09/04/2013

This morning I thought to myself "Wow, I’m leaving my house (and the country some) for almost three weeks, and I am not stressed out at all. And the cabinets are finally going up, so there’s a chance that I can schedule them to come measure before I leave after all.  And also, I haven’t had to pay a quarterly water bill in a long time. Things are going pretty smoothly!

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It is now 5:11 and I am one gasp short of breathing into a paper bag.

Boyfriend keeps leaving the attic door open, which is the wrong thing to do because it’s dangerous for bad cats. Today one of them (the fattest one) got stuck in the soffit behind 4 inches of protruding roofing nails while I was on a two hour conference call. While the weather is nice outside, it’s about 100 degrees in the attic. When I finally got off my call, I had to perform feats of acrobatic skill to try to reach her, while occasionally stopping to tell the boy to shut the fuck up, because "yelling about the cats hiding in the attic isn’t going to help at all coaxing her out, and it’s your goddamn fault she’s in here anyway, and you better not pull this fucking stunt when I’m gone, because they’ll die and I’ll never forgive you".  I kept hearing her pant and gasp and rasp between meows, which made my panic level dangerously close to intolerable.

My call ended at 3:00, and I’m finally recovered from having to crawl behind storage, through 90 year old dust, scraping my arms on rusty nails, and kittykat bath time. When the cat situation got taken care of, boyfriend went into a typical lack of stress management skills rant about whether or not the corner cabinet that goes over the corner sink (that was supposed to hung hours ago, pre-cat-crisis) should be set 0 or 4 or 6 inches higher than the straight wall cabinets….  complete with about 45 minutes of watching him try to find one of the thousands of images he saw in google search results that he couldn’t remember the key words to that he didn’t like to support his case. God forbid I should go do the hours of actual paying work I have ahead of me… no, no, I’ll just stand here and watch you peck away clumsily trying to find a picture of something you don’t even like while you get angrier and angrier that your pc isn’t working because you haven’t done any software updates in god knows how long. I’ve got plenty of time, thanks.

Now, I’m finally back in my office, very aware of the time. The cicadas are out of control, I can hear rush-hour, some jackwagon in the drug-dealing-apartment house is "trying to fix his motorcycle" by revving the engine and blasting the pipes that aren’t even supposed to GO on that bike, the mentally challenged girl three houses away is having a very high-pitched temper tantrum, and there are three small dogs tied to a handrail in front of someone’s house just bark-bark-barking away.

Oh, and my water-bill came.

I was hoping this pre-vacation stress would hold off until the evening before I left, so I wouldn’t have to endure too much of it…

but, here we go, folks! it’s like I can physically feel my blood pumping through my veins… and i still have about 3 hours left of work that needs to be done today before I can relax.

breathe.