So this is what hell is like.

The inversion that was trapping smoke in our valley lifted on Saturday, which means the air was clearing up yesterday. Unfortunately a new inversion descended last night, which means all the smoke was back by the time I got home this morning. The minute I rolled over the mountain pass, my heart sank as I saw a massive haze obliterating the countryside.

So here we go again.

Misery. I knows it. I sit at a desk staring at a computer screen with eyes swollen, watery, and itchy. My throat is raw because my nose won't top running no matter what I do. I spend every other moment trying to decide if I need to run to the bathroom. The moments in-between are spent trying to figure out what I do when I get there... puke or poop. I am doped up on everything from ibuprofen and Pepto Bismol to antihistamines and Imodium. When all I want to do is take a handful of sleeping pills and go into a coma until it's all over.

Why I react to smoke this way, I have no idea.

Hopefully I can last six days until I blow this popsicle stand.

Well this sucks...

Tonight I had a craving for a cheese & potato chip sandwich. And since I didn't have any cheese, potato chips, or bread (not to mention toilet paper), I decided to go to the grocery store. Something I most definitely did not want to do, but at least it wouldn't be crowded at 8:30 at night.

As usual, I found tons of other crap to buy... meaning a $10 run to the store ended up costing me $60... but whatever. I had my ingredients for a cheese & potato chip sandwich, so I drove back home.

Where I almost ran over Spanky the cat.

As I mentioned last week, she likes to plop down in the middle of the parking lot for no reason. But I always assumed she went home at night (wherever that is). Now I know she doesn't. Spanky totally hangs around the complex in the evenings too.

This is a very bad situation, because the cat is the exact same color as the pavement and very difficult to see after the sun goes down. I was practically on top of her before I realized she was even there. And she never bothered to move. I eventually had to back up and drive around her.

After grabbing my bags of groceries I went over to tell her that she needs to move so she doesn't get run over, but she was having none of it...

Spanky did not like the flash from my iPhone... nor does she like to have her picture taken.

And then she started rolling around in an attempt to get a belly rub...

Cat aerobics. On the pavement. In the middle of a parking lot. At night.

And since it is impossible to resist giving a belly rub to a cat, I had to drop all my groceries and give her one.

And now I know I'll be losing even more sleep because I'll be worrying about Spanky getting run over. Some of the people living in this complex are not the best drivers.

Stupid kitty. =sniff=

I have air conditioning again.

This is, of course, fantastic. There's nothing quite like coming home to a cool house on a hot day.

The only down-side being that I no longer have an excuse to eat chocolate ice cream cones for dinner...

Except the excuse that I have a strange disease I picked up while traveling abroad which requires me to eat chocolate ice cream cones for dinner or else I'll die.

Yeah. That.

Given the horrible wildfires burning near Cle Elum (just an hour away from me), I loathe to complain about something so relatively petty... but holy crap does coming home to a 94° home suck ass. Since the air conditioner broke, evenings are just miserable, and trying to sleep in this heat is nigh impossible. But at least I still have a home to come home to. Dozens of people in Kittitas County are not so lucky. I try to remember this and be grateful... but it's just sewww hawwwt!

Which once again makes me realize just how badly I take for granted all the wonderful luxuries I am privileged to live with.

Like air conditioning.

And a place to sleep.

Yesterday morning I went out to my car only to see a cricket perched on my rear door. Worried that he'd be leaving his cricket family and his cricket friends if he went with me to work, I tapped near him so he'd move. He didn't budge. I blew on him so that he'd jump off, but he just got irritated and turned away. So I poked him gently thinking that would do the trick, but he just took a couple steps and re-planted himself. Apparently, he was dead-set against leaving. I thought surely getting in my car and slamming the front door would convince him to bail, but no. "Okay then, little buddy, I guess you're taking a trip downtown."

The drive is only five minutes, but it seemed a lot longer because I was always checking on my passenger in my rear-view mirror. Surprisingly, he hung in there all the way to work and was still clinging to my car when I exited it. So I pulled out my iPhone to take his picture, and that's when he decided to jump off.

Of course. They always move just as you go to take a photo. Why didn't I think of that to begin with?

My guess is that he caught his cricket girlfriend cheating on him and just couldn't bear to be around her neighborhood one damn minute longer. Perhaps he thought a change of scenery would do him some good, and my car was the fastest way to get out of Dodge. No wonder he was so determined.

