Keeping busy

Well, I finally did get some vague news from my nurse, which I am glad about even though as I suspected it does look like our retrieval and transfer will be earlier than I had hoped. I am not going to freak out about it though. She said that if my progesterone looks good next week (I'm not sure what "good" means in this case...), our donor would be starting stims the last week of July and that we would be needed out there for retrieval and transfer during the 1st two weeks of August. Ugh. I definitely know that beggars can't be choosers, and it is more important to me to be done with the transfer before the semester starts, so we will figure it out. We are kicking up our house-hunting, and might even be able to find something available July 15th, and move in the end of July. Talk about timing! The nurse said that we would know more next week when they see my progesterone levels, so I'll try to relax until then. And then maybe I'll ask her if there is any way to push it a little later. We'll see.

As far as the house-hunting goes, we have almost finished compiling our dossier. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, renting an apartment in NYC is a major ordeal. We were trying to avoid going with a broker, but all the ads you find listed under "by owner" or "no fee" end up being with a broker anyway, so it's kind of inevitable. And they can be helpful. But if you go through any broker, or even for most management companies, you have to provide a huge pile of personal and financial information to be approved before even being shown any apartments. Here's the list of stuff we need to have together from the website of one of the major realtors in NYC:

1. Letter from employer stating position, salary and length of employment (or start date if you have not yet started), and any information regarding bonus, guaranteed or otherwise.
2. Last two pay stubs
3. Last two years’ tax returns
4. Last two months’ bank statements
5. Name, addresses, and phone numbers of previous landlords
6. Two personal reference letters
7. Two business reference letters
8. Verification of other assets such as real estate, securities, etc.
9. Photo identification (driver’s license, passport, etc.)

We have all of this stuff together and have also written up a nice little document, sort of a hybrid between a resume and a cover letter, introducing ourselves. We just need to make copies and put them in the nice little pocket folders I got at Staples yesterday. Seriously, this is like a popularity contest, and it's very competitive!

Furthermore, to qualify for most apartments without a guarantor, your annual salary has to be between 40 and 50 times the monthly rent. Luckily, that works for us so far, because we have a pretty strict budget. But I wonder how long it will be before we start getting upsold, or even want to look at pricier things ourselves since the ones in our budget so far have been scary. Tomorrow we have an appointment to see a few things, so we'll see how it goes. We are going to be out of town for the holiday weekend, so will hopefully be able to finalize something by the end of next week. Things move fast in this town!

In other news, the robot rocket has blasted off! The FedEx guy came to pick it up an hour ago and it is on its way back to South Dakota. We should get the results pretty quickly and hopefully everything will prove to be ok with J.'s sperm. I was interested to see that it was part of the ODWU for LisainSK, because it wasn't for us. If there turns out to be a problem with it, I will be seriously ticked off, since we did 3 cycles with CCRM and nobody said boo about it to us!