Operation Pink Herring

Continued

Part eleventy billion: yesterday, 2pm

An earthquake hit the East Coast. Perhaps you heard about it. I was grateful for the opportunity to once again display how stellar I am to have around in any sort of emergency, what with my very first reaction being to loudly proclaim "what in the HELL" as my office chair began to shake. And then I went into my boss's office and asked IS THIS AN EARTHQUAKE OMG WHAT DO WE DO CAN I HIDE IN YOUR OFFICE in my most panicked voice.

(Oh, how I wish I were joking... but no, I definitely said the words "can I hide in your office." I don't like to be alone when scary things happen!)

The earthquake was both exciting and scary, I don't care what all the smug people from California say. Yeah, yeah, they eat 5.9 earthquakes for breakfast with a side of organic flaxseed toast over there on the West Coast, I get it. Californians are used to earthquakes. But that's exactly the point -- they're used to them. We here on the East Coast, not so much. I'd like to see Los Angeles wake up to find this in their backyard and be all "whatever" about it:

Although, I must admit: Baltimore did shit its collective pants when Snowmageddon 2009 hit. But that's because Marylanders are a bunch of Snow Pussies. Joel and I were unperturbed -- in fact, it was one of the best weeks of my life! Free week off from work! -- because we are from the Northeast and have seen a few feet of snow before. We are used to it. People in South Caroline are used to seeing alligators lurking around on golf courses, people in Texas are used to seeing rattlesnakes slither around on their porches. People in California are used to earthquakes and that makes them very cool and hip. We alllll get it.

But I'd wager that most Californians don't live in 110-year-old brick houses with 110-year-old brick chimneys which spew 110-year-old bricks and two vacuum canisters worth of 110-year-old brick dust all over the damn place during an earthquake.

This mess took me an hour and a half to clean up and I STILL have to dust the entire house. I think we can all agree that unnecessary dusting is a pretty big fucking deal. Whether you think earthquakes are scary or not.

So I vacuumed and washed the floors and wiped brick dust off every single surface in The Baby's Room (uh, guess it was a smart move to not put the crib right in front of that non-functional, decorative fireplace!) and finished cleaning (except for the dusting part, which I'll do sometime for Sir Fetus turns five) (maybe) just in time to make it to my Tuesday night yoga class. I changed, walked out the door and...

Part eleventy million and one

... realized I'd just locked myself out of the house. And this yoga class is one I need to drive to, so I was screwed.

Part eleventy million and two

I called Joel to see what time he might be planning to come home from work. As luck would have it he was just packing up to come home!  He sped home on his bike, opened the door, I gave him a quick kiss and waddled off towards the car as quickly as I could.

Part eleventy million and three

Oh dear.  

Hmm. It seems that the chimney of the house our car was parked in front of enjoyed the earthquake even less than ours did. And it showed it by collapsing and chucking bricks down onto the street. Right onto our car.  

So. That happened. The earthquake made me miss yoga. How's that for ruin and devastation, West Coast earthquake scoffers? I MISSED YOGA!  

We need to come up with a stronger term than Pregnancy Brain

Part One: Last Week

I place a fairly large Amazon order to fill in some of the last things we really, definitely need for the baby. More cloth diapers, more diaper covers, a wet bag to hold dirty diapers, the special laundry detergent you use to wash cloth diapers. Most of it revolves around diapers. But there are other things too!  Many things! Many things that babies need! I hit "place order" and feel very accomplished. Now we'll have all the absolute essentials covered and Free Super Save Shipping to boot. I ship the order to Joel's office, since we can't receive large packages at our house and I don't feel like carrying a big fat Amazon box 3/4 mile home from my office. Look at me, thinking ahead! Actually learning my lesson after having our crib shipped to my office!

Part Two: Wednesday night

Joel asks what the status of the Amazon order is, as it has not yet arrived at his office. I look in my email and forward him the tracking information saying that the order has shipped in two parts, one via UPS and the other via US Postal Service. Oh, and upon further inspection it seems the Postal Sevice portion has already been delivered! Woohoo, baby stuff!

Part Three: Wednesday night, two minutes later

"You used my new office address, right?" Joel asks. As in, not the old one that his company moved out of many months ago, whose address no longer technically exists?

Part Four: Wednesday night, two minutes and five seconds later

Um... oops?

Part Five: Thursday morning

Joel checks his office to see if by some miracle the packages have arrived there. After all, they did set up address forwarding with the post office and they get a shitload of UPS packages and the driver knows about their office move. Maybe they made it despite the wrong address! SHUT UP, MAYBE.

