Do you suppose many women opt for the generic brand of pregnancy test when weighing their options in the grocery store aisle? Logically, I’m sure that the generic brands must be just as effective, tested, and reliable as the well-known ones, but when I see that easily identifiable generic packaging (you know the kind I mean, where the name and color scheme are almost like a name brand competitor, but not quite close enough to be grounds for a lawsuit), I don’t think, “oh, a bargain!” Instead, I figure this is not the time to be frugal.

Although, I suppose that thinking’s kind of crazy, since I have no problem accepting generic prescription drugs, which actually go into my body and could cause me to grow extra limbs and start spinning and mumbling about aliens if mixed incorrectly.

Anyway, how do you compare pregnancy test choices? A growing number seem to offer an extra test free, but I worry that this means the first one might not be too reliable and they are suggesting you test twice. All the packaging reads about the same, except for one test that claimed it could potentially tell if you were pregnant up to three days before your period was scheduled to start. 60% of the time it could tell that. What good is 60% of the time? 40% of the time it’s wrong? Are they just looking for repeat customers who then have to spend another $15 during a more accurate time in their cycle?

I don’t really understand how pregnancy tests work. Or really how conception works, if I’m being honest. I mean, I get the sex part, but ovulation and fertilization and how plan B can work for a certain number of days and you can only get pregnant when you ovulate except when you can get pregnant at other times? It’s all a big blur. I blame it on my high school for letting me skip health class to take a writing workshop.

(I also never took driver’s ed, but that’s probably not strictly relevant to the technical details of pregnancy except that my stepdad said that girls shouldn’t have their own cars, but boys could, because girls could get pregnant. Obviously.)

The lesson is this: look at your pill pack when the pharmacist hands it to you.

I know, I know. You’ve been on the pill for 14 years. You get the concept. You have mastered the art of popping that pill out the back of the plastic. You don’t need to look. Believe me, you should look. Otherwise, day 7 will come and you will just so happen to look at your pack as you pop out the pill and you will notice that the pack was in the cute little holder UPSIDE DOWN. And it will hit you like a crawling baby headed for your breast: YOU HAVE BEEN TAKING THE “INERT” PILLS FOR SIX DAYS. And during that time, you have had sex at least twice.

What you should probably not do at this moment? Take all seven pills at once. It will seem like a good idea at the time, but later, when you read the instructions that you normally throw away, because honestly, who needs all that stuff after 14 years of the same old disclaimers about blood clots and smoking and cancer, you will learn that once you skip three days, you’re screwed. Or, actually, you shouldn’t get screwed, if I’m being technically accurate. And also? Taking seven days of the pill all at once makes you a little queasy. A lot queasy actually. And queasiness is not a feeling you need when you’re thinking back to engaging in that activity you thought you were so carefully avoiding — unprotected sex — since queasiness is also a symptom of the result of said activity.

I called my friend E., who has a health class background.

“I feel really icky. I think this means I must be pregnant.”

“I think this means you took seven days of pills at once. I don’t think you get morning sickness if you’re like three days pregnant. Besides, you don’t ovulate at the beginning of your cycle.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. I’ll check around at work.”

All of E.’s coworkers now think she’s the one who’s pregnant, but it was for the greater good of getting me anecdotal evidence about when I might be ovulating. Which obviously is more important. Her coworkers (with backgrounds in actually having children, so even better than having attended health class) said that you ovulate starting with the 21st day of your cycle. So, then we tried to figure out what the first day of your cycle is. The first day of your period? The first day of your new pill pack? And then I read on the Internet that you can start ovulating as early as day 8. So, that was confusing. And E. said that when you go off the pill you can’t get pregnant right away, but I think that’s a myth right up there with “pulling out in time.”

We both started to feel inadequate as women. Surely we should know about our own ovulation cycles. E. said that she gets cramps when she ovulates, and then I got confused about whether you ovulated at all when you were on the pill. What is ovulation then? What does the pill really do to prevent you from getting pregnant anyway?

