 Good morning everybody. It is Tuesday, right? Tuesday today. Day two of this week. How are you guys doing? I'm headed up to Arberg today. I got to hook up to a van trailer, unit 50, 57. And we'll see what they got from me. I'm used to pulling up roll tights or flatbeds up to Arberg. I don't think I've ever loaded a dry van up there before. This green pickup truck hasn't moved in at least a year. I wonder what they do with it. Maybe it's just an advertising piece. It makes you look at that auto body shop every time you go past anyway. So I guess it's doing its job. This is Arberg once again. The nice little small town you might not even have known existed, but now you do. It's actually a thriving little community. They got quite a bit going for them up here. So we're here, a little bit of wind here. And we got one big crate that we're picking up. That's it. It's a big one though. So it's right back here. It's not even at the dock. They're gonna load it on the back of the truck here and I'm gonna take that back with me. That's all we're picking up. It's going to White Horse Yukon, way up by the border with Alaska on the Canadian side. I've been there once. I was there with Britain, remember? For New Year's, a few years back, we had a trip up there. Way up north. Here at Petropas, Arberg. We have our load on us. It's just that one big piece. They put it on the tail of the trailer and I'm not sure if they're going to transfer when we get back or not, but that's a worry for later. Right now our worry is getting it back to our yard in one piece and safely without damaging anything. So far we're off to a good start. We got full tanks of fuel again, just in case you never know. I don't like to go below a half tank. Some of us are getting close to half a tank. I start looking for fuel stops. Now, why is this guy kicking up so much dust? What's a paved road? Where did all that dust come from? They're going to be all dusty. Look, I'm not kicking up that kind of dust. This is Highway 68, right? I'm going to take this across the Highway 8 and shoot ourselves south, just like that. Little pioneer village, just like Steinbeck has, except this is the Arberg version. This is the Heritage Village. This is what the first village looked like when they first settled here, or similar to it, right? So cool to see those little things. It's unimaginable how hard it must have been to sail on a boat across the planet to a foreign place that you've never been to before. Hopefully you make it, because those boats were riddled with sicknesses. And if you make it, you got to get all the way to the inland of the continent, way out here to Manitoba. And once you get here, there's nothing. There's no roads. There's no police department, no fire department. There's no house. You got to build your own house. There's no government giving you government handouts or help to get started. All that you have is what you arrived with. You got to build civilization from scratch. And now this country is among the G7, seven most wealthiest economies on the planet, in less than 150 years. It took them a less than 150 years to build it up there. That's how fast they got here and turned this into one of the greatest countries on Earth. Heavy. Oh boy. Got a free haircut. courtesy of me, I'm a barber. I only do one haircut though. So there's not many options, but looks as if it all pretty today. I had to get out of my PJs and put on some makeup today in order to function. How's it going today with all the shots you've been taken? Honestly, not bad until I vacuumed the house and then all of a sudden I felt like I had run a marathon and then I got a little bit groatsy for about a half hour. And then I got my second wind while we were grocery shopping and now I'm fine again. Yeah, we're going grocery shopping, that was fun. Food, I like food. So do these guys. Chevy, it's rude to stand there. Chevy, back up. Do you guys have Saskatoon berries where you're from? When I grew up on a street nearby here near Blumenort, we had Saskatoon bushes that would grow all along our street. And every year we would go and pick pails and pails of Saskatoon berries and they're always so good. Are they native to this area or are they? I'm not sure. We had them at our last place too. We had lots of bushes. Sort of like blueberries, but blueberries grow lower down, right, on the ground. These are a little more bitter though and have bigger seeds inside of them. I'm not a big Saskatoon berry person, but this jam smells fabulous. Saskatoon berries that we had never had seeds, I don't think. I don't remember ever having seeds in them. Yeah, they do. They have big pits. What? You just eat them. What kind of alternate universe are you in? In my universe, we don't have seeds in our Saskatoon berry. Do you know anything about Saskatoon berries? Are there seeds in them? Cause we just picked them off the bushes. Like the bushes would go real tall and you just pick them off and you could just get them. 10 foot tall Saskatoon berry bushes at our last house. But they didn't have seeds in them. Yeah, they didn't. You could just chow down. That's why I liked them so much cause I didn't like cherries cause cherries had the seeds. I tell you, but you're wrong. We must have had seedless bushes. One of those genetically