What ever happened to manners?

For the most part I don't like writing about work. You never know who might be reading this and I'd like to keep my job...at least until I start school again next year. However, today I almost lost it on some of my co-workers for a startling lack of manners. The other day our office hosted some clients for an event. As they are pretty big clients and we were hosting them for a daylong event, we of course provided lunch and snacks throughout the day. Our buffet was set up outside the meeting room that they were in, in our administrative area. While there are only two people working in the area, it is an area that is passed through by many staff during the day. I had to stop five...count them, five people from attempting to grab food from the table before and during the meetings. Ummm....hello!!!! Who raised you people? Now of course we do let the staff at the food AFTER clients have left, but it is always moved into the staffroom before we let them at it. But in these cases, they brazenly started picking through, even lifting the covers off of the trays and essentially unpacking items that hadn't yet been opened. If my mother had been here, they would have all been spanked. It is common sense for me to not touch anything until I have been given the go ahead. That means dinner at other people's houses and business meetings. Same etiquette applies to pretty much everything. I thought it was standard for people to teach their kids etiquette and proper manners because my parents were very careful and insistent on instilling me with good manners. If I went over to someone's house it was always "please" and "thank you" and I wouldn't grab even a glass of tap water without asking permission from my host.



I just wonder when people stopped teaching their kids manners. Was it a generational thing? It seems like everytime I am confronted with a lack of manners it comes mainly from two generational groups, those that are a generation before me (baby boomers) and a couple of generations after me (Millenials) have missed the manners lessons. However, this lack of manners really applies across the board and my generalizations about specific generations are just that. I have observed more people from those two groups but it isn't always the case. A decade ago when I moved in with DH a group of friends offered to grab my stuff and move me. I was very grateful as this was a time in our lives when we were living on a very strict budget. As a thank you I put on a really nice steak dinner for everyone that evening and kept them plied with alcohol. Since our budget was so tight we were only able to purchase exactly what we needed to feed our friends. I had potatoes in the oven baking (just enough to feed everyone) when the boyfriend of one of my friends casually strolled into my kitchen, opened the oven, removed a mostly cooked potatoe and started eating it. I was so stunned I just stood there, mouth agape, for a few minutes. Then to my utter amazement he started tearing out a page from the magazine he was reading....my magazine. Now granted it wasn't anything particularly expensive, but holy cow! A that moment I did something that solidified my reputation as the chick you don't want to piss off or mess with and I kicked him out of my house. I explained to him that in my home the very minimum of manners was required and he had pretty much offended the hell out of me. As he was only the boyfriend of a friend and hadn't really even helped (took a few lamps from the driveway into the house) I didn't feel really guilty. He looked a little stunned. Had it been only one instance I could have lived with it but the sheer lack of manners shown in a five minute period was more than I could handle. These days I'd likely have given him heck and allowed him to stay...but as it turns out it was a good idea that I sent him packing. Guy turned out to be a huge L-O-S-E-R...he pushed around and hit my friend not two weeks later when she discovered his illicit mini-grow op in their spare room (what she thought was just his office/workout room.



Okay...so now that I am pretty sure I have taken this in an odd direction, I digress. But I beg of anyone reading this...if you have or are having kids, please teach them manners cuz if they run into me it ain't going to be pretty!

Life, why do you vex me so???

So this whole specialist thing has not gotten to quite the auspicious start I had hoped for. Not really anything bad, just slightly annoying. Although in the past few months I have already given enough blood and other assorted liquids to create a whole new human being, the specialist needs some more blood tests before my upcoming appointment in May. Okay…bleed me dry if need be, all I care about is knowing what's up. So, since I neither live nor work in the area that the specialist is in, I took some time off work to go to her office and pick up the paperwork request for my blood test. Figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and get my blood work done in the lab downstairs from her office. I even phoned the office ahead of time to ask them to check the request to see if the blood work I needed to get done required me to fast overnight before I went in. The answer was NO so I made the arrangement and went up there in the morning intending to pick up the form, get the blood work done and then start my work day. So I get to the office and a very nice woman at reception directed me to the lady beside her who had all the paperwork. After finishing her cruller (damn I miss donuts sometimes) she flipped through her file folder looking for my sheet…asking me three times to repeat my last name. When she finally got the form, she handed it to me and said "Okay, so you'll have to get this blood test done on Day 21 of your cycle or if it falls on a Sunday, the closest day after that the labs are open", ending it with a bright smile. And there I am on the other side of the counter dumbfounded. Day 21???? I'm currently on Day 4 of my cycle. Could you possibly have told me this on any of the occasions which I spoke to you on the phone (all four of them)?? A quick "no you don't need to fast but you do need to complete it on Day 21 of your cycle" would have been great! So instead I took part of a day off, woke up extra early so I wouldn't miss too much work, went to a completely different side of town than I needed to be in (which the DH could have easily gone by in his travels and picked up the form for me) all so I could be informed that I couldn't even take the blood test that day. SERENITY NOW! As stress is not good for those trying to conceive, I smiled politely, thanked her and walked out of the office, sweetly imagining all the nasty things that I hoped happened to her for the rest of the day. The visuals I came up with were almost worth it! If this is the biggest bump in the road, heck I'll take it. But I suspect not. Guess we'll see. Definitely hope her employer is a little more with it otherwise I am screwed!

I'm Baaack!

It's been almost a full year since I posted anything. I've often started writing a post in my head while on the bus or reading something for school, but every time I started thinking about typing out my thoughts, something always came up. My priorities have rested with finishing my undergraduate degree as fast and as well as possible, so until now I decided not to beat myself up about abandoning my blog.