She suggested that I stop worrying and take a pregnancy test already. So, I went down to Safeway to check out my options, which is when I discovered that you can’t take the test until you’ve missed your period, unless you want to take the 60% accurate one, and even then you have to wait until three days before. And then I was even more confused because if conception happens the day before your period, the test will work when you’re two days pregnant? But if conception happens three weeks before your period, the test won’t work when you’re two weeks pregnant? Doesn’t the test measure some hormone in the blood? Does that hormone not pop up until your (theoretical) period?

All I knew for sure is that I could not take a test to confirm that my icky feelings were due to a birth control overdose. I called E.

“What? We don’t have technology for that yet? We can go into space but we can’t tell if someone’s pregnant?”

Apparently not.

According to the instructions that came with the pill pack, if you miss more than three days, you should take one pill a day until you get to Sunday and then you should start a new pill pack, and after you’ve taken pills for seven consecutive days, it’s all sex all the time! Although now that I think about it, there must be more to it than that, right? Maybe I didn’t read far enough or missed some crucial part. But I panicked, OK? I was like, fuck, the pill pack was fucking upside down! I didn’t exactly think clearly.

The instructions warned that I probably would not have a period at the regular time, what with the back-to-back pill packs. I took the old pill pack until the next Sunday (a week), then started a new pack. This time, I checked to make sure the pills were right side up. Ahem.

About a week later, I was talking to a coworker about my pill fiasco. It’s not that I normally chat up my coworkers about sex but we’d both had a couple of glasses of wine. So now you all know the truth: I’m the slut of the office and I drink on the job. Right. So, we’re drinking wine and I’m telling her about the whole upside down thing and she was horrified because apparently she too takes her pill in the dark. So then she mentions that she recently had some pharmacy issues and couldn’t get her pills until three days after she was supposed to start them and so the pharmacist said she had to start over and wait the entire month until she’d taken the entire pack before she’d be safe. Well, the pharmacists said two to four weeks, but what the hell does that mean? You could be good to go in two weeks but maybe not until four? But go ahead and try two weeks, what the hell?

Anyway, I wasn’t really thinking much about her problem. Instead, I thought, fuck, I started my pack a whole week late. If she’s supposed to wait until the next pill pack, what about my instructions and the whole, once you take the pill for a week you can have all the sex you want?

Clearly, I should never have sex if I can’t figure out something as simple as birth control pills and my own cycle that I’ve had since I was 12.

So, then I started trying to calculate ovulation and do math again and that didn’t work any better than it did the first time. And I couldn’t help thinking about my niece who is wonderful and the best thing ever, but was a result of my sister taking her pill faithfully every day but naively adding St. John’s Wort to her daily regimen. The confidence of the pill is tenuous at best!

(Speaking of confidence in the pill, I was at the orthopedic surgeon’s office the other day and I asked him about the side effects of some drug he was prescribing and he said that it wasn’t “all that dangerous”, although probably “more dangerous than Vioxx”, which was taken off the market (he seemed bitter about this particularly). But I shouldn’t use that as a gauge because the most dangerous drug prescribed is birth control pills and they’re still on the market! They probably kill 50 women a year with blood clots! And Vioxx only killed nine! So I shouldn’t take the pill because I’m not smart enough to and because it will kill me.)

I missed my period like the instructions said I would. No real surprise since I was in week two of the new pack. But still…

I ended up back at the Safeway aisle. It’s difficult to compare pregnancy test packaging when a man is leaning against the shelf in question, pondering pain relievers. Dude, just pick one and go. They all are equally ineffective. I looped around and picked up a roasted chicken. Still the headachy guy blocked the tests. I grabbed a loaf of french bread, some cheese. Finally, the aisle was clear. What is the etiquette on blocking the pregnancy tests anyway? Shouldn’t you be able to consider the benefits of each one with some presumption of privacy? I realize this is irrational since he was in a public grocery store, but do I seem in any way rational in handling any part of this situation?

