"I've Got Bad Plumbing" has moved!

You should be automatically redirected in 6 seconds. If not, visit
http://badplumbing.kurvy.com
and update your bookmarks.



Surrogacy Blogs:
Part of a Miracle
Bump Fairy
Our Surrogacy Adventure

Working on it:
Mad Hatter
Chick N Chicken
Ambivalent Womb
Stirrup Queen's List of Blogs
Delinquent Eggs
Life and Love in the Petrie Dish
Life in the Infertile Lane
Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Barren
Everyone Else But Me
TTCNSLC
Endo-A-Go-Go
It Takes a Village
Stella Part 2
Music Maker Momma

On other paths:
Fertile Soul
MLO Knitting
Pamplemousse
Out, damned egg! Out I say!
Holding Pattern
Hummingbird Chronicles
LAF
Torrefaction
Velvet Cage

Success:
Adventures in Baby Making
Barren Albion
Barren Mare
Dead Bug
Due Dates
Fertility Shmertility
Flotsam
Fumbling Towards Eggstacy
Great Good Fortune
Healing Arts
Hopeful Mother
I Can't Whistle
IF & the City
It Only Takes One Egg
Waiting for Baby Orange
Jenny From the Infertility Block
She's Back!: Manana Banana
Smarshy Boy
Sprogblogger
Stella and/or Ben
Tinkering with the Works
Twisted Ovaries
Wishing For One
UtRus

Other Good Reads:
Dr. Licciardi's Infertility Blog

Mc Gill Reproductive Centre - Montreal
Georgia Reproductive Specialists
Jinemed Hospital - Turkey

Cooper Center - NJ
Conceptions - Colorado
Red Rock Fertility - Dr. Eva Littman
Pacific Fertility Center
Zouves Fertility Center"
Nova IVF
SIRM

IVF Meds - UK
Free Garage Sale
Flying Pharmacy (IVIg)

Blastocyst Grading Criteria
How much hCG is Left After Trigger?
POAS Ratings
More POAS Ratings
The Beta Base

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Home at Last: 8 Days in Hell, Otherwise Known as LA

8 days in LA. 8 days in hell, to be accurate.

A trip that was supposed to last from Wednesday to Sunday lasted an extra four days. God help me. I am so exhausted.

Mom, AA, and I left for LA last Wednesday. AA's mom was at Hoag Hospital with lingering complications from esophageal cancer and so we dropped him off in Huntington Beach and headed to the house in Whittier (aka, Shittier).

J flew down the next night and we retrieved him from Ontario Airport. Our first real work day, Friday, we went to Home Depot and I blew about $1K on hardware, baseboards, sinks, faucets, mirrored closet doors, etc. Later that day, we set about working on the house with a contractor we hired off of CraigsList. Patrick (contractor) was fantastic, cheerful, a mortgage office by trade by doing odd jobs while between jobs... and he was a deal at $200/day. He had the entire house outfitted with baseboards on the first day and still had time left over to install lights and do some painting in the living room and halls. Let me tell you this was a deal. The lowest bid I got from my CraigsList ad just for the baseboard installation was $460. And I got it done for $200 WITH extras. I love a bargain.

Saturday, Patrick came back and helped J install closet doors, do more painting, etc.

Sunday, J left for the Bay Area and mom and I went back to the house and I worked on the house on my own. Patrick took the day off to be with his girlfriend. I reserved a plumber for Monday to remove/install our old kitchen and bathroom sinks, snake the tub, and remove/install a new shower arm.

Monday morning comes, and the plumbing office calls. Our plumber has food poisoning (I'm thinking: "Food poisoning my ass...probably a hangover"). But we move on without him. Patrick returned with a friend, Marc, who bills himself as being a professional painter. They painted the rest of the house for $400 total ($200 each) and while it looks good the one thing I'm peeved about is that I told them to brush the cabinets, and instead they rolled them. So the cabinets have a mottled look to them that I don't care for. It looks like a rush job and luckily I have two gallons of the cabinet paint left so I can touch them all up with a brush on the next trip. So much for professional painting and listening skills. But at $400 for a entire day..I will bite my tongue.

Tuesday rolls around. The plumber is still sick so his boss (the owner) shows up. He has a hell of a time getting the kitchen sink out even though J chiselled most of the surrounding tile out. In the end he resorted to some metal cutting device...I am impressed. He gets the old sink out without damaging the vintage tile. Whew. He moves onto the bathroom and starts ripping things out. At some point I went into my bedroom and there was water on a good portion of the floors. My NEWLY REFINISHED WOOD FLOORS! I freaked. Apparantly our 1953 hot water pipe had been installed poorly and gave way. I cleaned up the water. He fixed the pipe. We're still not sure if there will be water damage to the wood or not. Time will tell when we see how well it dries out. I wonder whose insurance would pay for this?

So the plumber tears a 7"x6" hole in the wall to fix the hot water pipe. He tells me, "Do you want to fix this?" I'm like, "Sure...but I don't have a repair kit with me." (I'm also thinking, "And I also don't want to pay you $85/hour to fix the wall when I can do it myself"). So he suggests that he comes back the next morning at 8am sharp to finish the job.

I'm exhausted. I procrastinate about going to Home Depot to buy the kit. I instead work on the house till about 5PM and I then drive to HD to do some shopping. It took me nearly an hour to gather my supplies and by that time I was starving. Exhausted and starving and bordering on bitchy. Instead of going home and at least getting a start on the work we went for....SUSHI!

Finally, about 8pm, I made it home and got to starting on installing the drywall patch. But I was out of spackle. At 9:30PM no less. Where the hell to get spackling in the middle of the night? Hell.

