In the past several hours, I’ve received 13 emails and Facebook messages from readers lending their support. I am so blessed to belong to such a warm, caring community.

I want to give each email the personalized attention it deserves so if you messaged me, please be patient, I am hard at work with my paid job coupled with a major Burning Man deliverable due today! I need to sleep less.

I’ve had one unsuccessful intrauterine insemination (IUI) and moving forward to try again. I was in NYC when I found out I wasn’t pregnant so I had to wait to come back home to get a hold of next rounds of medication. It’s good I waited because I got my period naturally. Hooray! I feel like a kid who just found out I got an A on my science project. I can skip the Provera pills to give me a period, but will start Clomid tomorrow.

People have been asking and wondering as it has been two years since we’ve been married. We freely tell people we’re trying. I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about parents footing the bill for middle-aged, unmarried daughters burdened by the cost of fertility treatment. If they could put their money somewhere, might as well be on a living legacy. Gotta agree with that.

Dean and I have been praying especially hard, including offering up special prayers at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC. Doing all we can.

I’ve been plotting the most effective way to see the most amount of people and I’ve decided it’s happy hours and BBQs, which is why I’ll be having a BBQ birthday party next month. For a California girl, I know an inordinate amount of people in NYC and it’s so hard to get everyone in. But here are some fun pictures post-happy hour at Anup’s sky-high apartment. Anup said the fireworks were for me, but in reality, they were for Fleet Week.

Anup’s friend must have been tipsy because the pictures of me and Anup are fuzzy. The one of him and Anup? That’s me with the steady hand.

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Finally downloaded all my NYC pictures. Here’s a sampling.

Comments precede the picture being described.

Block party in the West Village

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Late night window shopping.

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Lulu Bear mad at me because I left her outside while I went to get meatballs.

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Ok, Lulu, I just need my daily chocolate chip cookie fix.

While I’m waiting for my pictures to download, I should share some news that my 70-year-old aunt has stage 4 lung cancer. She fell while vacationing in the Philippines and the cancer was detected via x-ray. She came immediately back to the U.S. for treatment, but not responding well to chemo. If we can all say prayers for her.

Situations like these make me extremely sad and I think, why always my family. But I have a big family which means greater probability so I shouldn’t think that way. I also start to think rashly like I should go ahead and commit to all the trips I’ve been conjuring in my head: Galapagos, overly-expensive Greece, why not? Go away again this weekend even if we did just get back from NYC.

Then I get real and ask myself, are you happy right now, in this moment? I am. I like my work, my husband, our shared experiences. Tonight we’ll go to Trader Joe’s, make a salad, sit on the couch, and read. I couldn’t imagine a fuller life.

I think back on all the jobs I’ve had and how, for the most part, I really liked what I did. Startup? Sign me up again. Banking? Love this industry. In contrast, there were two jobs I hated. I hated being an environmental consultant. I hated doing finance for Cisco. ABHORRED. I cannot imagine enduring 40 hours a week doing something you don’t love. Yet there are so many who do it. After I finished one year at the consulting firm, I quit. Quit without another job lined up. One of the best decisions I ever made.

There are so many unemployed, sick, people going through distress. I hope we all make changes (even little ones) so that every day is one where we could go to sleep and be ok with not waking up.

A friend sent me the following email with a historical picture attached. It made my week!

I have been working a lot lately and realizing how special I had it when I previously worked with people I consider friends. Friendships I maintain to this day. The photo captured a zany moment, but more so reminds me of some treasured moments with an amazing set of coworkers. God, I loved that department and group so much.

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CG, going through by hard drive and found this pic. Date Created = Aug 2, 2006!

I think that was the day we did volunteer work at a food bank in SF, then we went drinking at Trader Vics, then we went to Butter and made them open early for us. What a find!

If you think you don’t have enough structure in your life, get a dog. If you’re wondering whether or not you’ll make a good parent, get a dog. If you want to lose weight, get a dog. If you think your spouse or significant other needs more discipline, get him or her a dog.

I volunteered to walk Marc’s dog Lulu not really understanding what that meant. Easy peasy right? Walk the dog a couple times a day. Feed the dog a couple times a day. Life is good.

I’m a thirty-something, newly-married, childless, petless adult. I regularly sleep in on weekends. 9 hours minimum on any given weekend day. My husband gets more. I swear Dean’s like an overgrown kid because he needs at least 10 hours of sleep a day to function.

After my red-eye, and a day and a half without rest, I was looking forward to sleeping in and getting a good 10 hours of sleep. But at 8am, I swear to God I thought someone was in the room talking to me. I slowly picked up my head. “Marc?” I was in a daze. Is someone in the apartment or is someone talking loudly outside the apartment? I couldn’t tell. I went back to bed.

“Ruff, ruff!” Lulu raced over to the bed.

“Were you talking to me earlier? Or was I hallucinating? Look Lulu, I didn’t sleep last night. There’s this thing called turbulence…”

“Grrrr. Grrrr.”

I groped around for my glasses. “Ok, ok. Give me a second.” I stumbled, drunk from sleep deprivation, threw on one of Marc’s sweatshirts, searched around for my flip-flops, grabbed a couple poopy bags, and exited the apartment with anxious Lulu following my every move.