I was back to the question of which one to get. I had ruled out the 60% accurate one anyway. And the packs of two. I went with the most expensive single test. No skimping for me! I got it home and unwrapped the package. It had a computer chip in it. There was a part that collects the er, testing material and then I had to slide that into another part and there was an eject button and everything. And an LCD display. Technology has advanced far beyond the one line or two to which I am accustomed. Not that I’m complaining. The one line or two thing was an exercise in neurosis. Where’s the line? How long do I have to wait for a line? Wait, there it is. It’s one line! But, is that a blur of the first line or a second line? Did I jostle the test and screw it up? Why do the makers of this test hate me?!

This one had a little flashing icon to let me know it was still testing. And then, there it was, “Not Pregnant”. I checked again a few minutes later to make sure the display hadn’t changed to say “ha ha, just kidding!” And since I work in the software industry, I couldn’t help but think about the glitches possible with a computer chip doing your pregnancy test. What if the program gets screwed up and sends a 0 when it should be sending a 1 and the opposite result displays? What if something’s wrong with the display itself and the “not” shows up when it shouldn’t?

I told myself that surely the QA testing for this industry is particularly rigorous and and decided I wasn’t pregnant and the threw the test away. I was tempted to dig it out of the trash later and make sure the display hadn’t changed, but since I had used such good judgment throughout this situation, I didn’t want to ruin my good track record by being silly.

Clearly I can’t be trusted with birth control. P. is going to talk to the doctor about a vasectomy tomorrow. It was either that or crash a high school health class.

Maybe I need a different career, if only so I’ll get to deal with new problems. I am so tired of dealing with the same petty, political, this-should-not-be-so-fucking-hard, I just want to do my job crap over and over again. I’ve been doing the same thing for twelve years. Which means I’ve had the same arguments and the same ridiculous uphill battles and the same brick walls keeping me from just getting my job done already about 3,000 times. I’ve double-checked the math. I’m pretty sure it’s right.

I’m not saying that any other career would be better, or not have just as many annoying parts, but at least they would be new annoying parts. I could think creatively to solve the artificially created problems that people decided to stack up in front of me rather than just pull out the same solution that worked the last 2,500 times.

I often fantasize about being a stop sign holder for road construction. How awesome would that be? You just hold up the sign and make people stop and then at the end of the day, you go home. Of course, there’s all the rain and sun and wind and loud noises from the sledgehammer and possiblity of dying from someone not paying attention and running you over and how if you don’t tell someone to stop when you should they might end up hitting someone coming the other way head-on, so I suppose there are drawbacks to any job.

What I know is that I have what is probably the best job that exists for my particular field, background, and interests. And I still need a margarita at the end of the day.

Alternate careers I am considering:

Book reviewer
pro: I could read books all day
con: some of them might be really crappy but I’d have to read to the end

Novelist
pro: I could write books all day
con: what if no one published or bought anything and I starved?

Chef
pro: I could cook all the time
con: working at a restaurant sounds really stressful and hard, especially now that I’ve seen Hell’s Kitchen

Translator for the UN
pro: I could look all cool with the earpiece
con: I’d have to learn other languages and learn to multitask

Politician
pro: I could change the world!
con: I probably couldn’t change anything and would get so frustrated I’d stab myself in the eye

Iron Chef judge
pro: awesome food
con: trout eyeball ice cream

You see my dilemma.

I know I have mentioned before that P. and I should not be trusted with a house, and we discover new ways every day where this continues to be true. Take, for instance, our dryer situation. You know how I said our shiny new dryer had the incessant beeping that was slowly but irreparably driving us mad and we climbed up on the roof to inspect the dryer vent, but it seemed to look normal and venty and anyway we couldn’t get the top part off?

