Torrefaction

Warning: contains discussion of my period!  12-year-old boys beware!

Ok, so back in February, I went on the pill.  I have always had bad cramps, and the older I get, the more they move from causing "pain" to "horribly, ungodly, debilitating pain."  Maybe this is endo, maybe my hormones just hate me, etc etc.  Part of why we decided to stop TTC was that it meant I could return to the one thing that had, in the past, helped my cramps - the pill.

Ortho makes three pills that I have personally tried.  The first one I took, back in my late 20's is a single phase pill called ORTHO-CYCLEN.  Single-phase means that all 21 of the "active" pills in the pack have the same dosage, which is this case is .025mcg of norgestimate (the Progestin) and .035mcg of ethinyl estradiol (the Estrogen). (I am going to get ungodly amounts of pharmaceutical comment spam for this!)  The single phase pill, back in the day, totally got rid of my cramps, reduced my normally 5-day period (3 heavy 2 light) to 2 and a half light days, and cleared up ALL of my acne.  It also totally killed my sex drive, put my blood pressure up to 160/90, and made my normally roller-coaster-like mood swings go away to the point that I felt like a walking corpse.  So eventually it wasn't worth it and I went off it.  The changes to my period persisted for a while, with my cramps getting gradually worse/back to normal over the course of about 3 years.  (does that sound like endo? does surgery actually help?)

So, for this go-round, I decided to try the Ortho Tri-Cyclen, which is tri-phasic.  This means you start with a week of "low" dose pills, then go to a week of medium dose, then a week of "high" dose.  BUT: the estrogen stays at the same level for all 21 days of active pills.  It's just the progestin that changes, from .015 to .020 to .025 mcg.  You can google up the various side effects of the two drugs, but in a nutshell, estrogen causes most of the bad side effects (blood clots, cancer, nausea, loss of desire).  So, I took OTC for a month, and my blood pressure shot up to 160/100, with shakiness, headaches, weird pains in my legs (probably imaginary).  Also it made me so nauseous I missed work one day and had to start taking it with dinner (so I could feel ill in my sleep) instead of in the morning.  And my cramps were improved, but not gone by a long shot.

I stuck with it for the first month and then switched to Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, which is new and therefore has no generic equivalent, so costs $44 bucks a month.  The "Lo" means that the estrogen is at .025mcg instead of .035mcg - otherwise it's the same as OTC.  This difference of .010mcg is apparently why the actual pills are about HALF the size of the OTC pills - they're so teeny weeny that I can't push them out of the blister pack using my fingers; I have to use a pen or a spoon handle.  Thanks, dumbass Ortho marketing people. "Let's make the pill REALLY SMALL so people know what a TINY dose they're getting!"

Other than that, it's doing a very good job.  My cramps are still bad, by normal standards - I have to take about 12 advil over the course of the first day of my period, and about 6 on the second day.  But if I stick with the advil I'm able to have a fairly normal day - i.e. I can work.  The worst periods before we stopped TTC (which may have actually been early miscarriages), I took 12 advil before lunch and then had to switch to vicodin, and even then all I could do was lie on the couch.  Also, since the pill gives you a totally predictable period, I've managed to nudge my schedule a bit so it always starts on a saturday, so I can just plan to stay home that day if I want. 

It's not the spectacular result I was hoping for, but I'm pleased with it because on the OTCLo, I have almost no bad side-effects.  My blood pressure is normal (for a fat 38-year-old, anyway), my period is 5 days (2 heavy 3 light), my moods, which have evened out with age anyway, are just enough up and down so that I feel like ME, but overall I'm cheerier and less prone to blue days.  Also I'm a lot less anxious and stressed, and I have way more energy.  This may just be because I'm not TTC any more so I don't feel like I'm carrying the weight of my failed womanhood around with me all the time, but I suspect the hormones also have something to do with it.  It also has helped clear up my skin.  Does this mean I do NOT have a zit on my chin right now?  No. Damn. I still get zits, but not as bad and not as often. Oh well, can't have everything.

