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All I Wanted for Christmas...

...was an uneventful ultrasound, and as B is reporting over on his blog, it was in fact blessedly normal.  A relief for people who've been through years of infertility hell.  The mental stress is still with us, however, as I am listed as Advanced Maternal Age (oh how I love those sensitive doctors!) and we need to be checked for every chromosomal abnormality under the sun.  That's coming up in four to six weeks, so wish us luck that we dodge this last significant bullet.

Do you remember last year?  When nearly everything that could have gone wrong did, and in ridiculously spectacular fashion?  Yeah, this year has pretty much been the exact opposite of that in every way.  I got a great new job and B was allowed to keep his, even if it meant we moved halfway to the Arctic Circle.  Our house sold in six hours in the worst housing market in twenty years.  And now good baby news.  It goes to show that life really does go in cycles, and that the answer to your prayers might in fact be the second-snowiest city in America, a new snowblower, and a little luck.

Baby Wishes and Diaper Dreams

We heard the baby's heartbeat yesterday.  It was 156 bpm (very good, for you fertile types who don't have to worry about that kind of thing.)  Because my doctor's appt. is still more than a week away (why for the love of God are they taking so long to get me in?), and because all that bleeding last month scared the crap out of us, and because our luck in the war against childlessness has truly been crap until now, I was starting to panic a little (how did I know there was even a baby still in there?) and ordered one of those home-doppler machines so we could hear the heartbeat ourselves.   

It came Thursday afternoon.  It was waiting for me when I got home from grading portfolios, and as I rubbed it back and forth across my belly, not hearing a thing, B declared he thought it was a terrible idea.  Not finding the heartbeat, he said, would make me worry for no reason.  The same on Friday, when I couldn't hear it again.  I thought I did for a minute, but then it was gone.  I started to think B was right.

Yesterday I used my headphones, which made the blips and beeps and whirs a little easier to follow.  I heard my own slow heartbeat and the whoosh of blood through the placenta, which sounds less like blood than like the wind that comes off the lake and beats at our windows.  But then I heard it--a fast little noise like hoofbeats.  I counted the beats for ten seconds and multiplied.  Then I turned off the machine, got B, and dragged him upstairs so he could hear it.  You should have seen the grin on his face.

I now am almost allowing myself to believe we may get to June with an actual baby.  After that, of course, will be years in which the kid will take the car without permission and tell us we just don't understand, and can I have a raise on my allowance.  But just getting to June would be enough for now.  Having a little bit of hope at this point is such a luxury, I'm almost afraid to enjoy it.

Words and Music

Over at Maud's blog, she writes about soundtracks for writing, and it got me thinking about putting together a new playlist for my new novel.  With Christmas Break about to start and a whole month ahead of me with no classes, I do so want to get back to writing regularly.  I'd like to have 50 pages done by the middle of January, a very doable number, and by announcing it here I am hoping to shame myself into getting it done.

For Icebergs I listened to a lot of Cocteau Twins, not necessarily because that was the mood I was going for, but I found that the wordlessness of the songs (or at least they were words I usually couldn't understand) allowed me to concentrate on what I was doing.  Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis and Duke Ellington and Sigur Ros worked almost as well.

A little pop or rock or alt-country or alt-anything is fine to start off a set, but when I really get down to work, I need something that will allow me to concentrate on my own words and not the lyrics.  But I seem to have exhausted my collection of jazz/world music/certain classical pieces and would like something fresh for the new book, something that I didn't already play to death for three and a half years on the last book.

That's where you come in.  Help, please.  Recommendations very much needed.

Radio Reading

I will be reading on the radio Wednesday, December 12, at 9:35 a.m. EST from an unpublished short story titled "Debt-Free Living" as part of WNMU-FM's Christmas programming.  It is shamefully too long, clocking in at more than 18 minutes when I was given only 10.  (I did not time myself beforehand--rookie mistake.)  But if you're interested in hearing it live, click here.  If you're interested in hearing it archived, click here.  It won't be posted until sometime after the initial broadcast.

The Joys of Inadequacy

So I was asking my UCLA Novel II students, now that we're at the end of the term, what they think is the biggest challenge they have with continuing their novels.  Not surprisingly, they all said a lack of confidence, of belief in their own abilities, was their biggest worry.  How could they ever muster the courage to finish a novel at all, much less finish something readable and good?

