Every breath you take

Wowie wow wow! It has been almost three weeks since my last post! Wow! Time flies!

Well, this one will be short.


My obsession with home early pregnancy tests (EPT) had reared its ugly head once again, which prompted SubHub to utter one of his funniest lines ever. (Actually there were two lines, but I don't remember the first one exactly because the second one was soooo good.) He looked over my new super-multi-mega-pack-SubWife special edition EPT purchase and uttered, "Every time you pee, it costs us five dollars."

Little did he know that it's $5 on sale and including super-multi-mega pack discount...

(The first line - I think - went something like, "You know, you don't need a pregnancy test to pee, you can go straight into the toilet?"

So I declare this line to be the quote of the month! (or with the say my posting goes, it might end up the quote of the decade.)

You look nice from the back, honest

OMG! So much to write about, so little time. I have topics and ideas, but no way to actualize them. But sometimes an event of enormous magnitude comes along when one must throw caution, considerations of time and efficiency and all such matters away, and simply blog. That sort of event happened today. Life, at least professional life, will never be the same. And I have a responsibility to bring this to public attention, well at least to those three people who occasionally read my blog.

I have this uncanny ability to channel out life around me. I walk to our super-duper new printer, for a water refill, or simply take a short stroll around the office, and on the way to my destination I completely zone out. Until something catches my attention. Today that destination was lady's bathroom. On the way there, however, I had to pass men's bathroom. The genius who designed it made a little quirk in the layout. Every time the door opens, the person passing by sees the back of every single man standing at the urinals. So today on my way to the bathroom, the door opened, and who do I see attending to his call of nature? Our esteemed CFO. I must've definitely made a grimace of pain and horror as I looked away ... only to come face to face with the CFO's #1 (the boss of my boss's boss). He saw the face that I made and must've thought, "What the heck had she seen there? And was it really that disgusting?"

Truth is, I saw nothing but the number of fully clothed male backs; however, that was enough. I have complained to our facilities head, but he said that I am the only one to complain about the men's bathroom layout. Which brings me to several suspicions.

1. My male co-workers are exhibitionists.
2. My female co-workers are voyeurs.
2. The head of the facilities thinks I am a peeping Tom, was caught by someone in the act and to look innocent concocted the story about faulty layout. BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE HAD COMPLAINED. EVER.
4. These things happen to me on a regular basis, and they happen only to me.
5. Why, G-d, why????

Which reminds me about another bathroom story, but that's for another time.

Never say never or my Bridget Jones moment

During the last two weeks I had: two and a half episodes of vertigo, three gross pills to stop it, and about four hundred suggestions, insinuations, or simply direct questions about my possible pregnancy. Some people were friends, some were concerned colleagues and some simply couldn't imagine an Orthodox woman in her child-bearing years not pregnant. Incidentally the last group was the most obnoxious and was the least entitled to know the answer. (Up until very recently I thought that only Orthodox, Mormon and celebrities are subjected to this kind of belly scrutiny; apparently Dawn from Because I Said So, who is somewhat of a celebrity, but definitely not Orthodox or Mormon, had experienced the same avalanche of pregnancy questions after posting about her vertigo episode.) And it matters not that I have been diagnosed with Meniere's Disease and made this fact public precisely to avoid these situations. Young? Married? Orthodox? Lightheaded and nauseous? You MUST be pregnant! Don't even try denying it because you can't fool the all-knowing ME!

At first I ignored the insinuations and pretended I didn't understand what people were hinting. Then I got annoyed, and towards the middle of the week every glance in my direction was met with the evil glare and a hysterical shriek, "No, I am NOT!" (Turns out some people were looking not for the signs of life, but at my unzipped fly, which I only discovered at the end of the day, probably because people were afraid to approach me. Oh well...) And then towards Wednesday night the suspicion crept into my mind. What if I actually am? After all I AM young and married. And nauseous. And light-headed. And recently had a UTI, gained three pounds, became moody, had a bad headache .... the lists went on and on and on. So I decided to be sure and take an early pregnancy test (EPT).

The minute that decision was made, I felt the call of nature. How convenient, I thought. So I ran to the bathroom, gave my toilet one longing look, turned my basket with hygiene products upside down, but couldn't find the test. Hmm, I was sure I had one and it was there. Then I ran to the medicine cabinet - not there either. I urgently had to use the bathroom, but couldn't find the darn test. I thought of doing the logical thing - taking the test in a couple of hours - but the voice in my head that sounded like Homer Simpson (don't ask, I don't know why, but ever since I OD'ed on donuts, my inner voice sounds like Homer) spit out a line from the EPT instructions, "Need concentrated urine, need concentrated urine." So with that mantra, I was running around like a maniac, stopping in awkward poses to prevent an accident and simultaneously trying to find the test that I was sure had to be somewhere in the house. When my inner voice changed to that of Agent Mulder and told me to keep looking because, "The test is out there", I realized that urine probably got to my brain and I myself was getting kind of "out there". At that point I gave up the search and breathed the sigh of relief. And then I got to the toilet - just kidding...

Next day during my lunch break, I went to the pharmacy and bought a new test. Every time I shop for EPT, I amuse myself while waiting in line to pay with the recollection of the chapter in The Bridget Jones Diary about Bridget's experience with EPT. Of course the heroine never reads the instructions and thinks that one line on the test means she is with a child until somebody tells her that it is actually two lines, not one. After a few seconds, my mind always wonders off to different topics such as how Bridget managed to take her first EPT while well in her thirties, or why she wouldn't read instructions, and how such a thing would never happen to me because I waste oodles of time on reading and rereading the stupid labels and instructions to everything. At that point it is usually time to pay.

I was very tempted to do the test right away, but forced myself to wait until most people left the office. So I went to the bathroom, and while trying to open the wrapper, I dropped the test on the floor. When I bent down in the stall to pick it up, I realized that the woman in the next stall happened to be the one who was surer than anyone else that I was preggers. Sheesh, can't a girl catch a break from Murphy and his law?

So finally, the deed was done and I was awaiting results. Very, very quickly two lines appeared on the stick. TWO LINES!!!!! OMG, I actually was pregnant! All those people were right! I already imagined holding the baby, I could almost smell his downy hair (it kind of smelled like Lysol, but then again I was in the bathroom), got all mellow with a stupid smile plastered on my face - 3 seconds is a long time for daydreaming. And then I snapped out of it and remembered that this particular test requires a line and a plus sign for a positive result, two lines = negative. And then I remembered something else: I went through the same "two lines" vs "plus sign" thing the last time I took a pregnancy test. Hello, Bridget!