Yeah, no.

Realizing that the Postal Service package is most likely a completely lost cause, I dedicate myself to saving the UPS package. I check online: out for delivery. OK, so it's not too late! Surely UPS can call the driver and tell him oopsie, actually DON'T bring that non-existent old address, bring it to the new address!  It's not far from the old one! In fact, Joel insists that since they get so many UPS deliveries the guy might actually just recognize the old address and know that it's really supposed to go to the new one. SHUT UP, HE MIGHT.

Yeah, no. Again.

The UPS phone rep insists they can't do anything until an actual delivery attempt is made. If the driver is unable to deliver the package, then I can call and change the address. UPS suggests I call Amazon and try to change the address with them.

Part Six: Later Thursday morning

To avoid the shame of having my entire office overhear me try to navigate my way out of this bungled mess, I log into Amazon's chat help. A nice Amazon lady asks how she can help me. I explain the situation and beg her to change the delivery address. Sorry, but she can't change the address once an order has shipped. She can't even put a note in the system or do anything to somehow alert the UPS guy that some dumbass used an outdated, now nonexistent shipping address. I am about to cry. Joel's old office is now just an abandoned space. The city is doing a ton of construction right outside it. Our baby stuff is either going to be run over by a bucket loader or stolen by hooligans. 

However, the Amazon lady continues, she can issue a refund for the entire order. Then I can re-order all the items and use the correct shipping address. Would that be OK?

Um, yes, I guess that would be "OK", if by "OK", you mean extremely generous considering this entire problem is 100% my dumbass fault. She does that. Refunds the entire order. I... really don't know what to say.

Part Seven: Thursday, lunchtime

I get in the car and drive to the site where Joel's office used to be on the off chance that the Postal Service package is still lying on the sidewalk or was somehow delivered to the company next door. There is, predictably, no parking downtown. I illegally park in the area reserved for the construction workers. As I walk by their cars, I notice that they ALL have an official-looking permit displayed on their windshield. This is so fucking stupid, I think to myself. Some nice lady from Amazon.com is not going to swoop in and save your ass when you get the car towed. But I'm already halfway to the entrance of the other office, and I'm expecting this whole thing to be a bust anyway. Joel has warned me that neither the security guard nor the loading dock staff at this building are particularly friendly or helpful. But at least I do have a strategy in place: 1) explain the situation, admit it is my fault and beg forgiveness, 2) look at pregnant as possible, and 3) cry, if necessary. But still, I am fairly certain I'll be back out in thirty seconds after they shut me down, and the car will be OK for thirty seconds. I hope.

I tell my sob story to the security guard. I am a silly, very pregnant person who forgot to update her Amazon shipping address and has he perchance seen a package -- he interrupts me to say that yes, a package from UPS just came this morning and he took it back to the loading dock. Do I know where that is? No, no I don't. He escorts me back peresonally and introduces me to the loading dock lady, who isn't very friendly but points to a pile of packages. And right on top, there it is! The UPS package!  Unharmed! I pick it up and give it a kiss.

Now, there was another package delivered yesterday by the regular postal service, I explain. Do you know where that might be? Oh, says the loading dock lady. That's going to be a problem. That'll be in the mail room. You have to go up there and look for it. I... don't know where that is, I stammer. She rolls her eyes and picks up the phone. I think she's completely dismissed me, but then she hangs up the phone and tells me if I go back out to the front, the security guy will take me up to the mail room.

THANK YOU, I say. I will go right up there in just one second, I just need to stash this in my car [and make sure my car isn't being towed, which by this point I'm freaking out about just a little bit because it's been much longer than thirty seconds and oh god, I saw a city ticket lady one street over on the way in, what the hell was I thinking parking there]. I run (RUN, which I have not done in several months) out to the back entrance of the building, clutching my precious UPS box. The car is still there. The car doesn't have a ticket. I get in and move it into the parking garage, berating myself for not just parking there in the first place. I hate, hate, hate paying for parking (especially because we used to have a free pass to this exact garage, you know, back when Joel used to actually have an office here), but I reason that if all this idiot mistake ends up costing me is $7 for parking (rather than, you know, THE COST OF OUR ENTIRE AMAZON ORDER), I can count myself insanely lucky. I park in the garage and hustle back up to the front door, preparing my saddest, most pathetic pregnant lady face to tell my story to the mail room employees.  Except I never even get to the mail room, because in the time it took me to move the car it seems that Mr. Security Guard has gone to the mail room for me, retrieved the package, and has it waiting for me at the front door. THANK YOU, I tell him. Thank you so much. Thank you.