Well, we couldn’t take either the sanity-depriving beeping or the huge piles of clothes, and so we determined to fix things once and for all. P.’s parents were visiting and his dad had left a note with diagrams and instructions that he titled “I need to vent, by dad”. His idea was to attach something small but heavy to a rope and then lower that down into the vent to see if it went all the way down or got stuck somewhere. The small yet heavy object we decided on was a fork, in case you were wondering.

So, P. went back up on the roof with the rope and the fork and we hoped that our neighbors didn’t choose this moment to welcome us to the neighborhood. And with my shouted encouragement (that I know made all the difference), he managed to get the vent cover off. He lowered the rope until it hit something and then he told me to go down to the laundry room and stick my hand up the hole in the wall where the vent goes to see if I could feel the fork.

Seriously. He wanted me to stick my hand up a dark hole in the wall when just the day before I was making the bed and found one of the hugest spiders I had ever seen not on TV or in the scary spider room at the zoo. It was nestled up all happy right under my pillow. And when I started screaming and hyperventilating, P. ran in and claimed it probably was not a spider I had seen and started waving around the sheets to prove that it was nothing while I waited for the huge spider to be flung at my head and he kept saying, “see, no spider!” Only then he saw it and was all, “oh yeah, I guess that’s a pretty big spider” and was going to use a piece of paper to transport it outside. And I said, are you a nutcase? That spider is going to crawl off that paper and kill us all. And so I made him trap it in a plastic container. Only now that I’m thinking about it, I hope he washed that container with bleach and scalding hot water before putting it back in the drawer or quite possibly the soup I made the other night is sitting in a spider-contaminated container and I might have to go to the new age health store and get spider cleansing pills or something. I already have to cope with the trauma of possibly having slept with a gigantic spider under my head, and I just really don’t want to think about this anymore.

The point is, he wanted me to stick my hand into a possible spider nest, and I was wondering if this “home ownership” thing and really, even this “dating” thing was really such a good idea. As I walked through the garage to get to the laundry room, I heard the fork banging on something. But it was nowhere near the laundry room. It was directly above the hot water heater. So, apparently our “dryer vent” was actually a “hot water heater vent”, but who knew a house has so many vents? And anyway, it was the only vent we saw any hot air coming out of, but I guess we had been running the washing machine at the same time and probably hot water was involved, so maybe that was a false lead.

Which left P. holding a rope with a fork tied to it, on the roof, and no idea where the actual dryer vent was. I turned on the dryer and we looked for some sign. He walked around the roof and inspected all the various vent-like items. I walked around the house and looked at all the walls. Nothing. We were beginning to understand why the dryer was so irritated with us and did all the beeping before.

We went to Home Depot and got some more dryer hose and vented it out the laundry room window to see if the lack of ventilation really was the problem. Sure enough, no more beeping! Of course, now we had a dryer hose hanging out our window. P.’s parents showed up right about then and suggested that we cut a hole in the wall and make our own vent. That just seemed like a lot more work than the rope and the fork thing.

Then we got distracted by crawling around under the house. Or, actually P. did. See above, re: huge spiders on my lack of enthusiasm about that activity. He went under there to check out the floor support beams or something or other, since he found some discussion forum where all these tile guys hang out talking about tiling and so obviously he has to check the support beams to see if ours are as big as theirs or something about weight to support travertine or… I’m not really sure exactly except that it will probably involve me in the crawl space somehow.

And while he was down there, he found the dryer vent. The hose apparently goes all the way under the house to other side and is supposed to vent out the side of the wall under the deck. Only the hose part doesn’t actually make it all the way to the wall. It’s just kind of laying on the ground. In the crawl space. Under the house. We don’t know a lot about dryers, but we’re pretty sure this isn’t right.

So, the point is, we are responsible homeowners after all, able to troubleshoot our issues and find the root cause. Of course, we have no idea what to do about the situation now and P.’s parents have gone home so we won’t be getting any more helpful diagrams with ropes and forks. In the meantime, the dryer hose out the window works remarkably well.

Maybe we should write a do-it-yourself home repairs book or host our own show on DIY.

