Guns, Needles, & Jugs…. Crazy!

It has been a crazy busy week full of guns, acupuncture needles, and old jugs and not the kind you find on old ladies.

Around the end of last year I got my pistol permit. I wanted to get a pistol for the personal and home protection. So after a few trips to numerous gun shops, I finally settled in on a Glock 19 Gen III 9 mm. But before I loaded it and headed off to the range I knew that I wanted to have some training first. That led me to a two night basic handgun safety and training course that Seneca Guns Sports was putting on in Watkins Glen. So Monday and Tuesday I drove all the way down to Watkins Glen for the class from 6-9 pm.

The class was actually a really good class with tons of hands on training and heavy on safety. The best part of the class was the guy who was putting it on brought in 20-25 guns ranging from palm sized .22 derringers to full sized 9 mms to a 50 cal revolver with a leupold scope that he uses “to hunt deer”. He had numerous revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. He laid them all out on the table and everybody came up to the table and picked a gun then went through everything from loading and unloading to take downs of each gun. So I handled a ton of guns for about an hour. It was awesome!

So the gun course killed two days of the week, and it was on to round 2. A friend from work mentioned that she was having acupuncture to help her quit smoking. I told her I had seen stuff at the fertility center about an acupuncturist that did it for male infertility and I had thought about it. She said that the acupuncturist that she sees also does treatment for male infertility and was local. So I sucked it up and called and made an appointment. I am not sold on the whole “eastern medicine” scene, but hell anything is worth a shot right.

After the initial interview process the acupuncturist says she can give me a treatment regime to try and treat my fertility issues and asks if I am ready to start. I agree and she leads me back to the room with the table. I hop up on the table not knowing what  to expect, and she tells me that I can leave my clothes on just roll up my jeans to just above the knee and pull up my shirt to expose my belly. Ok cool I can handle this. Then she starts with the needles, which are actually pretty painless. I get stuck with 25 the first time. She puts one in the top of my head, about 6 around my ankles and arches of my feet, two in each knee and the the rest below my navel. I was not ready for that part, I figured that she would just stick them in my abdomen, well she did but it was just the lower lower abdomen. I folding my boxers down low and proceeded to start popping needles from just below my belly button to about an inch above the base of my junk. It didn’t hurt but it was a little more personal/close to my stuff than I had imagined and I think it moved a little. I don’t know if it was supposed too but it did.

So she gets all of the needles in, turns on the good old pan flute music and tells me to relax and she would be back in 15 minutes. No problem, I lay back and relax. It was pretty peaceful. She comes back and removes all of the needles and flips me onto my stomach and repeats the process on my back with about 10 needles. Relax for another 10 minutes and bang I’m done. I go back this Friday for session 2. So we’ll see how this goes, I am hoping it helps.

Thursday and Friday go pretty well and the came Saturday. Auction day. Captain Insano and I normally hit the auction at least once a month, sometimes more. The auction was glorious in its funk and Margaret the auctioneer was pulling out all the stops. We ended up sitting next Pickle Barrel, there is a reason we call him Pickle Barrel but that’s a whole other story. So the auction is going and Pickle Barrel turns out to be a chatty kathy. He is just a mile a minute about CAT diesel equipment and banty rooster cookie jars. Yeah, he’s an interesting fella. In between these bits of conversation, I managed to win a nice set of jugs. Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Sure they were a little mismatched in size but even different sized jugs are still a great thing to have.

So what do you do when you have a great set of jugs??

Start a jug band!!! Yep, there we are practicing around midnight after getting back from the auction.

So that’s it folks, its been a crazy week and tomorrow starts a new one. So let’s go….

Him and Her...

It was a hot summer day in August of 1999. He had just finished up a two month summer internship to fulfill the final requirements of his degree. With no prospects for job interviews he went back to the grocery store deli that he had worked at through his college career. With the internship over he was hoping to make his way back on the schedule to plod along until something in his field presented itself.


He made his way into the store and was standing at the end of the case making casual conversation with Jill, a fellow employee, when he first spotted her. She must have been hired while he was away, because he had never seen her before. She was short, with short light brown hair, pretty face, beautiful deep brown eyes and curves that filled out her uniform in all of the right places. She was busy preparing a platter of a pasta salad, so he leaned into Jill and asked who she was. Jill said that her name was Lauren, she was indeed new and then called her down to introduce them.