Yesterday at 6:10 pm I walked out of my very last undergraduate exam. I am now done. Nothing left for me to do but wait patiently for the mailman (or woman or transgendered mail-person) to drop that all important letter through my mail slot which will advise me that I am sufficiently edu-macated and will be awarded a neat-o looking piece of paper which backs up that claim! What I can do with my lovely degree in English literature is pretty much nothing…on its own that is. I will be taking a year to breathe and fill out applications so that in September 2009 I will start law school in Vancouver with the hopes of suing people for infringing trademarks and copyrights. If you need a good Intellectual Property lawyer in about four or five years look me up.

So for the first time in a few years, my life is sorta going to be my own. I say 'sorta' because the next four weekends have been claimed by parents and various friends who have been trying to get me out of the house and away from my books and computers for a while now. I have a few shopping days already booked, mostly to go shopping at the various farm markets and specialty shops in and around Vancouver and am hoping to see something resembling a beach at least a few times over the summer months. I am also hoping to finally complete a novel I have had sitting on my computer only partially finished for the last few years. I keep adding notes to it when ideas strike but I haven't actually committed more than a half hour to writing in over two years. The story is still there and still raring to get out so I'm hoping to get it out of my system and see what the world thinks.

However, my biggest project by far that I will be working on this summer is trying to get pregnant. Now this may not seem like a hard thing to do (and no I do not require diagrams) but as it turns out, for me nothing is ever easy. I am suffering from what my doctors are currently calling Unexplained Infertility. Since I am only really just starting to get anywhere in the testing process I'm not yet truly infertile. To explain this I'll have to give you a little background.

The DH and I decided in November of 2005 that I should go off of birth-control in hopes of starting a family. I was all revved up to be pregnant within months and mothering a child in late 2006 or early 2007. But month after month my period would come like a timely little trouper, to advise me that it hadn't happened for me. While I was in the thick of school I really couldn’t concentrate on it much so this went on for about a year and a bit before I started to get a little worried. There were so many things that could have been (and may still be) contributing to my inability to conceive including the ongoing stress from being in school and working full-time, being over thirty and being overweight, so I wasn't as freaked about it as I would eventually get.

The thing is I have conceived in the past. A few years before I met the DH I got pregnant accidentally while in a long-term relationship. Nature intervened and I miscarried a couple of months into the pregnancy. I think Fate was looking out for me because looking back on it, having a child with that boyfriend would have been the worst possible thing that could have ever happened to me. So what we know is that I can get pregnant, so the question is why am I not now?

Last summer, with the end of this round of schooling in sight, I decided to really focus on what was going on with my body and start working towards a plan of action. I started taking my basal temperature every morning, started using ovulation predictor kits and as the DH would not unhappily report we were doing it like rabbits. And….NOTHING! After a year and a half of trying this was starting to get a little disheartening then September and October 2007 hit and my emotions went a little sideways when three of my friends became pregnant within a month of each other. While I was ecstatic for each and every one of them (and I know they're all going to make great moms!) a little piece of me died inside every time I got one of those happy calls. After the last one I finally did what I had promised myself I wouldn't do. I went into a private dark corner and cried…a lot. And I've cried a few times since then too. The Dixie Chicks have a song called "So Hard" which was written by the two sisters that are not Natalie Maine (sorry can't remember their names) who both experienced similar difficulties with trying to conceive. There are a few lines in that song which can explain the way I feel better than I ever could:

It felt like a given

Something a woman's born to do

A natural ambition

To see a reflection of me and you

And I'd feel so guilty

If that was a gift I couldn't give

And could you be happy

If life wasn't how we pictured it


Now like any Type A person, a group in which I am firmly planted, I had my functional little breakdown and started looking at alternative reasons why this might be happening. While I still don't have any answers a few really positive things have come out of my search. First of all, I discovered that I am gluten intolerant. My body does not like wheat, rye, triticale, barley or anything that they are found in. This includes soya sauce (a devastating discovery for an Asian girl), pretty much any kind of processed meat or sausage and even certain types of body lotions which contain wheat/bran oil as an ingredient ~ a fact I found out ever so itchily and painfully one evening. I've pretty much had to change my whole diet and am a compulsive label reader these days. What used to be a half hour shopping trip to Costco has now turned into a two hour adventure while I pour over ingredients lists and cross reference anything that I am not sure of. Thank God for Blackberries with the internet and Wifi. I feel a million times better and realized that it wasn't natural that I was having stomach cramps every single day (stupid parents told me for years that I had a 'nervous stomach'!

This change has assisted me in the second positive thing. I have easily and naturally lost just over twenty-pounds in under six months by changing my diet alone. Now that I am not studying and working insane hours, exercise will be added to the mix very shortly and I hope to see much more weight lost over the course of the summer. This weight loss will hopefully result in my ability to wear a two piece bathing suit by September when the DH and I will be jetting off to a luxury vacation in Mexico (more on that later) another of the things we are doing in an effort to de-stress my life and give me a better chance of getting pregnant.

While these are the things I can and am doing to make the process easier, it has also been determined that it was time that we started to see a specialist. After all our blood work and other such testing was done, the doctors couldn't find a good reason that I wasn't conceiving so they referred me to a specialist who I will be seeing at the beginning of May. My best guess - and this is only a slightly educated guess - is that I am not ovulating regularly. I believe I am ovulating…but not every month. So if my chances at my age of conceiving under normal circumstances are 25% then think how low that percentage goes if I'm not ovulating regularly. But this will be up to the doctor to determine.

So I guess what I've been trying to say in the most longwinded way possible is that for now the focus of this blog is going to be changing. I'll still post my thoughts on pretty much anything and everything, but you'll start seeing a whole lot more of the posts chronicling my journey to get knocked up! Wish me luck!