P.’s truck was broken into yesterday when he was at the gym. It was the middle of the afternoon in a crowded parking lot, and the gym manager thinks the surveillance camera got the guys on tape. The police said not to expect to hear anything, though. All they took was the Comcast HD DVR/receiver that P. was bringing back for service. Maybe they thought it was some fancy DVD player or that they could get money for it on the street, but not only was it defective, the cable company deactivated it as soon as we reported it stolen. So, good luck to the thieves.

It was a quick smash and grab, so I suppose it could have been worse, since they didn’t take the time to look in the center compartment and thusly, didn’t find P.’s wallet. I wouldn’t say he was lucky or anything, because how lucky is it to have your truck broken into in the first place?

He was pissed when he called me. Obviously. I called the cable company and then picked up a new receiver. Did you know those things cost $700? Either did we. Another sucky thing is that if we file an insurance claim, we have to file one with the car insurance for the window and another with the homeowner’s insurance for the theft. Which means two $500 deductibles. Plus, potentially two raised insurance rates. It sucks all around.

At first I thought P. was just upset because of the money and the hassle and the glass all over the truck, but just before he got home from work last night, I remembered how I felt when my car was broken into. I felt violated, vulnerable. At risk. You always know that these things can happen, but you don’t really think they will. Not that that you think you are invincible and nothing can happen to you. You lock your doors and try not to walk down dark alleys alone and all of that. But you don’t actively think about it all the time. You don’t spend your days paranoid and suspicious. Once something like this happens, you can’t help it for a while, I think. You realize this could happen any time. You can lock your truck and park it in a busy parking lot in the middle of the day in a generally crime-free part of town, and someone can still come by and smash your windows in.

So, I wondered if P. would be feeling like that.

When he got home, he was quiet. If it had been me, I would probably cry. But he’s not the type to cry. Sometimes it helps, to be the crying type. You can at least get through some of your initial frustration. What can you do with that emotion if you don’t cry? I guess he could break something, but then all he’d end up with is two broken things. Not much point in that.

He wanted to try and park the truck in the garage, but we soon found that it’s too long. Which was just one more frustration on top of the rest. We went to Home Depot and that’s when I realized he really was a little freaked out. He asked if maybe we should get deadbolts for all of the exterior doors. The doors right now just have regular locks, no deadbolts. So, we loaded up on deadbolts and bigger drill bits so we could make new holes in the doors. He installed the one on the front door last night, although I don’t know how much safer it made him feel.

The other thing I was thinking about was how this didn’t really upset me all that much. I mostly thought, well that sucks, I guess we’ll have to pay and move on. When I was younger, I would have been bothered by it a lot more. Sure, part of it is that I didn’t have as much money back then. Not that $700 plus how ever much the window is going to cost doesn’t seem like a lot of money now or anything, but I remember a time when $700 was more than I made in a month. Before taxes.

But mostly it’s that I’ve been through this before, and worse. And I know that we have savings to cover it. I guess this is what savings is for, really. We like to think that it’s for vacationing in the south of France and getting spa treatments when we’re retired, but really it’s for people breaking into your car and stealing your DVR.

Is this what maturity is? Not the wise experience of years, but simply experiencing these setbacks until they are no longer new and shocking, they are simply life? The beaten down apathy that comes when you realize these things have happened before, will happen again, and there’s nothing you can do so why beat yourself up about it and be more miserable than you have to be? Is that what it means to grow up?

We are now homeowners. It makes me a little giddy, being in this house, knowing that it’s ours. It feels exactly like home, even now, with the boxes piled everywhere, and no idea where the majority of my clothes might be, and with the bathroom sink crowded with soap and toothpaste and brushes and everything else including a q-tip box since there’s no way we’re putting anything into the cabinets or drawers until we’ve cleaned them out.