What else?  Well, I haven't lost any weight but I haven't gained any either. Oh, my sex drive! That's been a net gain, actually.  I've always had peaks and valleys throughout the course of any given month and being on the pill seems to make the valleys a bit lower.  That is, instead of being too tired/busy/stressed for sex on some days (pre-pill), it just doesn't even occur to me to think about it, some days (on-pill). The peaks are probably a little lower too.  But because the pill/getting off the baby wagon has made me more cheerful and reduced my anxiety, I'm more likely to be in the mood for sex on the days when it does occur to me to think about it.  Also, I have more energy overall, so I've just recently started exercisiing - lifting weights and riding my bike - which does help to increase desire. So I'm getting laid a little more and expect this to continue to improve as we get back to the "hey, this is fun" type of sex instead of the "we must be doing it wrong! this'll never make a baby! hurry up! the computer says we've only got 20 minutes left!" type of sex.

So, the overall verdict:  OTCLo has made my mood better, my energy better, and has not made me sick or miserable in any of the usual ways pills do.  It has not eliminated my cramps but it's made them manageable.  I don't know how good it is at actually preventing pregnancy (I forget who, but I at least one blogging mom got pregnant on it) but since my body manages that without any assistance, I'm not worried about that.

Sorry if that all sounds like a big frickin' ortho add, but dang, I love feeling healthy and not worrying about unmanageable pain.  Unless something changes, I'm staying on this thing until menopause.  

Addendum:  I forgot, there is one bad side effect -- my allergies have been CRAZY.  Not as bad as before I had immunotherapy (aka "allergy shots"), or as bad as when I had 2 cats instead of one, or when I was still eating chocolate. (Yes, pity me, for I am allergic to chocolate, and have had none for lo these three years) But bad enough that I'm hitting the benadryl regularly during this season of blooming things, and can't have pizza or garlic more than a couple times a week.   For me, a more than fair trade, but if the hay fever was amped up into the migraines & athsma range (chocolate does this, sigh) I'd maybe reconsider.

Very Late Addendum, 1 year later: This pill sent my blood pressure up to 180/100 or thereabouts.  So there's another side effect to consider. (I had to stop taking it at that point, of course) 

Posted by alchemist at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So I arrived in the office this morning to discover that it's "take your kids to work day."  ARG!  I love kids, yadda yadda, but I wasn't in the mood for a whole passel of them running, playing, yelling, etc in my actual work area all day.  Particularly because a lot of my job requires attention to detail. And because I'm still getting used to being INFERTILE.  I spent a lot of time today typing the same crap over and over because I kept screwing up.

I could have put on my headphones or asked the parents on the team to set the kids up somewhere other than our communal table, but I actually do love kids and I don't want to be Cranky Infertile Woman, so I made nice and just stayed late to get my work done after the kids were gone.

So...in the midst of the pandemonium, one of the dads says to me & another co-worker who's still young & single, "This is the world's greatest birth control, right here, huh?  After this you'll never want to have kids, huh?  I'm telling you, world's greatest birth control."

This guy knows my situation - his sister's also adopting from China.  So I sucked it up and gave a wan smile and said "uh-huh" but what I wanted to say is "Actually, you FUCKING MORON, being IN-FUCKING-FERTILE is the world's greatest fucking birth control! YOU FUCKING MORON!!!!!"

But, I didn't.  Let's hear it for take your fucking kids to fucking work day. 

Posted by alchemist at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

All the parts and bits have arrived and Hub has put everything together for me (I know I said I was going to build it, but hey, he wanted to do it, and I'm lazy.)  I opted for this case and dual 19-inch LCD's so my workspace is much cooler and prettier now.  Will post a pic in a couple of days.

So far I've installed Cinema 4D, Poser 6, Vue D'Esprit 4, Sid Meier's Pirates, Sims2, and my old y2k edition of MS works+ word.  Tonight I'm installing 30-day demos of Photoshop CS2 (planning to buy, but ouch, not cheap! so will wait til demo runs out), XFrog for C4D, Painter IX, and Paint Shop Pro X.   Paint Shop Pro has some nifty features that Photoshop doesn't.  Painter I'm just trying for a lark - I'm not really a digital painter so it's probably not worth the money to buy it, but I may as well enjoy the 30 days of noodling.

Probably what I'm the most excited about is getting Dreamfall (Longest Journey 2).  I loved The Longest Journey like it was a kitten.

