"Find Us a Dream that Don't Ask No Questions"

I survived the Neil Diamond concert with my mom, i.e she didn't say anything stupid and we had a good time.

For those of you who have never been to a Neil Diamond concert I must say you are missing out on prime people watching. For a dude in his mid 60's, Neil's got some pretty diverse fans. You have your trotted out cougars, double fisting drinks and falling all over themselves and Neil; older couples reliving their beginnings; families with little kids in tow(wha huh?); dudes with their friends and their moms; and believe it or not tons of young girls in their twenties.

The cougars were incredibly entertaining what with all their trips to the bar and tacky clothing and all.

What wasn't entertaining was the slore sitting in front of me with her boyfriend. Girlfriend had to be in her late 20's and was flipping her hair around like no tomorrow. Seriously, it was irritating. The HP Pavilion in San Jose does not give you tons of leg room and every time she flicked her long hair it would hit my leg, my popcorn, or my beer. Ewwwww. Besides that she and her boyfriend kept hugging on each other and would bang their arms into my legs. I was ready to knock a bitch out.

The poor guy sitting next to her, when she got up to dance a few times she was dancing with her butt in his face. She was one of those hip swayers and poor guy looked like he was trying to crawl over his wife's lap to get away. That was amusing but probably only because it wasn't directed at me.

Anyway, the concert was great except for the 80's tunes. I'm sorry, I just can't stomach 80's era Neil. I'm a Live at the Greek purist. I could have shoved an ice pick in my ear during America, Forever in Blue Jeans, or You Don't Bring me Flowers. Thank the Lord he didn't sing Heartlight. I would have had to go purchase another beer for that one.

For those that love Neil I bring to you my crappy Sweet Caroline video. I was being a bad girl doing it when I wasn't even supposed to have a camera, but see how much I love you?


We had kick ass center seats but sadly, with my camera it seems so far away. You can also see swaying irritating people in front of us. That was hair flip girl and her bald headed boyfriend.

And You Call Yourself Family?

Yesterday was a bitch.

Even though I had been spotting for days and my temps were down I still had a tiny bit of hope. That was crushed at 3 am when I woke up with cramps so bad I could have ripped my uterus out and not cared.

Cycle 19 staring me in the face. Joy! Knowing that cycle 19 is already a dud due to Alex being out of town three or four days before I O, was another reason to be depressed. His sperm can hardly last an hour, they certainly won't last three days.

Yesterday we were travelling to the Bay Area to my cousin's little girl's 4th birthday. I had to stop in Target to get her a b'day present and had to steel myself against the onslaught of pregnant bellies and little ones. Blech. Sometimes I hate Target. Yesterday was one of those days.

We get to the party and everything is fine. Both my cousins (who are like my sisters) have two kids each, a boy and a girl. My mother fawns on them, as does most everyone else.

At one point I'm looking at this baby doll that belongs to Taylor, the birthday girl. It is hideous. Seriously, I don't think I've seen an uglier baby doll. First, off it's huge. No newborn is that size. It's the size of a small linebacker, or at least an overweight one year old. Secondly, it's molded face is awful. It would give most people the creeps. As a joke I covered it's face with its hat and placed it face down in the moses basket it was in. No big deal. Alex and my step daughter were laughing because they thought it was scary too.

I guess my mom was watching be because she looks at me and says,

"No wonder you don't have any kids"













Has that sunk in yet? Yeah, that's what I thought too. I slowly got up off the couch and ran outside so I could sob. Alex ran out to hold me and just let me cry.

WTH! She knew I had just started my period. She knows what I am going through. She has gone to RE appointments with me when my husband couldn't and cried with me when I got bad results. She fucking knew better.

Later, I try to compose myself and return to the party. My mom comes over to apologize but then says, "Kathy (my aunt) says I didn't say anything wrong". What a way to apologize mom. I could give a crap what my aunt thinks. Of course she doesn't think my mom said anything wrong. She doesn't have any clue what it is like to have IF daughters. She doesn't understand IF at.all.

My younger cousin takes me aside and tries to comfort me, which was surprising and very nice considering she was a total bitch that we have hardly talked to her in a year and a half since she didn't go to our wedding (it's a long story). I thought she knew about our IF because my mom had told my aunt and my other cousin so I thought Jill would have known as well. Guess she didn't or didn't think too hard about it.

