Last night I drank so much tea, I thought I'd be up every half hour, all night long. Luckily, I must have a bladder of steel. (Do they make an instructional video for that? Abs of Steel! Bladder of Steel! Ah, whatever.) Our local Lechter's kitchen store is going out of business, so I picked up a new tea kettle. My last one held one quart; this one holds two and a half quarts. You'd think I'd realize that and not attempt to drink my usual pot all by myself right before bed...

This cycle I'm adding Red Clover to my usual herbs (Raspberry Leaf and Nettle). It's supposed to be particularly good for fertility, so we'll see. It certainly does taste good, so I'm not complaining. Come ovulation, I'll begin with the Wild Yam root.

Eric thinks I'm going overboard, that last cycle's low temps and short luteal phase was just a one-time deal. All the same, though, I don't think it can hurt to try to up my odds. Besides, I still haven't done anything that I don't mind doing anyway; I'd have to see a real problem before I'd start, say, swallowing Robitussin every day. Ugh.

For the Paper Souls collaboration this month, we're supposed to write about life lessons. Specifically, I believe we're supposed to talk about lessons we've already learned and may wish to impart to our readers. I'm a little uncomfortable with this. To be honest, I think anything I could come up with would sound a little preachy and condescending, not to mention ingenuine, because I don't think I've learned my "life lessons" very well so far. Certainly, I haven't learned them well enough to stop making the same mistakes over and over.

Perhaps, instead, I should talk about what lessons I'd like to learn in the new millenium. (Well, when else am I going to learn them? In the next ten days? In the next millenium?) For the most part, they'll probably be ones which I've been flunking, so I'll most likely require extra tutoring.

Patience

This is the biggest character flaw I have. I'm impatient with my husband. I'm impatient with my coworkers. Heck, I'm impatient with myself, constantly scolding myself for small mistakes or social faux pas. Recently, I asked Eric if he thought impatience was something born in me, or whether it was something fostered by watching my mother's impatient reactions to minor things. Predictably, he said it was probably a combination of column A and column B. I need to overcome it, but I don't know how. Even if I hold my breath and count to ten, only the current situation is resolved peacefully; the very next time a problem arises, I'm likely to erupt. And that's saying nothing of the argument which has likely been raging in my head since the previous issue.

Consistency

I'm on top of everything one moment, but the next, I've lost it all again. It seems like I only procrastinate half the time, which is all the more infuriating, because I cause people to lift their expectations of me in the meantime. In grad school, I would burn the midnight oil on one project, but then put off the next until it was long overdue; my old advisor told me that I was like a forest ranger constantly putting out small fires instead of preventing them from erupting in the first place.