9:30pm: I make quick run to WalMart...hoping they carried spackling. I think I've set foot inside a WalMart maybe once in my entire life. It was a frightening journey, but I did it. What a zoo that place is. But they have everything but the "cheap variety" of everything on the planet. I envision everything I buy "failing me".

The patch itself was 8"x8"...hardly much overlap to cover a 7"x6" hole, but using my trusty scissors I made it fit. By midnight I had the patch in place with a second layer of spackle on it. I put a heatlamp on it throughout the night to get it to set up. I got up at 7am and put a 3rd layer of drywall compound on it, heat it til it dried, sanded it with my mask on (silica does nasty things to lung tissue), and I just finish painting as the clock strikes 8am. Just as I sat my paint roller down, the plumber showed up. I warned him of my procrastination, and that the paint was still wet. He looked at my work and says, "Wow, you did really good work". His partner walked in (the one with the alleged food poisoning), and echoed the same sentiment, "That looks really good!" I felt good that someone thought I was doing a a good job. Even my mother hadn't been supportive on this entire trip.

So after they left, I had one last task to do before we could cut out and head home: install the drapery panels. I didn't want to do this and even J thought it was a bad idea. J said: "The huge windows in this house are a main selling point. Why cover them up? Let the buyer put in what they want!". I concurred. I couldn't see covering up beautiful glass windows or drilling holes into the walls that I had painstakingly prepared, sanded, and painted.

But mom griped nonstop about the blinds: "You have to put them up. Someone might SEE into the house. I don't want people SEEING into the house."

Me: "But mom, the windows are in the backyard. How can anyone possibily SEE into the house unless they're in the backyard? Which is private. And if they're in the backyard, well, they're already up to no good, so what's the point?"

She persisted.

So I took J's trusty Ryobi cordless drill and I proceded to desecrate my beautiful, smooth wall. I hit a nail. I shifted the hole over less than 1 cm. But the bracket went in crooked and my screws were too long. Damn.

I moved to the second bracket. I hit nail after nail. I screamed. I shrieked. (I'm not exaggerating). I cursed like a sailor...I was enraged that I was desecrating my beatiful wall to put up fucking cheap assed Ikea curtain rods. It was clear that the 8 days had really taken its toll on me...my stress level had brimmed over. Tears were running down my face at this point and I told my mom, "I quit. I am not installing those damned drapes. I tried and all I did was screw up an otherwise perfect wall. For what? Now I have to spend a couple extra hours repairing the wall and repainting it. I want to go home. NOW. But no, I have to fix a wall."

But that wasn't it. There was more.

While I slaved away, I had asked my mother to pick oranges and lemons for AA's sickly mother...thinking they might cheer her. Mom came in with just oranges. I said, "Oh but I was hoping you'd pick some lemons for her, too." My mother slammed the door on the way out, she was fuming, peeved that I hadn't specified that I wanted both oranges AND lemons. Slammed the door? WTF?

8 days of my mother's pointing out each and every flaw in my work had taken it's toll on me. And this somehow was the last straw on the proverbial camel's back.

I said, "I can't believe that I ask you to do something so small for me and you have to go and slam the door on me. After everything I've done. You are so ungrateful. I can't believe how ungrateful you are. I've taken 8 days out of my personal time to be here, I've neglected my clients, and you complain about everything, going out of your way to find fault with all of the work we've done....walking around continually pointing out faults. "Linda I have to show you this." And she'll point out some small smear in the paint." WTF? The house was a veritable disaster zone when she lived in it. It was dirty, unkempt, and there where smears in the paint EVERYWHERE. Why did she find it in her to now suddenly decide that microscopic smears in the paint were now unacceptable?

I continued: "...And then you have the audacity to slam the door on me because I asked you to pick lemons!? You know what I think? I think that you should hire a real estate agent to sell your house for you. I don't want to do it. I quit You hire someone else and you pay them $30,000 to do it because that is what they're going to charge you. I was going to do this for free for you, but forget it. Find someone else to be mean to because I don't need it."

So I fixed the wall as best I could and we left for home.

I came home and popped open a Franciscan cabernet and drank my first full glass of wine in six months.

And then I slept 12 hours.

Sad note...

It's been a bad month. First Coloratura miscarried at 9 weeks and now two of my eFriends, Julianna and Statia both had failed cycles while I was out of town. This was Julianna's last try at IVF/FETs, and Statia's second (she's off to FET now). Julianna and Statia produce loads of beautiful embryos and I have to think that if they can't get pregnant, how the hell am I going to get pregnant? It utterly blows me away that with the beautiful embryos they're producing that they're not already mothers.

And then just today I read that Millie's cycle in South Africa isn't looking like it worked.

Why the hell aren't any of us getting pregnant? WTF?

I'll bet a couple thousand crack whores peed on sticks in the last 30 days and got knocked up.

Life is utterly unfair and unkind.

Labels:

Comments on "Home at Last: 8 Days in Hell, Otherwise Known as LA"

 

Blogger Donna said ... (2:50 PM) : 

How did I not find your blog until now? Words to Live By has been replaced by A Velvet Cage...I felt the need to start afresh. I'm putting you on my bloglist.

Yes, so much sad news lately.

 

Blogger Pamplemousse said ... (7:26 AM) : 

I hope you enjoyed that cabernet. You truly deserved it. Enjoy being back home.

 

post a comment

My Diagnosis

My Infertility History

My Usual Protocol for Diet, Herbs, & Supplements

Powered by Blogger