She didn't understand, of course, and proceeded to tell me how she had two abortions (I knew about one) and when she couldn't get knocked up with a couple different boyfriends after seven years, she thought God was punishing her. Uhhhhhh. I just sat there nodding. I know she was trying to help so I didn't go off on her. Sometimes I think they only people who know how to help and what to say are those going through it themselves.

Anyway, long story short, we rode home in silence. I was still too pissed at my mom to talk. I hadn't talked to her the rest of the night while we were at the party. Once we got home I sat in the car and talked to her. She just cried and cried. See, my mom holds everything in and doesn't tell people when they upset her. I'm the opposite. I have to let it out or it eats me up. She has a hard time with that. She said she didn't mean to say that, that it came out wrong. She took me telling her that what she said was, "one of the cruelest things she could say" to mean that she, herself was cruel. She didn't see that telling me my aunt's comment sounded like an excuse for her behavior. She thinks she doesn't know what to say to me anymore because I get upset a lot.

Yet another reason why IF sucks.

At the end we ended up being ok. We needed to be because today I'm talking her to a Neil Diamond concert.

The Spaniard in Me is Insulted

Dear Senator McCain, this is Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

He lives here:



Not here:



You idiot.

Do you now want to attack Spain too?

Drill, Drill, Drill

I love Eve Ensler. I have had the honor of seeing her perform her play The Good Body at ACT in San Francisco. It was amazing and such a powerful statement of how women perceive their bodies and self worth. Some of you may recognize her as the playwrite of The Vagina Monologues. Today I read this commentary she wrote on Sarah Palin and wanted to share it.

Found in the Huffington Post

Drill, Drill, Drill
by Eve Ensler
Posted September 8, 2008 01:18 PM (EST)

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Well, We are Still Here

Neener, neener. Of course now I'm exhausted.

Alex and I stayed up to watch the webcast but it was down. Seems like the brilliant scientists didn't consider that there would be thousands of people interested in such a webcast causing crashes and error messages. You'd think they would have had the foresight to have mirror sites up.

Of course this morning I noticed they do now. Either way that was lame to stay up and not get to see/hear anything.

The first beam was successful. They sent protons around both ways. Sadly, they didn't do any collisions. I guess we'll have to wait for that black hole another day...LOL

Particle Physics is Supa Dupa Fly

5, 4, 3, 2, ....



No, we are not going to be swallowed up in a black hole. And if we were, we wouldn't even know it was happening. Regardless, the hype of the danger of CERN's LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is silly. My husband is silly too because he actually sort of believes everything will end tonight at midnight. I will be sitting on the couch next to him, watching the live streaming on the big screen TV, and laughing my ass off.

All in all, I think it is amazingly cool and I won't even pretend to understand much in the ways of particle or theoretical physics. What I do know is that these experiments could change the way we think of the world, the Big Bang, and honestly change the field of science all-together.

So ATLAS, ALICE, and CMS; do your stuff! I can't wait to see what you find...even if I'll be exhausted tomorrow.

As an add on for the science geeks out there...this is too funny. I've even shared it with my fifth graders though it went way over their heads.

Liar, Liars, Pants on Fire

Just read this and thought it was too good not to pass on.

I couldn't watch all of the drivel on TV last night, it was making our stomachs churn. Hoever, I caught bits of them, did read a lot of the speeches online and have been following the analysts and whatnot. That said, I caught many of these comments and thought, whoa they are lying through their teeth. The comment about Palin getting more votes than Biden is the most laughable and interestingly enough, the biggest lie.

From: AP link

Attacks, praise stretch truth at GOP convention
By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer

Wed Sep 3, 11:48 PM ET


ST. PAUL, Minn. - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her Republican supporters held back little Wednesday as they issued dismissive attacks on Barack Obama and flattering praise on her credentials to be vice president. In some cases, the reproach and the praise stretched the truth.


Some examples:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate."

THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

PALIN: "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise
business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.

Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.

He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise.

MCCAIN: "She's been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply ... She's responsible for 20 percent of the nation's energy supply. I'm entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America," he said in an interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson.

THE FACTS: McCain's phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she's no more "responsible" for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state — by population.

MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.

THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."

THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: "We need change, all right — change from a
liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."

THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate

Now, I'm not saying the left doesn't stretch the truth but come on, the right did nothing but play on fear and sling mud and insults last night. Where is the substance? Where are the issues? What is your platform? Redamndiculous.