Hot Flash Pedicure Chinatown

I realize that my title is random, but I had a really hard time sticking to a single topic in his blog post.

SO, my hot flashes need to be gone before I can start the Clomid. The Clomid won't work if the Lupron is in my system still. I called the nurse today to schedule an appointment with my doctor. She asked me if I was still experiencing any hot flashes and I was like, "I can't really remember... I had a busy day." So after I hung up with her and then had a hot flash like five seconds later. Seriously?!?

I have a phone appointment this Friday to talk to my doctor and I'm going to refer to my notebook with all the questions. I'm nervous that I'll take the Clomid either too early or too late and mess up my chance to get pregnant one of my three months. I hope there's some sort of blood test that they can do to tell me when I should start. I just don't want my inability to remember when I've had my most recent hot flash mess me up.

So maybe April 1st will not end up being my first Clomid day... I hope the next doctor's appointment will bring some reassuring answers.

Had a bit of a stressful day at work, so Caitlin and I went and got pedicures. Seriously, I LOVE pedicures! I never had one before I lived around these high fulootin northern Virginianers, but NOW I'm seriously addicted. It was the perfect thing to get my mind off of work.

Oh yeah, Doug will be home on Monday!!!!!!!!!!!


Here's one of his latest emails, so you can be jealous with me:

Last night, I decided to visit Chinatown, since I’m trying to cram as much as I possibly can into the next several days. The experience was definitely memorable – first, I walked to the river and took a “water taxi”, which would probably be more appropriately named a “water bus.” It is a long wooden speedboat with very low benches that you hop on at one of the various stops on the river, and then you proceed down the river at a speed that seems well beyond safe. A series of blue tarps strung to hand-drawn pulleys on the sides of the boat prevent you from getting too wet. The ride is a little unsettling, but at ten baht (33 cents) to get across town, it’s cheaper than a taxi or even the BTS skytrain.
 
Once I arrived at the proper stop, I realized Chinatown was not within easy walking distance, so I braved my first tuk-tuk – little three-wheeled contraptions with a driver in the front and a bench seat in the back, powered by either a small motorcycle engine or a large lawnmower engine. Tuk-tuks are named such because the engines make a “tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk” sound when they’re riding across town. They are also renown for being rip-offs, and this tuk-tuk was no exception – a Thai who spoke remarkably good English told me that for 20 baht, his tuk-tuk driver would take me to see some touristy sites and then to see some “Thai Fashion”, and then ultimately on to my destination of Chinatown. 20 baht is extremely cheap and I know going into it that it’s similar to a timeshare scam, but I go ahead anyway because I want to see it and it’s cheap. I got to see some really cool Buddha statues and temples. “Thai fashion” was, as expected, the hook – a tailor pays this guy to get tourists onto tuk-tuks and into his store so he can sell low-quality tailored suits and shirts. I was able to turn it around and found out that the wife of my salesman worked as a maid for one of the people at the US embassy, and subtly suggested to him that being extremely pushy with me might result in my “good friend” at the embassy finding a new maid, and I was immediately free to leave. The tuk-tuk drove me to my destination with no further sales stops.
 
Chinatown was intense – I think it was moreso since it was an extremely foreign culture inside of another extremely foreign culture. I have a friend at the embassy here who is a native of China, and he warned me that Chinese people are much more rude than Thais and will try harder to rip you off. Sure enough, the first street vendor I visited tried to rip me off by saying the price of the food was 15 baht and then when I gave him a twenty, he said “nooo… fifty baht”, to which I responded that I was not a farang (foreigner) and that I wanted my five baht or else I would call the police. He gave me my five baht and doubled my order for the “mis-understanding.” Sadly, most of the shops were closed by the time I got there, so I will have to visit this Saturday to see some of the famous woodwork that can be purchased for cheap in Chinatown.

Better get back to some REAL work!

Doug