engineered Saskatoon. A magical Saskatoon bush. It was a magical street. It was a street I grew up on. Isn't everyone's street they grew up on like a magical place? Like as an adult, you look back on it and it's totally different than how you remember it growing up. I never thought my street was magical. I liked my mom's house that I grew up in but I never thought the street was magical. I didn't have to fight her very hard to get her to move out of the city. No. No. Winnipeg, something else. There's good areas of Winnipeg but you gotta have money to live. A lot of money. Like I like St. Fattel a lot. I like the southern part of the city, eastern part of the city. Oh, there's just some pockets that are... Dicey. Dicey. A little dicey. Yeah. It is Winnipeg. We are the murder capital of Canada. I'm not even joking, Winnipeg. We're actually in a pretty dead heat with Edmonton. Like Edmonton is, they overtake us every now and then. Edmonton in Alberta takes the title for murder capital. Don't they have like 10 times the population though? Yeah, pretty much. Oh, okay, well. No, everyone in Canada knows of Winnipeg's dicey place to him. He's just don't end up in the wrong place. We're famous for slurpees, murder and blizzards. Yep. And Mennonites. If you come out of the city to the south. Yeah, I'm talking about Winnipeg. Oh, Winnipeg. Yeah. Manitoba, southern Manitoba. There's all of us weird Mennonites out here. Mennonites and French people. And Ukrainians. A lot of Ukrainians now in south. Say something, Frank. They want to hear from you. What's the good word? Give them their fortunes. Yeah? Nothing to say. It's almost needle time. I have a clean sanitary surface. She is much more prepared for this one. This is the third time. Feeling a little less hesitant. A little less unsteady. Gotta do this today, tomorrow night and Friday night. And then on Saturday morning, we go in for an ultrasound. That is inaccurate. Tonight is actually Tuesday, not Wednesday. Today is Tuesday, right? Correct. So she's gotta do this today. Two more days after this. It should be Wednesday and Thursday. And then Friday morning, we go in for the ultrasound. Yeah, first. She goes in. I go in, I wait in the car. Exactly. So you're a little more confident in how to mix this all up today? I mean, no. I kind of draw a blank every time. I just go with it. So if you haven't seen the other times, she's done it. That gets mixed in with those two powder things. And that's her first injection. Yeah. It's even overwhelming for me and it doesn't really have much to do with me right now. I mean, my part is coming. Psyching myself up and I'm getting ready. She takes half of that out into the syringe. It's a little tough to poke through there. Uh-huh. I'm not doing it the best way, I don't think. You're a lot better at it already. Getting there. The learning process. And that wasn't helping because I'm more overwhelmed than she is. I'm trying to stay calmer today. But don't worry. No, my part's coming. We're involved too. Very important. I mean it is. It's either that or we gotta pay for someone else's. I don't wanna do that. I want little trucker Josh's. Shove, he's very concerned with what I think lately. Very concerned. Oh, thank you. Except for Wiener over there. Well, how's the good thing about a skin puppy? Another puppy with no fur. Great. Where's Diesel? Probably on the bed making a nest. Yeah, probably laying on our pillows. Even though we try to cover them up every day. Great, they're busy. Pretty much it. We do a nest. And then we'll ask him, what did you do? And then he'll look at Chevy like Chevy did it. It's true, I'm always getting trouble for him. Well, you're getting much better at that. Thank you. Thank you. Way better. I won't. Just rocketing through that. Okay. Yeah. There we go. There's the needle says the needle. You're gonna first try it? Wow. You know what you're doing. Done at a time or two now. Literally twice. So that's the one that burns a little bit when you inject it, right? Last night's, both of them burned actually. But last night, neither one of them really bruised much. You saw my first two bruises, they were insane. My other two, I'll show you right away. So, this was from that one the first time. And then this one was from the pen the first time. And the second ones didn't leave any bruise? Just tiny bit right there. Little bit from the Menoper last night. And then that little one is from the Gonalda left pen last night. But that one there, yikes. Yeah, that one, and that's funny because that's actually the only one that hasn't hurt yet. Oh, no, pardon me, it was painful, it was the Menoper. Yep. Alrighty. We have arrived, I believe it's a jubilant cable. Do it right about there. Here we, oh right, I gotta make sure, get the little. There we go, there we go. Where was that? Let's try that one more time. Hard to grab. That very soft skin. Numero two. Tickle. Numero two. Numero de. De. De. De. Dos. Dos. This one's a lot easier to do because it's in a fancy pen. Yep, it's much easier to use. I wish every injectable medication came with one of these bad boys. All right. Does it say how much is left in there? 