I go back to the parking garage, again feeling slightly irritated that I will now have paid $7 to park in the garage for less than five minutes, but WHATEVER. I should consider myself fortunate! Both packages found! Amazon was willing to refund my money! I fixed my bonehead mistake! THIS IS A GOOD DAY. I insert my credit card into the machine at the garage entrance, pay my $7, and take my little ticket back. As I get in the car I look at the clock and see that not only did I succeed in retrieving both packages and not getting the car towed, but I'm going to make it back to work in less than an hour.

Part Eight

I pull up to the garage exit and go to insert my paid ticket, except... it's not in my hand. Or in my purse. Or in the car console. Or... anywhere. I illegally back up so I'm not blocking the exit lane and start to go through my purse methodically. I cannot have lost this ticket between the machine downstairs and my car. It's just not possible! I didn't go anywhere, stop for anything, put anything down. It HAS to be in here somewhere.

It's not.

I take everything out of my wallet. I take every paper out of my purse. I look in the glove compartment, under the seat. I get out and look in the trunk, thinking maybe I dropped it when I put the second package back there. No. Ticket.

Part Nine

I hang my head in shame and go into the parking office next to the exit. I lost my ticket, I tell the lady working there. Somehow, between paying the machine and walking to my car I lost my ticket. I just paid. Just now. Two minutes ago. But I can't find my ticket. I paid with a credit card, is there anyway she can look it up? I furiously look away from the sign declaring "Lost Tickets Pay Maximum Daily Fee - No Exceptions".

She holds out her hand for my credit card and walks back to her computer. She scrolls through many screens. I stand there for at least five minutes. She obviously cannot find it. I resign myself to paying the $22 maximum fee, on top of the $7 I already paid, reasoning that it's still cheaper than getting the car towed. Or having to pay for an entire lost Amazon order. Things could be a whole lot worse.

OK, I see you, she says suddenly, handing back my credit card. Just pull up to the gate here and I'll let you through. Thank you, I tell her. Thank you so, so, so much.

Part Ten

We are not going to talk about how I had to park in the scary annex garage when I got back to work because there were no spaces in the regular garage, and then I spent fifteen minutes trying to find my damn way out of there. No, we're not going to discuss how the exit door had a sign that said "Push Hard - Door Will Open" but I pushed as hard as I could and the damn door did NOT open, so I had to go back up the stairs, back to the car, and walk all the way through the annex garage and the regular garage to get back out to the street.

Epilogue

We're also not going to talk about how I after work, I 1) forgot my purse in my office, and 2) was stopped by a kind lady on my way out of the bathroom who told me that my skirt was a little bit caught in my bag. Which was her nice way of saying "your skirt is tucked into your underwear."

Lie to me

So when exactly are you supposed to have that moment? You know, the moment where it really hits you that you're going to have an actual baby? Because we are currently at T-minus twenty-seven days and, yeah... I still don't really get it.

I feel like I've been pregnant for five million years. I am used to being pregnant. But I still can't quite grasp the idea that we're going to have an actual baby in twenty-seven days. (Please don't remind me that babies are known to show up before their due date. Twenty-seven days sounds soon enough.)

It's crazy to me that we won't be wondering whether it's a boy or a girl any more. We'll know. We'll be able to see this thing that's been doing gymnastics in my stomach. I just can't get my brain wrapped around that. I know it's true, but I just can't imagine what that's going to be like. At this point, I'm not sure if I'll actually get it until I see the actual baby in the hospital.

I will tell you this, though: I'm ready to be done with being pregnant. I think I've said that before, but I had no idea what I was talking about back then. This time I mean it. My feet hurt worse than I ever would have thought possible, from the superhuman task of sitting in an office chair most of the day. (Yes, I am walking around plenty and putting my feet up and all that. And yet, I wake up in the middle of the night to pee and actually limp to the bathroom because my heels hurt so much.)  My hands are so swollen that my fingertips are numb most of the day. I am officially up 30+ pounds, and man, it feels like it. I feel like a whale. And then I catch a glimpse of myself in a window or a mirror and I look even more whale-like than I feel! But at least whales can just pee in the ocean whenever they want without having to limp-waddle to the bathroom. Lucky bastards.

