Jan
04

Blush and Bashful.

First of all, I feel I should tell you that I got all the way to putting on my coat to go to work this morning before I noticed I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Makeup done, earrings on, pants, shoes, bra…and I would have walked out the door that way had I not noticed my bare arm when I went to pull on the sleeve of my coat. Of course it was all I could do not to Google “forgot to wear a shirt pregnancy symptom?” but I am fairly certain it was a sign of nothing but stupidity.

You know how I promised I would get back to posting about something other than my nether regions? Well, I lied. But I promise wedding cake pictures at the end of this post, so feel free to skip ahead.

So, when I wrote before that I had a call in to Dr. Doctor, I meant that I had requested that she call me back in order to arrange a time for me to call her. If that sounds complicated, it’s because it is, thanks to my very open and not at all private office. Forever scarred by the time I had to shout “SEMEN!” at work while on the phone with a half-deaf nurse, I try not to call my reproductive endocrinologist’s office from my desk. Unfortunately, this means scurrying off to a phone in an empty conference room somewhere to make the call, and then scurrying back when, inevitably, no one answers the phone. I think this will be the closest I get to being a spy, sneaking around making complicated and covert phone calls.

So for the past few days I have been scurrying, as per above, and on the occasions when I reached a live human, having the following conversation:

NURSE: Really-expensive Medicine Center, this is Nurse speaking.
ME: Hi, is Dr. Doctor in?
NURSE: I can leave a message.
ME (refraining from mentioning that SHE DIDN’T ANSWER MY QUESTION): Well, er, I’m at work, and I can’t talk candidly at my desk, so I’m calling from a different phone.
NURSE: Dr. Doctor’s not in right now.
ME: Could you tell her I called, and have her call me back to give me a time to call her back?

I am realizing that this is not actually an interesting story, but rather one of those days that is so drama-filled and annoying that it seems interesting, until you actually start explaining it to someone else. Suffice it to say that I finally got to speak to Dr. Doctor yesterday afternoon, in a room ten minutes from my desk—several dizzyingly similar hallways away—after multiple false starts. She was suitably congratulatory, and told me I could start Letrozole on day three of my next cycle, provided I’m not pregnant, ha ha ha ha ha. Unfortunately, I expect to get my next period on a Friday, and need my day three tests done that cycle for our pre-screening, and the clinic doesn’t do day three bloodwork on weekends. Luckily, they will do day three tests any time between days two and four, so day four, a Monday, would be the obvious choice. However, if I start Letrozole on day three it will muddle the day four results. So the plan now is for me to have my day three tests on day four and start Letrozole that night, taking it days four through eight instead of three through seven. Unless I get my period on a day other than Friday the 12th, in which case I’ll be back to starting the Letrozole on day three. Did you follow all that? Because if you did, you deserve a medal. And an aspirin for your aching head.
I asked about monitoring, because if Dr. Doctor wants me in for multiple ultrasounds at $300 a pop it would defeat the purpose of this whole enterprise. Here is where you will probably tear up a little. She told me to make an appointment to see her on day eleven-ish, and she will do an ultrasound to check my follicles. She told me not to mention to the nurse who makes the appointment that it is for an ultrasound, because she won’t be charging me for it. Meaning I need only pay my $20 office visit co-pay.
Here, use my handkerchief.

Now: wedding cake. We had our tasting on Sunday, and let me just say that one of my favorite things so far about wedding planning is that there is free cake involved, not to mention the tasting we will have with our caterer, an event I have been looking forward to since approximately 15 minutes after the Actually proposed.
So. The baking-man brought out a tray of cake for us to try, and on that tray was carrot cake that would have made a grown man weep, and in point of fact I think I saw the Actually wipe away a tear or two. I am not particularly fond of sweets, and cake generally leaves me cold. But the Actually and I ate that whole piece of carrot cake in under 45 seconds, leaving the other varieties merely tasted. This was not ordinary carrot cake, is what I am telling you. It was called Connecticut Carrot Cake, and I am thinking that must mean it has cocaine in it, or MSG, because it was truly spectacular.
Unfortunately, the Actually is concerned that some hypothetical guest might not like carrot cake, and is insisting that we have another flavor as well—first tier carrot, second tier white cake with fresh strawberries. I am mildly annoyed by this, as the other flavors were markedly inferior, and I don’t think half the guests should be forced to suffer inferior cake because of the slim possibility that some spoilsport (no one from MY side of the family, I’m sure) dislikes carrot cake. Note that the Actually is not willing to have a piece of the non-carrot cake flavor himself.

We did decide upon the cake shape and decoration, and now I am going to have to tell you that we have wedding colors, a fact of which I am a bit ashamed because even the phrase sounds unbearably twee. But you may be assured that we aren’t going to be relentlessly match-y, and I’m not carrying around fabric swatches in my purse or anything, I promise. And now I’m blushing.
Anyway, when we arrived at the cake place, they had a cake on display that happened to be decorated in our…erm…colors—a very dark brown and a robin’s egg blue. We were both instantly besotted with it. The baking-man had designed this particular cake for a recent magazine shoot, and it is lucky for us he did, because now we don’t have to think of an idea ourselves.
The sample cake had Swarovski crystals in the center of each flower, which we will NOT be having, as in addition to being a bit too precious for our taste, it costs an extra $300. Also, our cake will be two tiers instead of three, but here is a picture of the prototype:
Cake

Flotsam: from the inappropriately intimate to the eye-rollingly superficial in the space of one blog entry.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |