Damn it.

Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.

The A/C repair guy didn't show up until 6:15pm last night, and that only came to pass because I called the office when no one had showed by 5pm (and I'd been sitting in the hot house burning up vacation time for the past three hours) and learned that our appointment had been rescheduled for the next day but no one had bothered to call us. They generously offered to come out after hours, for an overtime fee of course, and I generously offered to take my business elsewhere if they couldn't get someone out to my house ASAP to fix their screw up end my misery. They called back a few minutes later to say someone would be over soon, no extra charge. When said repair person showed up, he informed us that (drumroll please)...

Our A/C is broken. As in, "There's-nothing-I-can-do-you-need-a-whole-new-system" broken. They'd be happy to get a new one in for us as soon as NEXT WEEK for the low low price of $4400.

It took a while for all of that to penetrate, but the nausea rolled in about an hour after he left and hasn't dissipated much. Our house is unbelievably, torturously hot. The humidity in our house is so severe that it's curling the cover of the paperback book I'm reading. M and I moved into the basement a couple of days ago which means we're at least getting some sleep now, but it also means we're cramming all of our daily activities into about one fifth of our living space. I'm really worried about our pets. For some reason, they refuse to hang out in the basement during the day while we're at work. They'll go down there in the evenings with us, but when we get home from work and/or school, they're all sprawled out on the couch and living room floor, panting and looking at us with squinted, pained expressions. And this is with the house opened up and every fan running. We're about to leave town for a couple of days (luckily for us) and we'll have to close everything up. The dog will be in a kennel but the cats will be home on their own. We're thinking about locking them in the basement to force them to hang out in the cool, but M is worried that will stress them out even more than the heat. I would think that if they got hot enough, they'd figure it out, but they haven't yet and it's really awful, so now my belief is that our cats are just extra-dumb or something.

What timing, huh? Our final payment (of about $4400 - what a coincidence!) to the clinic is due on 6/16, and we're going to have to fix this before then. There's no way I can cope with post ER and ET rest at home with the conditions being what they are. So I've got some phone calls to make today and tonight, I'll go to Home Depot and Lowes and anywhere else that I can think of and we'll just have to figure something out. By pulling from every corner of savings and credit, we'll be able to make this work, but it's going to decimate the cushion we'd built up going into IVF. I'm an underpaid social worker and M is wrapping up a stint as a full time student and looking for a job. It'll take us a year to recover from this financially.

We're just really wondering when we're gonna get our break. I'd love to think it will come in the form of a BFP, but really, why should our luck change at this point?

Damn it.