an unexpected torrential downpour blew in last week.  So much for living in a desert. We are getting a ton of rain recently. I'm waiting for Noah and his ark to show up or for Jesus to suddenly appear in the east. Or is it the west? I don't know what signs of the apocalypse I'm supposed to look for anymore since I've turned heathen. But it has been raining a lot here and it's quite shocking. I don't even recognize my own town anymore because of all of the green stuff that is suddenly popping up everywhere, I think they're called plants.



My best friend from childhood went with Mems and me to see Les Miserables this weekend. J and I have known each other since we were seven. We've spent the better part of our lives making fun of people, stealing grocery store signs (figs, five for a dollar!), creating cooking disasters, and shopping for baby chickens and cookies when we should have been helping my husband on moving day. We've had each other's backs for all the big and small things in each other's lives and both loved Les Mis in junior high, just like every other nerdy junior high drama/choir girl. Memma worships J and sat next to her in the theater. Can I tell you how incredible it was to watch my best friend of nearly 30 years hold my little preteen's hand in the theater as they both cried to the same story that we cried our own little teen souls out to so many years earlier?  So awesome. And Dear Anne Hathaway, I always thought you were overly cheerful and obnoxious and detested you as an actor before but WOW you blew me away. Incredible.

Oh and speaking of crying. My fertility doc ran a bunch of labs on me to make sure my ovarian reserve and FSH levels were in line with where he wants them, and he threw a bunch of other labs in there for good measure. Got a call yesterday from the IVF coordinator and it turns out I have hypothyroid, yippee! (All of my other labs were perfect, yay.) Maybe this will provide an explanation for my freezing cold hands and feet and my bouts of random moodiness. And the numbness and tingling in my face and extremities that caused my stupid PCP to completely freak me out last summer while he worked me up for horrible diseases (multiple sclerosis, chiari malformation) may now be explained. (Time for a new PCP I think.) I start Synthroid tomorrow and am shopping for an endocrinologist. I am so relieved this lab was checked, since hypothyroid can interfere with getting pregnant and staying that way. And BONUS since I've learned that hypothyroid causes weight gain, I'm totally justified in scarfing half a Costco-sized bag of Doritos for breakfast this morning. I'm going to be fat until I get on meds anyway, why fight it?

All of this discussion of food now brings us to the muffiny smell that is now permeating throughout the kitchen. Time to go take them out of the oven.

Detour

Well here's a surprise. In vitro is being delayed a month!

It's already been five years, what's another few weeks?

*slams head against wall*

Aunt Flo made her appearance yesterday so this morning I called my clinic and told them I was ready to get going on the birth control pills that precede egg stimulation drugs, and during the conversation it was realized that if we do only the minimum time (2 weeks) on the birth control before the next drugs, we could possibly do the egg retrieval before Chad left for his two week annual army training. But! There is a possibility I would need to be on them another week, and then the retrieval and embryo implantation part would happen while he was gone. In essence I would be getting pregnant while my husband was away for the army. Ok, that sounds kind of awesome. But NO.

We all know how I feel about how the army shoves its big boogery nose in the middle of my personal business, so the thought of his not being present (again! last time the army hauled him off during this too!) for such a crucial part of this has made us decide that at the end of THIS month we'll do the birth control pill thing instead. I'm still having some labs drawn today and Chad is having a procedure done to save some of his little friends from a lifetime of swimming in circles, so we're not at a standstill.

At least that's what I'm telling myself because I truly am disappointed. I'm handling this better than anybody who knows me would expect though. Usually I would throw my body on the floor (new carpet, how nice!) and howl but right now I'm just shrugging my shoulders and saying "eh, oh well".

That residual holiday sugar high is coming in handy.