The first time I walked her after Marc left, she wouldn’t follow. Poor Lulu saw her owner drive away in a car service and she resigned to wait in that same spot until he returned. “Lulu, he went to Paris for a week. Are you going to be like this for a whole week?” I tugged at her leash. “Cmon.” The four-legged bitch settled into the pavement and wouldn’t budge. “Let’s go Lulu. Don’t you want to go for a walk?” After a few paces down one way, and a few paces down another, she tugged me back in the direction of the apartment at the front of the curb where Marc had left for the airport.

Who is walking who? I felt like I was getting walked by the dog. I psyched myself up. “You’re a disciplinarian. You have to show this dog who’s boss. “Let’s go Lulu!” She resisted and pulled away. I had no other choice but to bring her back home. She spent the rest of the evening planted by the front door, waiting for Marc.

But I’m starting to get the routine: walk in the morning, food and water, walk in the afternoon, water, walk in the evening, food and water, walk before bed, more water.

After a work meeting started to run late today, I became anxious, tapping my feet on the carpet, drumming my fingers on the conference room table. “I’m so sorry, but I have to go walk the dog.”

The turbulence was so bad that the seat belt light remained on for the duration of the six hour flight from SFO to JFK. Any moment now the pilot will speak on the intercom and assure us we’ve hit a bumpy patch, that he’d work on smoothing it out. That message never came. Oh please God, I don’t want to die in flight. Anywhere preferably in my sleep or in a rocking chair or at the library, but I don’t want to spiral head-first sitting in the middle aisle with my unborn child.

After a sleepless red-eye flight, I checked my pee for pregnancy. It’s a simple test. One line means not pregnant. Two lines mean pregnant. One line, only one line, still only one line, three minutes, five minutes pass. Well there goes two wasted weeks of sobriety. I thought I’d be pleased either way, but honestly, I’m more disappointed than I thought I’d be.

While I pray often, I rarely ask God to grant me a wish. Recently, however, I’ve been praying specifically to get pregnant. I did a novena which is 9 days of guided prayer in request for something. Last time I did a novena was in business school when I asked God to help me get an internship. That was 10 years ago. The last part of the novena I prayed read, “If what I ask is not for my own good and the good of others, grant me what is best, that I may build up your kingdom of love in our world.” I’ve always believed in God’s plan for me which has been a beautiful plan thus far, so I will sit tight and be grateful for what I have in this moment. Not for what the future holds, but to treasure the abundance that I currently have.

I have been up, out and about for more than 36 hours straight without rest. Sweet dreams to me.

I sweat when I sleep. Deep damp sleep. I feel freakish waking up in a wet state. Always been a heavy sweater. Even when I’m eating, I’ll sweat profusely over spiced meals. I like my food jalapeno hot so it’s always this weird dichotomy of food enjoyment and brow-sweating embarrassment. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. I get it in little bursts. I’m the last to fall asleep and first to wake.

It has been a taxing two weeks post-insemination. I feel pregnant. I’m bloated, sober, fatter, crampy. I’m exhibiting all the PMS signs that I never get even when I do eventually get my period. The horror of my teenage years, also known as severe acne, has returned with pimples sprouting around my back and dotting the hairline around my face. Without birth control, my hormones are out of whack and causing skin eruptions!

These two weeks of sobriety have been the kiss of death for a wine-guzzler like me. Wine was my late night dessert substitute. Without it, I’ve reverted to snacking or going to bed starving. Not fun. Marc tells this great story of a friend who went on a diet. He claimed, “I went on a diet for 10 days and I lost…10 days.” That statement resonates so well with me. I feel like I’ve lost out on two weeks of life. A full life is one where all your senses are engaged: physical warmth, emotional connection, achievement, laughter, good books, movies, music, food, and good wine!

Yesterday I opened up a bill from Kaiser and almost started crying. Amount You Owe $476.70.  Please Pay This Amount. I haven’t even birthed a child. That cost breaks down to 16 lab items, 1 specialty office visit, and 1 ultrasound. This is after my co-pays. This is after I find out my insurance doesn’t cover the herbs I’ve been taking with the acupuncturist. I am a healthy woman trying to get pregnant. The year is not even half over and I’ve already used up my flexible spending account dollars. I work for a generous corporate employer. And still, I have to pay ridiculous sums out of pocket. I am a well-paid professional, working for a generous corporate employer. Yet this bill brings tears to my eyes. Can you imagine a single mother or an unmarried woman getting paid minimum wage who wants to have a child? This country sucks. I want to go live in Canada! I don’t know how people do it. What if you don’t have insurance and someone calls an ambulance for you because you’re having a heart attack in the middle of Union Square? What American can afford health care? It is ludicrous.

On a happy note, I am heading to my other favorite city on a red-eye, arriving in NYC at 7am. Virgin America. Wooohooo! I’m not bringing my personal laptop, only my work computer, which means I can’t post any pics. No I do not have an iPhone, unfortunately. Seems a bit redundant and excessive to have a Blackberry and an iPhone. That means, tons of pictures to post when I return after Memorial Day. 10 full days in beautiful, sunny, chaotic, vibrant New York. Hello Big Apple.