So yes, I am ready to be done with this gestational business. But at the same time I'd like to stretch out our pre-baby lives by just a few more weeks. On Sunday night as I was lamenting the untimely end of yet another weekend, I realized that we only have two more free weekends with just the two of us. Over Labor Day we have a wedding to go to, and the weekend after that is my last yoga teacher training. And then the baby is due two days later. So we have next weekend and the weekend after that to do our normal hang around the house, watch movies, run errands routine. Two more weekends of normalcy... for the rest of our lives. I can't comprehend this whole living, breathing baby thing but I can understand THAT. And... holy shit. Can I get a pause button or something?

Next Tuesday I'll officially be full term, 37 weeks. ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. I should basically be prepared to go into labor at any time after that.

Heh, labor. See, I'd kind of purposely forgotten about that, telling myself it was far away in the future and there was no point fretting about it. And now it's almost here and guys: I am scared.

During one of our yoga teacher trainings, the meditation teacher told a story that helped me immensely at the time. As the story goes, two young monks living in a remote monastery came across an older monk sitting on a bench. In his hand he had a pair of pliers. The pliers held a bloody tooth. The young monks were horrified and asked the older monk why he'd done such an awful thing -- pull out his own tooth with a pair of pliers! -- when they would have happily taken him to the dentist in the nearest village. "Didn't it hurt?" they asked him. "Well, it didn't hurt when I realized the tooth was rotten and needed to be pulled. It didn't hurt when I walked to the shed and got out the pliers. It didn't hurt when I put the pliers in my mouth. When pulled it out, that hurt for a moment. But now it doesn't hurt any more."

That story was exactly what I needed to hear at the time, after that horrible childbirth class had scared the pants off of both of us. There is nothing to be gained by working myself into a lather thinking about horrible labor is going to be. There is no point in scaring myself, worrying about what if my epidural doesn't work or what if I have to have a C-section and I can feel the doctor rooting around in my insides, what if I can't handle the contractions, what if the entire thing is just as terrible as everyone says it is. There is no turning back. It will be what it is, I will live through it, and then it will be over. The end.

Well, that was a lot easier to tell myself when it was still a nebulous event months and months away at some point in the unimaginable future. Not twenty-seven freaking days away. Or less! Oh god, it could be less. So I've been doing the sensible thing, staying awake until 3am worrying about it and being annoyed by my numb hands.

Tell me it's not going to be that bad. I don't care if you're lying.

**********

I can't believe that I am posting this picture, but here you go. Official 35-week photo! Next time Joel asks me if I really want to take a photo in my sweaty yoga clothes, please remind me to listen to the man.

 

(HEY LOOK IT'S A CRIB OMG. See guys, I told you we were going to get our act together eventually!)

(We don't exactly have a Pottery Barn nursery going on, but we are basically ready for the baby at home. Well, sort of. We have the crib set up. We have the somewhat random assortment of baby clothes that we own washed and stuffed into the drawers of a little changing table/dresser that we bought off Craigslist. We lugged all the hand-me-down stuff that was generously given to us by a coworker up from the basement. I have the vague feeling that we are going to need a whole lot more stuff -- for instance, we currently have three pairs of socks. Do you think we need more than that? What if we have about ten footed sleeper outfits? We're probably OK on socks then, right? I sure hope so, since the only socks I could find at Target that weren't for 6+months were those little Carter's gift sets that cost $7.99 for four pairs. I'm sorry, but I'm not paying $1 per sock. Plus, we don't have any more space for more stuff. So three pairs of socks is the limit. Sorry, baby. We should have registered for a bigger house instead of eight swaddling blankets.)

How the baby ruined our TV

A few months ago, Joel declared that we should cancel cable once the baby arrived to save money.

My first reaction was hell to the N-O. Fresh off reading this post, I was fairly terrified about feeling lonely, bored, and isolated during those first few months and I saw the suggestion as a personal affront. Sure, let's cancel cable! That sounds like a fantastic idea! While you're off at work with your fancy fast internet and your people to talk to and important work-things to do, I'll just sit at home with an infant attached to my boob, staring at the wall in silence! And while you're blissfully sleeping through the night I'll just wake up every two hours and quietly hold the baby with one arm while I hold up a copy of War and Peace in the other arm at 3am. Who needs TV when I can be educating myself AND feeding a baby in the middle of the night? And then I believe I cried. Have I mentioned that pregnancy hormones are fun?

Still, I was not pleased with the suggestion, even after I recovered my wits and peeled myself off the tear-stained floor.