So, that's what I've been up to, and hence not blogging much, but I promise many scintillating posts soon including:

how the Pill is working out
list of paperwork for Illinois home study and what I had to do to get it
report on final home study meeting
shrubbery wars 

Posted by alchemist at 05:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Our FBI fingerprint clearance just arrived after 6 weeks of waiting!  No, boys and girls, this is NOT the I-171A immigration fingerprint clearance, which will involve even more waiting - this is the one for the home study.  Illinois requires 3 clearances for the home study - a state police clearance, an FBI criminal clearance, and an FBI child abuse clearance.  So the FBI criminal clearance has finally arrived, which means we have ALL the paperwork for the home study completed!  And that's a LOT of paperwork.  I'll post a detailed rundown soon of what we had to get, for those who may want to adopt in Illinois, or for those who want to say "well, jeez, thank god we don't live in Illinois!"

Now, I'm going to do my little happy dance, and then cook some lipton noodles, and then go sit on the couch with Hub and watch Mythbusters on the Tivo.  Do I know how to party, or what? 

Posted by alchemist at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I should Not:

1. Eat Oreo Cookies.  Even the vanilla ones.

2. Play Frozen Bubble when I should be writing

3. Read blogs when I should be writing

4. Watch tivo when I should be writing

5. Forget to put on sunscreen

Posted by alchemist at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Spent the past couple of days in my hometown, which is a blue enclave in the sea of red that is Indiana.  While wandering around with family and whatnot, I saw two interracial families.  Then while I was chatting to my SIL about our respective dossiers a lady overheard me and pointed out her young son who was adopted from Russia a couple of years ago, and told us all about what a great experience it was.

Interracial and international adoption has been part of the landscape for my whole life, so it wasn't really suprising, but it was kind of nice to run into 3 adoptive families in 24 hours like that and get a little boost while I'm waiting around for print clearances.

Posted by alchemist at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've hit a lull in the paperchase - waiting for fingerprint clearance to come back from the FBI so that the Home Study can be completed.  Just about every other piece of paper is done (the I-171h won't come til long after the home study is done, so I'm not even fretting about that yet.).  Now I have nothing to do, adoption-wise.   So that leaves me plenty of time to feel bad about being infertile.

I spent my 20's trying to get my shit together.  It really wasn't together at all.  I made a huge radical life change when I was 25, after the sudden death of a close friend.  I dropped out of graduate school (Lit and Creative Writing) and moved to the big city and started working with computers.  I had a few friends here but mostly not, and I'd never lived anywhere really big.  It was the right choice - it started me on the path to being actually happy for the first time in my life - but it was a very hard couple of years.  I didn't do anything too masively stupid but I did manage to fall mildly in love and get my heart broken.  I was 28 when I met Hub and was still licking my wounds and kind of drifting, life-wise.

It took a while to get around to getting married - I wasn't cut out for partnership.  I'd always dated jerks, so I didn't really know how to deal with someone nice.  "You mean, when I come home, I'm supposed to sit and talk with you?  But what if I'm in a bad mood?"  Fortunately for me, Hub is a very patient, sweet guy, and he rode out the crappy first year of living together while I figured out how to be an ok girlfriend. 

So, I had more things to learn.  For assorted reasons, I didn't acquire certain skills as a youngster.  Managing stress, keeping my workaholism to a manageble level, friendly conflict resolution, building normal instead of super-rigid boundaries -- I had no idea how most people handled these things.  On the other hand, I am super-duper in a crisis, and will wrassle with a rabid tiger if I think there's a need.  A year or so of therapy made a big difference. (Advice to folks seeking therapy: find someone who specializes in your Issue.  If you're dealing with the death of a friend, for instance, see a grief counsellor. If you're addicted to crack*, see an addiction counsellor. Otherwise you get a sympathetic person who says "oh, wow, that's terrible" but doesn't teach you useful skills for changing)

By the time I was about 34 I felt like I was ready to be a mom.  I'd always wanted kids, but I didn't want to screw them up.  I knew I would never be perfect but I wanted to have skills for dealing with stress, and I wanted to get past the majority of what I'll call my moodiness.  Thanks to a good job, a terrific husband, a good therapist, a stable home life, and nobody I loved having died recently, I was feeling normal and healthy and ready to start trying for a baby.