The problem of course is that we all feel inadequate all the time.  Even the best writers I know struggle with the worst kinds of self-doubt.  In fact, I think the better the writer, the greater the doubt: the worst writers I've met in my lifetime were the ones plagued by the least amount of doubt about their abilities.  They seem to have some kind of armor that protects them from criticism, even criticism they might desperately need to hear.  If I had a dime for everyone who thought they could write a novel without having the least idea of how to go about it, I wouldn't have to work anymore.

But I think it's the doubt that makes writers better, work harder, never settle for "good enough."  Fear of failure, when you don't let it cripple you, can make you write with heart, to give everything you have to your story.  Unfortunately, that's what good stories require: everything we have.  No wonder we're so afraid of them.

My Ears are Ringing

"Tired" is the buzz word for the last couple of weeks.  By the time I get home from work at night, I'm barely keeping my eyes open.  I'm hoping that's a good pregnancy sign, because other than that I'm not having a lot of symptoms.  But no bleeding at least.  Yes, there is that.

Lots of things going on the past few weeks.  B and I celebrated our 20th year as a couple, though honestly five of those were spent living in separate time zones as we did the college long-distance dance.  It probably made it easier for him to put up with me, though, so it wasn't all bad.

My much-maligned Missouri Tigers are the No 1 college football team in the country, at least for another half an hour, and to get there they beat the KU Jayhawks, one of the bitterest rivalries in college sports.  That game was extremely fun to watch.  Honestly, when I was a student at Mizzou (1989-1993) you only bought tickets to the football games because you had to in order to get tickets for the basketball games.  I was, however, on the goal line for the infamous 5th down game vs. Colorado, and I can tell you that even if Colorado hadn't been given a 5th down, that guy did not break the goal line.

Anyway, I know you, my beloved readers, do not stop here for football news.  You also come for the bitching.  And this time I have a doozy: Our new cleaning person stole my cell phone. 

I plugged in the phone Sunday night before bed because I keep getting a lot of political calls (the number is still registered in Iowa) and so forgot to take it with me Monday morning.  I remember this vividly because I needed to make a long-distance call to the pharmacy where I get my progesterone injection meds Monday but couldn't do it from work because I forgot the phone.  When I got home B told me he'd left me a voice mail.  But when I looked for the phone, it was gone, AND SO WAS THE CHARGER.  The cleaning person did, however, leave a good number of dust bunnies behind the door in my office.

I thought it was suspicious, but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and look for it in the house on the chance that I had a brain aneurysm and forgot I put it someplace else.  I looked everywhere in the house--even the freezer.  Every drawer, every shelf.  It was not in the house.  It was not in the car.  It was not in my office at work.

I called the number, and even though I never, ever turn the phone off, it wasn't ringing: The calls went straight into voicemail.  Hmmm.  Suspicious.  I also could not hear it ring anywhere in the house.  I checked my messages, and there was B's voicemail.  Nothing else.  I called Verizon, but no calls have been made since Sunday when I saw it last.  I can't cancel the service without affecting B's minutes as well, so I decided to leave it on and see what happened.  I sent a text message telling her that I know she has the phone, and I want it back.  Nothing.

Yesterday I called again.  The phone was magically turned back on.  I called the cleaning company to tell them I was canceling the service, and when they asked why, I told them I was pretty sure their girl had taken my phone.  But I have no proof, and I could tell the woman on the phone didn't believe me.  "Oh, you'll find it somewhere," she said, in that maddening Upper Midwest denial-voice that makes my head feel like it will explode.

It really frosts my cookies that someone would come into my house and take the phone.  It's not that I can't replace it, but I would seriously like to hunt the bitch down and remind her why Thou Shalt Not Steal.  Grrrr.  Call me a goody two-shoes, but I've never taken something that didn't belong to me and never would.  It's a violation of trust.

And I was going to give her a Christmas bonus.  Guess she took it for herself.

UPDATE 12/4: The cleaning company called me back today to follow up.  Looks like Miss Thing is going to be getting a grilling from her boss.  There's nothing they can do--she'll deny everything, of course--but I feel better knowing that at least someone's going to ask her about it and she'll have to sweat it a little.