In any event, I hope he's happy in his new home. There's a tiny park across the street, so maybe that's where he ended up. Maybe he'll find himself a new cricket girlfriend and live happily ever after.

There are times I think I'd like to jump on a car passing through town and set sail for a change of scenery myself.

But I get bored on long car trips.

Guess I'll look at the television for a while and see where that gets me.

I don't want to see a world that's so bleak and devoid of color right now.

Fortunately, there are other places to look...

   
...or so I would imagine.

I was an hour late getting to work because I was having a bit of a waffle crisis this morning.

Once I finally got there, it started dumping down rain. This was very bad timing on the weather's part because there's a parade going on downtown this evening. Apparently the rain eventually realized its mistake, as it retreated before the festivities began. Since I had no plans to attend the parade I shouldn't have cared about the weather one way or another, but was kind of glad I didn't get drenched going out to my car when it was time to go home.

I live just five minutes from work. But Since I had three errands along the way, it took me two hours to get home.

I should say that usually I live five minutes from home. Thanks to half the town being closed off for the parade, tonight I lived fifteen minutes from work. I guess this means my errands lasted only an hour-and-forty-five minutes, but it sure seemed like two hours.

Now that I'm home, it was time for inevitable frozen pizza dinner.

I say "inevitable" because frozen pizza takes no thought or effort. It's the microwave popcorn of Saturday-night dinner. Or it would be if microwave popcorn wasn't already the microwave popcorn of Saturday night dinners. If only I had microwave popcorn I wouldn't have had to settle. But the idea of fighting parade traffic for a trip to the grocery store was more than I could bear after the nearly two hours I spent just getting home.

It's at times like this when I'm safe at home while people are fighting for their lives in a parade that I think about how Katy Perry totally ripped off her Fireworks super-powers from the X-man formerly known as "Jubilee." Somebody at Marvel Comics should sue...

And by "sue" I mean "ask Katy Perry to appear in the next Avengers movie." Because, seriously, everything that Katy Perry touches turns to gold!

And now I suppose I should finish polishing all those imaginary trophies I won in that desert submarine competition. Tomorrow I have to do this all over again (sans parade) and that tarnish isn't going to remove itself.

Please remind me to pick up some microwave popcorn so I can have a decent dinner tomorrow night.

Last night as I was sitting down to dinner, I had some unexpected pains shooting through my groin. "Well, this can't be good!" I said out loud to nobody in particular.

And, sure enough, it wasn't... because a couple hours later it felt as though I was pissing razor blades through my urethra. "That's funny," I mused... "I don't recall buying a diseased crack-whore recently!" Though, to be fair, my memory isn't quite what it used to be, so I went to bed wondering if I was going to end up with a prescription for penicillin and a frowny-face in my medical record next to some exotic STD.

Then, sometime around 4:00am, I awoke to agonizing pain shooting through my John Thomas.

Seriously, it felt as if my unit had been sliced open... turned inside-out... and then had lemon juice poured on it.

Hobbling to the toilet, I was fully expecting my wanger to explode into shredded streamers like a party popper...

Image from Yatego Shopping.

But instead... a kidney stone dropped out, and the pain instantly subsided.

Yes, somehow I had a kidney stone and never even knew it. That's because usually a kidney stone starts causing excruciating pain long before it gets to the end of the line...

Usually, I am in total agony as the stone travels from my "Dual Water Filters" (kidneys) to my "Water Bucket" (bladder) all the way through the "Sensitive Tubing" (urethra) and out my Massive Nozzle (wiener)... which can take days. This time I didn't feel a damn thing until the bastard made it to my "Sensitive Tubing."

Which is very odd (but totally welcome because it saved me several pain-filled days in bed). Guess I'm just lucky that this got cleared up in time for me to take an early drive over to Seattle for work this morning.

But was it alone? Or can I be expecting a buddy to start causing hideous amounts of pain any minute now...

I've been working pretty much constantly for four days now. My brain feels fuzzy and I think it stopped working properly around 6:30am this morning. This was confirmed 90 minutes later when I arrived at work and didn't remember how I got there... despite the fact that I was sitting in my car.

And now, fifteen hours after that, my brain is starting to melt. So I figured I should probably write a blog entry while I still have a few neurons left.

Sooo... if somebody can tell me how to work this toaster, I can get started on this here broccoli Cadillac.

Taco rhapsody.