BUT. Then we decided to actually do something about turning our second living room into the baby's room.  Previously, we had a big couch downstairs with a flat-screen TV connected to the main cable box and Xbox with surround sound and all that crap. We used this for Netflix Instant and occasionally one of those old-fashioned "DVD" thingies. On the second floor, we had a loveseat and a smaller TV connected to the Tivo. This is where we watched most of our TV (and coincidentally, where we ate dinner, since the coffee table up there doubled as our dining room table). So our first step in Preparing for Baby was to take the Tivo and coffee table downstairs and set them up in the Big TV Room. We then promptly (meaning five weeks later) put all the second floor room furniture on Craigslist. We weren't exactly following the What to Expect When You're Expecting Official Timetable to the letter, but whatever. Progress! We were making it! 

There was just one teensy little problem. When we connected the Tivo to the main cable box downstairs, it started recording every show with this little red flag icon instead of the happy green circle icon we have known and loved for many years. We ignored this at first. But then when I went to watch a rerun of Law and Order I'd recorded, I got this strange little warning telling me that "due to copyright settings," once I started the program, I'd have 24 hours to finish it before it was automatically deleted. Pardon moi? Upon further investigation, we learned that the little red flag also meant that we had only seven days to watch a recording before it was also automatically deleted.

As far as first world problems go, this was a pretty huge one. I came home one day to find Joel frantically watching an episode of Eureka. "I can't talk right now!" he said as he triple-beeped his way through the commercials, "I only have 36 minutes to finish 42 minutes of this show!" A week later, I stayed up way later than I wanted to in order to finish watching Project Runway after forgetting that it went to a 90-minute format last season. Normally I would have just stopped it whenever I felt like and resumed watching it when I was good and ready, whether that was the next day or two months later. BECAUSE THAT IS HOW TIVO IS SUPPOSED TO WORK. But no, I stayed up until the late, late hour of 11pm (shut up) and finished the goddamn show because I wasn't going to have time to watch it the next day. The whole time, I bitterly remembered the night I became utterly convinced that we needed to pony up for a Tivo. We were coming home from the grocery store and it was 7:57pm and Prison Break was about to come on. Joel slowed down while we passed the house and I jumped out of the still-moving car (possibly I have dramatized this evening in my mind a wee bit) and raced inside to set the VCR while he looked for a parking space. I struggled with getting the VCR properly set up and we missed the first ten minutes. This was back before all shows were available online, and also back when Prison Break was a good show. It was a tragedy of minor proportions and I decided I was sick of it. We got a Tivo a few weeks later and the Tivo set us free. The end. Until now.

This little copyright debacle has been going on for about a month, and friends: it sucks. We went on a babymoon vacation to South Carolina (and met the lovely Angela!) and while we were gone, all our shows were deleted. We can no longer bank up three or four episodes of a show and watch them back to back on the weekends. The Tivo is basically useless, and without the Tivo... TV is basically useless. And these two now-useless commodities are costing us $75 a month.

I tried contacting Tivo's customer service, and they were helpful enough, but ultimately concluded that it was a Comcast problem. I tried contacting Comcast and they were... not helpful. At all. The first person I spoke to on the phone said she'd never heard of such a thing and it must be a Tivo issue. The person I talked to on via their online chat help suggested that all our problems would be solved if we switched to a Comcast DVR for a low introductory price. As a last ditch effort, I tried contacting Comcast Bill on Twitter. I've seen other people have great success solving customer service problems via Twitter, and I figured it was worth a try. And what do you know -- it worked!

Well, sort of. It worked in that Comcast Bill put us on some kind of VIP Customer Service list and I got a call from a very nice gentleman who was very concerned about our problem that same afternoon. He agreed that we had a serious (SERIOUS) problem on our hands and set us up with a service appointment that same weekend.

It didn't so much work in that the service tech was unable to actually, you know, fix the problem. He tried switching out the cable box and spewed out a lot of mumbo jumbo about "cable cards" and our elderly Series 2 Tivo "not having one" (and he also had some helpful advice about how we should find out the sex of the baby so that we can know if we're "in for trouble" or not), but the bottom line is this: we either replace our perfectly fine Tivo with a newer model and pray that fixes the problem, or we suffer with the faulty copyright setting forever.

Strangely enough, I have almost stopped caring. It's the summer and there's not much on. I'm totally over Covert Affairs and Pretty Little Liars. So all my shows are getting deleted? Whatever. I'm just pissed that we're now paying $75 a month for, basically, nothing.

Friends, I think we are going to cancel cable. Hold me.