Two years later, we thought probably something wasn't working right. My confidence in my ability to be a mom had grown a lot - we'd had a bunch of family crises & illnesses, including losing a very dear aunt to cancer at the age of 56.  It was horrible but it didn't send me into an anxiety spiral - it was just a sucky, grief-filled time, like anyone else would have.  So I felt like "if I can handle this, I can handle anything," but my body seemed to be going the other direction.  Another 2 years and I'm 38 and we had to decide how to address the situation.  If I was 30 right now, we'd be making a different set of plans.  We'd be adopting a baby, because we want to adopt a baby. But I'd also be going in for a laproscopy to see what they could do about my apparent endometriosis, and then I'd be finding out what they could do about the uterine abnormality.  In short, I'd have more options.  I could still daydream, at least, about growing a life inside me.

So, not only has my body failed me (and let Hub down), but my psyche has too.  If I was one of those people who sailed into her 20's truly knowing herself, not struggling with life angst or what have you, not wasting years in school and starting a career later than everybody else, not dating worthless bozos, etc etc, etc, then maybe I could be, you know, a REAL woman.

Sheesh, where's a giant stack of paperwork when you need it? 

*note: I am not addicted to crack. This is merely an example.  At the moment I am addicted to "chuckles" candy, but I'm sincerely working on beating it.

Posted by alchemist at 05:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Gardening seems like a good antidote for my infertility-based bummage.  I mean, it won't make me pregnant but it's girly and it's about new life and what have you, and it gives me a (probably false) sense that I'm not a total failure as a woman.  So I'm going to fling myself into it as soon as I can.  The temp's a little too unpredictable yet for anything crazy like rose cultivating, though - killing things isn't going to cheer me up--so I decided I'd get to work on the landscaping side of the equation, carting dirt around in a wheelbarrow, de-rocking the space behind the garage, or whatever else needs doing. Even though that's a teeny bit less girly than coaxing tender seedlings up to the sun, etc.

This is the hideous shrub group - a Juniper with 3 thorn bushes sort of woven into it.  This was here when we bought the house, so it's not really our fault, although I didn't keep up with the pruning last year because it seemed pointless.  I've been limited in what I could do to give it a nice shape. The lower parts of the juniper are masses of dead twigs with the vaguest hint of greenery on the outside, so I can't cut far into it when I prune...or can I?

Meet my new toy, the DeWalt Reciprocating saw.  I opted for the DeWalt instead of the SawZall because the Dewalt is way cuter.  Seriously, that was my whole decision process.  The SawZall weighs the same and does the same thing, but is ugly.  My uterus may be misshapen but damnit, my power tools WILL be pleasing to the eye!

Even the saw blades are yellow!  How adorable is that? 

So the saw and I made this big heap of branches...

...and here's my cute little Juniper bush!  Yay!

Posted by alchemist at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So, at long last it's time for me to buy a new PC.  My current one is a 4-or-5-year-old Dell, which was smokin' at the time that I bought it, but now is wheezy and tired.  The good thing is that it's encouraged me to write more, because writing doesn't require huge gobs of memory or a zippy processor.  The bad thing is that I have several 3d modelling projects that could be earning me actual money if I could finish them without pulling my hair out.  When it takes 30 minutes to render each product display image, problems like "gee, her head's at a funny angle in that one" become nightmares of Ropsian proportions.

See, I work in a variety of 3d apps.  Right now the only one that will render images efficiently is CINEMA 4D.  That's the one I use for my modelling and for most of the images I make for fun, including the bubbling bowl up at the top of this page. (See my main site for more of that sort of thing)  But the products I sell are mostly designed to be used in Poser or Daz Studio.  So to give an accurate idea of what they really look like to customers, I have to use the tool that the customer's going to use to render them.  Sigh.  Poser & Daz Studio render much, much, much slower than CINEMA 4D (They also cost much, much, less...you get what you pay for).  On a newish computer, you'd like them just fine. They'd seem zippy.  You wouldn't sit and say "for the love of GOD how long can it take you to render a single figure with a WHITE BACKGROUND!  I could render a big leafy TREE in C4D in that time! AND MODEL IT!

