DON'T PANIC!!!

I'm not right. I know this. You will too. It won't take you long to catch on.
    My head moves in some pretty interesting ways. At least I think they're interesting. My head makes strange analogies that don't always click. I can find a movie quote or Simpsons quote or TV quote or piece of music to go with almost ANY situation. You'll learn this, too.
    I'm gonna start off by talking about stress. Everyone loves stress. Everyone has stress. Everyone has our own little chunk of chaos that seems to pursue us like a pissed-off yellowjacket (oh, by the way, one of those stung me in the side of the head last week.Yay.) and we can't seem to get rid of it, no matter how hard we try.
    We have it at work. Or, if we're not working, we have it because of our lack of work. We have it at home, little annoyances that coalesce into one big clusterfuck of muscle tension right between the shoulders.Yes, mine comes from work, but it also comes from little things (or not so little things) at home. Like this weekend, for example. This weekend was AWESOME. I got some great romantic time with my girl E, I had a great time with my family remembering my father in law (whole lobsters and an on-demand grill, WOOHOO) and a nice lunch with E and our friend AlleyMac. All the boolashite started afterwards.
    E wanted to do her laundry, so she threw it in and started it in the hope it would be done by the time she had to leave (sniff sniff) and go back home. Problem being, the machinery around my home has been very disagreeable lately. I tried to mow my lawn on Friday and somehow the gas in my little midget can had gotten fouled. No workie. Now, the washing machine was refusing to drain. No problems earlier in the week, just now when we were actually on a timeframe. Tried the old trick of cleaning out the trap, nothing in there but a penny.
    A. Penny.
    Then the trap wouldn't screw in straight, so it kept leaking all over the floor. We finally pulled the whole machine out, flipped it (after draining it, of course) and removed the entire pump mechanism. Found a barrette in there. A single, inch-long, purple flower barrette. no clue how it got there, no clue how long it'd been there, but then I couldn't get the hose clamp open to put the damn pump back on. Went out this morning and bought a channel-lock pliers, got everything back in place, flipped it, hooked it up, ran it, drained fine. Tried to trow in the towels we used to sop up the spilled water... no drainage.
    WHAT. THE. BLOODY. PURPLE. FUCK.
    So yeah, now I have a top-loader washing machine coming tomorrow. Losing some storage space. Gonna have to figure that out. When I win the lottery, I'm knocking down the wall between the kitchen and the porch and making it one big room, and have the washer and dryer in the same spot like a normal homeowner.
    Then there's the vermin. Not mice, not roaches, nothing like that. Grasshoppers. And crickets. and click bugs. You know, those beetle-looking things that if you swat em, they flip over, and then they CLICK and pop back up? Those. Oh, and toads. Hundreds of toads. The hell.
    I never get normal pests. Ever.In Philly, I had centipedes. The kind with horns. In West haven, I had pill bugs. Our storage room was full of em. Branford, we had spiders. And moths. Weird combo, I know, but there they were. Now, grasshoppers, crickets, and toads.And not normal ones either. The grasshoppers are like ninjas, waiting and attacking in waves and droves when the opportunity presents itself. You can hear em bouncing off the siding of the house like hailstones. And the crickets... you can't see em. But you can hear em. Dozens of em. Somewhere on the porch. They pop out like the goblins at the beginning of LABYRINTH. You hear em, and when you turn to see em, GONE. POOF. But once the grasshoppers start, so do the crickets. Jumping and ricocheting off shit on the side of the house and on the porch and off the windows and catching themselves in the window screens and kamikaze-ing themselves into spider webs where they just wiggle and squeak and creak and chirp and DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE!!!
    Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you.
     They scare my dogs. The look on Otis' face when he trots through the backyard and these tiny Japanese Zeroes pop out of the grass and flitter aimlessly around him... there is a look of fear and confusion on his face as first one, then another, then another, then another ftftftftft in front of him, just sorta meandering in the general direction of AWAY as he approaches. If he could talk I swear he'd say "AH! AHHH! What th...?!? HEY! THE HELL?!?!? WHOA!!!" Well, it's what I do.
    But that's me. I deal with it by lounging on the couch with the boys after a relaxing shower, drink whatever carbonated alcoholic beverage I happen to have (and if I have none, some sort of soda-fied beverage will do) and just let it breathe out. Yeah, I know there's more coming, but for now, it's done.
    Until Otis starts bitch-barking at 2:15am so he can go outside and bark some more.