450. So not quite two doses. So we'll have to move on to the second pen tomorrow. Okay. The song, right? So this is the one that's much like a diabetes pen, right? Diabetes injection? Insulin pen. Insulin pen, that's what you call it? Okay. It's four diabetes. Four diabetes. It's not a diabetes pen. A diabetes pen. Diabetes. So she puts it to 225. 225, yeah. And away we go. All right. So much easier. Isn't it? No mixing it, no nothing. It comes pre-mixed. Like, isn't that nice? It's very nice. All right. All right, well, let's go in there. Okay, thanks those bruises. I've always been a bad bruiser. I'm very pasty, but also my iron's probably low because I can't eat red meat right now because I'm trying to stick to some somewhat Mediterranean diet throughout all this. But I haven't been totally well-behaved but red meat right now because I'm not used to it anymore. Makes me a little bit sick, so done. There you go. Day three. Day three. There's a lot of people out there that go through this process a lot more than I thought. So, chances are that you probably have gone through this or know somebody who's gone through this or is currently going through this. And now you sort of know what the injections look like. Five days of this, and then there will be more. But we have five days and then we go see the doctor and then they tell her what she needs and either more or less and then we go get some more from the pharmacy. And mid-April is when they do the surgery, right? That's what we've been saying. Yeah, right around then. Around mid-April and so. Hoping that it's before our family gathering. Yeah. Because I'd really like to make it to Easter. Yeah. You already told them, right, that you have 14 follicles? I think I did, yeah. 14 eggs going on. So hopefully this stuff does the trick. Hopefully they can extract them all without damaging any. That'd be wonderful and hopefully they're all healthy. I mean, I know the chances are low, but I can always hope. And then after the extraction is when I come in, for my part, and they fertilize everyone that they can in like a petri dish, they'll make little science babies. And we chose to use a process called ICSI where they actually take a microscopic needle and inject the sperm into the egg so that the chances of fertilization are actually better because we already know that our cells or our, his sperm, my eggs have trouble communicating already. So now we just gotta force them. And then they're hand-picked by the scientists, the healthy ones. Yeah, as opposed to the other option where they put her egg in a petri dish and then just drop my boys in there and just say, go to town. There she is right there. There's no barriers, there's no goalies, there's no race. She's boom, just dropped my right there. We didn't want to take that chance. It's a little bit more expensive this way, but this way, like she said, the scientists go in there and pick like the ultimate, the ultimate little sperm, like hand-picked. So when this baby is born, it will be hand-picked. They're gonna pick the best one and they inject the single one right into the egg, like right into there. And that does come with some risk of damaging the egg, but it's very rare. So if there's, let's say there's 14 that we get and they can fertilize all 14. Hopefully we don't lose any. They let them grow in a lab for five days, right? For five days? Five to seven days. And then once they reach a certain maturity, we freeze them. And then one at a time after that, so let's say all 14 work and are fertilized and grow, that means that we have 14 shots, 14 chances. As well as they survive the thawing process. Yeah, I'm gonna survive that, but chances are they usually don't all survive. So out of 14 we're hoping for, what are you hoping for? Like eight to 10? That would be wonderful. And I checked our receipt. I actually had emailed to me from the clinic and it's about $2,000 more to opt for Ixie. Okay. Ixie process. So $2,000 at our clinic here in Manitoba anyway. Okay, so that would have been included in our fee that we paid the other day then. Yes it was. The fee for the surgery and for Ixie was $8,820. And then the meds that she's injecting into herself right now, five days worth was $2,300. $2,300 and some change. Yeah, about $2,309. Registration, that was $600, right? Yep. And then the transfer, they call it a transfer when the implant, each time they implant, they call that a transfer. Each transfer is $2,000. So if it didn't work and we were to go month after month until one did work, it's $2,000 a pop until it works. After all of this, yeah. Plus I had a preemptive ultrasound before all this just to make sure that my body was producing eggs and that was another $150. Plus the oral meds that I took to prime my body for these meds, well we have insurance thankfully so it was only 12 bucks. And we're also going to need to buy more of this medication that she's injecting right now. After our appointment on, I keep calling it our appointment. After her appointment on Friday, I'll be there but it's not my, I don't need to be there but it's still our appointment. I'm involved, I'm very important, okay? Hey, you're very hands-on husband and daddy. Very important. Couldn't do it without me. No, I certainly couldn't. Well, I'm sure there are many thousands of donors out there. Tissue, but tissue. Mine are the best. Just saying. It's gonna be a handsome trucker baby. That's right.