There is one slight drawback. It is that we are homeowners. Which means we have to figure out how to clean the dryer vent and get the icemaker in the refrigerator repaired and find a way to replace a single pane of a double pane window. Because if there’s one thing we can say about the previous homeowners, it is that no one would ever mistake them for being meticulous.

I’d say half the lightbulbs in the house are either missing or burnt out, and that includes all of the lightbulbs in the refrigerator and the ones in the garage door opener. One bulb, in fact, in a recessed can light, is missing the glass portion and all that is left is the part you screw in and the filament.

When you attempt to get ice from the door dispenser of the refrigerator, you simply get a humming for your troubles. Anyone know if this means the motor is not working or the dispenser is plugged or if we have to get an entirely new dispenser unit? It’s a GE Profile and if you think the previous homeowners left a manual for it, you are far too optimistic. The more troubling thing about the refrigerator is that it often makes a very loud noise, close to a rumbling really, when you close the door. It’s like the engine has kicked into overdrive and is trying to climb one last hill. We hope this doesn’t mean we have to replace the compressor or the refrigerator entirely, because we paid the previous, apparently not only non-meticulous, but also not very forthcoming homeowners $800 for this refrigerator in a transaction separate from the actual home purchase. We could have bought a completely functional refrigerator for that price.

We were very excited at our purchase of a shiny, new, high-tech Bosch front-loading washer and dryer set, but we can’t use that all. When we run the cool, high-tech dryer, it starts beeping at us (loudly) and flashes a warning about the lint trap. However, as the dryer is new and no clothes have yet been dried in it, the lint trap is also sparkly clean and fresh. The manual says to clean the lint trap. Or possibly the dryer vent. We went on the roof and looked at the opening of said vent. We weren’t sure what we are supposed to do with it. We can’t even figure out out to get the cover off. But it was fun to go on the roof, anyway.

I called the appliance store. We bought our washer and dryer from the local appliance store rather than say, Sears, because we had been lured by promises of exemplary service after the sale. Maybe they hooked it up wrong? Or could at least provide some guidance as to what to do next, as we could not use the appliance for which we paid them $1000 at all.

Ahem.

First, the customer service person asked if I was perhaps using the wrong soap. I said that I doubted the soap was the cause of my troubles. Well, is my laundry room small? Was I trying to use the dryer with the door closed? Huh? I asked if the dryer was so fragile that it would not work in a small room with a closed door, because if that was the case, I might not want this dryer after all. But in any case, it’s in a large room and the door is open. But what is the return policy, just in case, I asked. She told me I would have to talk to my salesperson about that. There’s not a standard return policy? She avoided my question and scheduled a service call more than a week away.

We have a lot of laundry to do. This is not anywhere near as funny as it might sound.

P. sent me a text message: “Don’t use the dryer until I get home.”

Then he called me. “Did you get my message? Because I was reading on the Internet that if you use the dryer when the vent is clogged, you could get carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Well, I was already planning not to turnon the dryer to avoid the incessant beeping, but I’d rather stay clear of carbon monoxide also. So much for the dryer.

Have I mentioned that P. is slightly into things being clean? And that the previous homeowners really were not? The aforementioned unreliable refrigerator was coated in food: syrupy sticky goop, moldy crumbs. P. spent six hours just cleaning the stove. It was encased in several inches of grease and food that made the actual stove nearly impossible to find. The bathtubs were coated in grime, the walls covered with nails. All the floors are completed obscured by dog hair.

There are other problems. The master bathroom door doesn’t close. One of the bedroom doors has a gaping hole in it. The carpet is so stained and dirty we have avoided walking on it with bare feet. Most of the outlets looks as though they are waiting to electrocute us. And that double pane window missing a pane? Well, it has little pieces of jagged glass surrounding the entire casing.

But I walk into this house, and I’m happy. We can cook together in the kitchen without pushing each other out of the room. I can sit here, in my chair, with my laptop, and watch the birds in the trees. The cats are finding new places to curl up and nap.

We’ll deal with the problems one by one and at the end of it, we’ll be home.