Back to Reality

We're back from our beach escape! One week in the Outer Banks is never, ever enough. Every year I ask myself if there's any humanly possible way that we could manage to stay for 2 weeks the next time we go. I've never taken 2 weeks off in a row - seems impossible but I know that there are some who swear by 2-week vacations.

The week before we left the mean weatherman was predicting rain for 6 of the 7 days we were to be there, and I was freaking out. However, beach weather is always fickle, and wouldn't you know we managed to somehow luck into perfect weather every single day! Never rained so much as a drop until Saturday morning as we were packing up the car to come home. Just how I like it!

We ate and drank sinfully, luxuriated in the sun, swam in ocean, pool, and hot tub, romped in the surf with our dog, played golf, went kayaking (Ok actually only R played golf or went kayaking, I concentrated on the luxuriating in the sun part), and drank many, many, many cocktails on a daily and nightly basis.

We also went on a lighthouse sightseeing mission one day towards the end of the week: we decided to drive the 130 miles from the northern most part of North Carolina's Outer Banks, where we were staying, all the way down south and across the ferry to Ocracoke Island. It took us all day, but we saw all four lighthouses most often associated with the Outer Banks: Currituck Light, Bodie Island Light, Cape Hatteras Light, and Ocracoke Light. It was quite an adventure!

Anyway, now that we're home, all I can do is pine away and wish we had never left the beach!!! Siiiiigghhh.....

Compounding my lack of enthusiasm for returning to reality, we came home to a leaking water pipe in our front yard. Actually, on the second day of our vacation, our neighbors called R's cell phone to report that they had seen a "small lake forming in our front yard" and they wondered if we'd like them to call the water authority to have our water turned off until we came home? Um, yeaaaah, that seems like a wise course of action! I began to fret over this lovely piece of information until R reminded me that there was absolutely NOTHING we could do about from North Carolina, and as such, we shouldn't ruin our entire week's vacation worrying pointlessly over it. He was right, and I tried to put it out of my mind for the rest of the week. (yeah right)

But, now we're REALLY back to reality, and the repair people are coming tomorrow morning to excavate the old pipe (all the way from the edge of our property at the street, through the yard, through R's perfectly manicured grass, through our borders with impatiens, otto luyken cherry laurels, hosta, etc.) and then install the new one.

Isn't it fun to spend $4,000 the weekend after you get back from your annual vacation? Especially when it's 2 weeks before you were supposed to spend $10,000 on your upcoming IVF cycle??

Given this state of affairs, R and I made the somewhat difficult decision last night to postpone our IVF cycle for at least a month. We'll need at least that long to determine how to scrounge up the necessary sack of money to proceed. It's really the only thing we can do. Having running water in the house is not exactly a luxury.

Sooooo, instead of starting the Lupron injections this Sunday, as I had been planning, I probably won't be starting them until sometime around Halloween. But golly gee, in the grand scheme of things, what's another month? We've already been at this for 35 months. Hell, might as well make it an even 3 years.