So, I've decided it's finally time for a new workhorse.  I've got some money saved up, so I can (within reason) buy as good of a PC as I need.  I figured I'd get the Dell XPS 400, because it's fast, designed for gaming, and I can get it with 4 gb of memory.  Buying a prebuilt system from an OEM vendor has advantages like 1. you can get support 2. you get a deep discount on your OS and other bundled software 3. you typically can also get a discount on your monitor.  And folks, I want the Dell 20-inch widescreen ultrasharp flat panel.  Oh yes I do.  I'm going to keep my super-sharp, beloved little dell 17-inch trinitron CRT, and hook it up to the second video port, and be in pallette heaven.  With 2 monitors you can work your main image on one and put all your pop-up palletes and crap on the other, and never have to go to a menu to get a tool.  Mmm, I can already imagine it, what a wonderful world it will be.  Plus, the widescreen can rotate into portrait mode for reading blogs or what have you, so that's nifty too.

Hub did a very nice job of convincing me that I was going down the wrong path with the actual system, though.  Darn him.  He suggested that before I spend my money mostly on memory and just accept Dell's idea of a good processor (Pentium E), I open "perfmon" and try rendering some things and performing other tasks in my art apps.  

Well, what I discovered surprised me.  I've thought, for all these years, that rendering takes place mostly in memory. As it turns out, nuh-uh.  It's mostly on the processor.  Photoshop is the real memory hog in my toolbox; Poser and Cinema4d want more processor.  So we googled around a bit to see if C4D can make use of a Dual Core processor, and found a benchmark test comparison of Athlons and Pentiums that used C4D as its benchmark app.  The Athlons won in both the really-expensive category (the 4800+ vs the Pentium EE) and the less-expensive category (3800+ vs the Pentium D).  So that means I want my system to start with a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+. I don't think I'm going to want to bother upgrading to a 64-bit os anytime soon but Hub recommends having the option, and since I didn't think to check my processor utilization in the first place, I guess I should listen to him.  I'm actually pretty miffed with myself because I'm a professional engineer, and I should use the same decision-making methodology at home that I do at work, and I didn't.

My punishment or reward for this is to build my own PC, although I will probably wimp out and let Hub do the tricky bit of seating the processor onto the motherboard. (When I'm working on a $10,000 system at the office, I insist on doing all of this stuff myself, but when it's my own money, I go all girly and let the man do it! Sigh.) I considered getting a prebuilt from HP, because they have Athlon processors and those cool Lightscribe DVD writers, but their video card selection is garbage.  And it's cheaper to build it ourselves--even with buying a genuine legal copy of the OS and all that.

So we're going to Fry's Electronics tomorrow to fondle components, and with luck we'll find a case on the shelf that I'll like, since I do insist on having a cute case for the thing.   In the event that we don't, I poked around on Newegg  to see what's cool.

First, though, I googled "cute pc case" and found this:
 

I have to admit I'm tempted!

Posted by alchemist at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I grew up in Indiana, one of the two states in the nation that doesn't do Daylight Savings Time.  Even though I've lived in Chicago for nigh on 15 years, I still have trouble getting used to the whole concept.  I'm okay with the "fall/back" portion, because that just involves sleeping in.  But this spring/ahead thing is killing me.  I generally get up at 6 am to get ready for work.  So far this week the earliest I've managed to drag myself out of the sack is 6:27, which would be this morning right here, and I feel woozy and exhausted.  Possibly that has something to do with the fact that I went to the bar with friends after work and didn't get home til 9, and had vodka-induced heartburn that kept me awake until nearly 1 am.  But I prefer to blame Daylight Effing Savings.

To make things even more irritating, Indiana is doind Daylight Savings for the first time in history, and they're on NEW YORK time.  What tha F? So now instead of just being an hour ahead of them in the winter, and on the same time in the summer, we're going to be an hour off all dang year.  Since my parents, best friend, and favorite brother all live in Indiana, I spend a lot of time going back and forth from here to there, particularly in the summer.  If we want to get to my folks' place in time for lunch on a saturday in the winter, we have to get on the road by about 8:30 am our time.  We were looking forward to flipping back to leaving the house at 9:30, because it's the WEEKEND for crying out loud.  The effort it takes to pry Hub out of bed on a Saturday morning would make angels weep.  And now my dang fellow Hoosiers stole my precious extra hour of sleep.  Phooey.

Posted by alchemist at 05:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)