As Lauren made her way down the case, she stopped just short of them to put the platter she had been working on into the case. As she leaned over the case he snuck another quick peek at her curves. Because she was so short she really had to lean over the counter to place the platter down, and in the process she dipped her shirt into a platter of baked beans that were directly behind the platter she had just placed in. As she stood up, she looked up and said “Aw hell, I just stuck my tits in the baked beans!” The first words he had heard her speak had been a shock to him, it was definitely not what he had expected. It had caught had caught him off-guard but allowed him to be able to tease her and tell her that she couldn’t say “tits” because she was a girl. There was some more banter back and forth and then she went back to work. Jill just looked at him with a knowing smile.

That was it, that was all it took, one conversation and he was hooked. Every week when the new work schedule would come out, he would pore over it to find out what days he would be working with her. On those days he would find any excuse to be close to her and to talk with her. He tried hard to make her smile and laugh. Her laugh was infectious and he couldn’t help smiling and laughing himself. Over the course of a couple of weeks they had developed a connection and she invited him to a party at her apartment. She said that she lived with two male roommates and they were having a party. He said that he would think about it and let her know. Then through the course of the day, he found out that one of her male “roommates” was actually her boyfriend. That news put a whole new twist on things for him. He twisted and turned that thought over and over in his head trying to figure out what to do. Should he back off or should he keep pursuing in hopes she would leave her boyfriend?

Eventually, the cockiness of youth won out and he knew what he had to do. He waited until she took her lunch break, then he took a quick break to go in and sit with her. As he sat there with her he said “I know you have a boyfriend, but I’ll lay the game down flat for you. Within two weeks you’ll be dating me.” She gave him her best not a chance face and told him so too, but as she said it he could already tell he was winning by the sparkle in her eyes and the faintest hint of a smirk on her lips.

The next two weeks he kept up his pursuit as he had been. One night he waited for her to get done with her shift in the parking lot. He was sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck with his hat on backwards and Biggie Smalls on the radio when she came out. When she walked out and he saw her smile, he knew he had won. She agreed to dump her boyfriend and start dating him.

By the end of the week, she was moving her stuff in with him. She obviously couldn’t stay with her now ex-boyfriend as just roommates, and with no other place to go his place was the only choice. It wasn't an ideal way to start a relationship, but it worked.

It has been twelve and a half years since that initial day standing at the deli counter trying not to stare as she cleaned up the baked beans, but they are still together and going strong.

Some things are just meant to be, like baked beans and tits!!!

Disappointed…

Sometimes it feels like life is just looking for an opportunity to kick you in the ol’ beanbags. Lucky for life, but unfortunately for me I provide life the opportunity to roshambo me every month. This month it just seems to have hurt a little bit more.

I have been taking my hormone drugs to try and boost my count for about three weeks now and I have been diligent in taking them and all of my other vitamins and supplements. I have cut way back on my beer consumption and have actually worked out more than a few times. All in hopes of getting my count up. We are not supposed to even attempt another IUI until I have been on the drugs for six weeks, but in the meantime we can try to monitor when ovulation happens and try on our own.

So this month has been a very good month for giving it the old college try. Let’s just say that I had a very vivid dream that led to a purchase for L Bird in the lingerie department and we put said purchase to very good use.

From there we went on about our business trying not to get caught in the perpetual thought process of infertility. “Maybe this could be the month?” Yeah maybe, but let’s not say anything about it, we don’t want to jinx it. Just keep your head down and your mouth shut and forget about it and it will happen.” That is the conversation I have with myself a few times daily as well as endlessly praying to God that this is the month.

This month I thought maybe we did get lucky. Today was day 36 for L Bird and no lady visitor yet. L Bird has longer cycles before but this month is a little out of the ordinary. She has been dieting all month, but it isn’t like she is starving herself, she is eating, just eating less. So maybe that has what has thrown everything off, so we finally decided we should by a pregnancy test today and see if we did get blessed again. WRONG, a big old negativo slap in the face, AGAIN!!

But on the other hand Aunt Flo and Uncle Red haven’t stopped by for a visit yet, so maybe I’ll hold onto a sliver of hope that her cycle is just extremely long this month and she is pregnant but because of the length of the cycle the test was still negative. Yeah, that’s what I’ll hope for. Who knows, maybe by some chance I’ll be right. Here’s to HOPE!