John called to tell me he was  just leaving the office and to apologize for how late it is.  I’m feeling weak-willed because I have no energy and my head is pounding (and not just the part that’s still tender from my encounter with the window yesterday), so I asked him to be the voice of reason and say “No, we can’t order Chinese food.  We’re having ravioli or stir fry or something that’s already in the house and is relatively good for us.”  But since it’s so late, and neither of us wants to deal with cooking and cleaning up, he failed in his duty (as the voice of reason) and told me that if Chinese food is the only thing that will make me feel better, then that’s what we should have for dinner.  And I gave in.  Because I’m weak.  Our local Chinese place should hang our picture on the wall.  (This hasn’t been a good week for healthy dinners.)

Okay, maybe this is going to be a little bit of a vacation post.  I was reading The Bloggess just now, and of course I’m laughing hysterically at today’s post (that should totally go without saying), and I had a similar experience over the weekend, and then I started writing the story in my head, so here it is.

Background: My family (Mom, Dad, brother, sister, me, assorted spouses, and one almost 5-year-old) decided to stay in a cabin in the mountains in northwest Georgia for a few days.  In the mountains.  In the woods.  Not in a clearing in the woods.  In the woods.  With me?  Okay.  ‘Cause this will become important.  John and I were supposed to arrive just before midnight Friday night (fly into Atlanta, rent a car, drive an hour and a half), but our flight was delayed (a lot) and then, only about 7 miles from the place, the road was blocked by a police cruiser because the power company was removing a tree from the power lines.  After about 20 minutes of sitting there (no map, no Internet connection to find a map), I finally asked the cop if there was another way to get where we were going.  There was, of course, and we finally got to the house.  In the woods.  At about 2:30 in the morning.  Oh, after we pulled into the wrong driveway.  ‘Cause it was a gravel road that was more of a track up the mountain.  In the very deepest dark.  Because it was in the woods!  And the power was out.  Dad met us at the right driveway with a flashlight and helped us get inside (where there were no lights, because the power was out) and find our bedroom.  With a flashlight.  Because there was no power.  Being up the mountain meant we were using well water, which gets into the house via pump.  Which totally doesn’t work when there’s no power.  So, you know, no flushing.  And bottled water for brushing teeth and washing faces and hands.  NO POWER!  But we were ready to collapse into bed (a bed we never collapsed into again after that night – I promise I’m getting to the point) when the power came back on, and so did every light in the house.  Anyway, most of that background was not really necessary, but let’s just say it illustrates how tired and ready for bed we were the next night, having only gotten about 5 hours of sleep the night before.

I was washing my face in the bathroom when I heard a very loud, somewhat shocked “JESUS CHRIST!” from the bedroom.  I came running and found John standing about three feet away from the foot of the bed, kinda pointing towards the pillow.  “There’s a scorpion.  IN the bed.”  “Can’t be.  Scorpions don’t live in Georgia, they live in Texas and New Mexico and deserts and stuff.”  “Zannah, it was a scorpion.  Go look.”  “Um, no.”  He twitched the covers a little and I saw something scurry under his pillow.  I got a little closer and saw it come out from under the pillow and go upside down under the mattress.  Kinda looked like a scorpion to me, but I wasn’t about to get close enough to really look.  Besides, it couldn’t be.  Either way, though, I didn’t want it in the bed.  John was pretty freaked out, and I wasn’t brave enough to get it, so I ran upstairs and grabbed Corey before he disappeared into his room.  Normally, I’m the one who finds the big ugly bug, and I’m the one who completely freaks out.  John walks into the situation knowing what to expect (I’ve already shrieked about the bug), so he’s usually able to handle it fairly calmly.  This time,  he was the one who found it after nearly LAYING DOWN ON TOP OF IT, so I think he was well within his rights to be a little less than rational.  Anyway, big brother came down, we both grabbed shoes, and I helped him lift up the mattress so he could WHACK the damn thing dead.  And then he put it in a plastic bag to show every person who came to the house over the next few days.  ‘Cause he’s a boy.  Thanks, Cor, for killing the scorpion!  After Corey left (with the scorpion, which he left on the table for everyone to find at breakfast), John and I discussed whether or not we’d be able to sleep in that bed.  I was actually fairly okay with it, I think because I’m not the one who found it, whereas all those other times I have been the one surprised by the spider or the centipede, I can’t sleep because of all the creepy-crawly nightmares.  According to John, that kind of inconsistency is one of my most endearing (or is that infuriating?) qualities.  Anyway, we did a thorough search of the room and the bed, checked all of the blankets, all of the sheets, took the pillows out of the pillowcases so we could shake them out, lifted up the mattress again, looked under the bed with the flashlight, then checked the drooping fabric underneath the box spring just in case they were nesting (isn’t that something you’ve heard of?  A nest of scorpions?  Maybe that’s vipers…), and when we didn’t find anything, we decided it was time to go to bed.  Gingerly.  And without much sleep.  Every night after that, we did the same bed check.

After the scorpion IN THE BED, the spiderwebs that apparently only took 10 minutes to string up across every doorway and sidewalk, and the millipede on the wall over our bed the last night (I called Dad to rescue us from that one), John and I have decided that although we like the idea of having a house in the woods, the woods will totally have to keep their distance.  Nature (the buggy part, at least) is not for me.

(I counted six, which I totally (seven) put in on purpose.  For reals.  Think I can go higher next time?)

It’s the end of the weekend.  I hate that.  John and I were talking this morning about how the conventional life (9-5 jobs, living for the weekends, tiny suburban house with neighbors we don’t know right on top of us) isn’t really working for us.  We want something different (set our own hours, work for ourselves doing something we like, live further away from people), but what if something different doesn’t work?  So we’re talking about it.

I don’t like being a zombie.  It doesn’t last long, though.  Once I get back from my run, I’m wide awake and talking a mile a minute.  Just ask John, who generally isn’t ready for that yet.

After Target, I dropped John off at home and went to Wegman’s, where I bought out the produce section.  Oh!  Then I sliced my first whole cantaloupe.    I’m very proud of myself.  And I ate two slices immediately.  I think that’s all I’ll be eating for the next two days ’cause this cantaloupe is that fresh.  I need to learn more about picking them out.  But it’s so good!

We’ve never really made a big deal out of the 4th of July.  I think we’re too lazy.  A couple or three years ago, we had some people over and played with sparklers, but that hardly took any effort.  Last year, we tagged along with other people’s plans and spent the afternoon at the pool and watched the fireworks in Falls Church (really good fireworks).  This year we had tentative plans to do that again, but then the band got a gig, and that ended up taking up pretty much the whole day.

Tomorrow will be all about trying to keep cool.  It’s supposed to get ridiculously hot, but I don’t have to do anything that’ll keep me outside.  I think I can safely skip running.

Today was the first day of my new job.  Same company, new boss, loads of new (and higher) responsibilities, and I think I’m in a little over my head.  It’s a good thing (right?), and I certainly won’t be bored.  The best part is the complete and utter lack of anything resembling travel.  Or even a commute.  I’ll have the occasional meeting in DC, and there may be a time in the fall when I have to spend a few days in a row down there, but the majority of my time will be spent in the office that’s only 20 minutes (max) from my house.  SO much better.

Enough about work.  I performed my adjunct-to-the-band duties tonight and put their set list together for them.  They’ve got a 4th of July gig nearby, and tonight was their last rehearsal before the big day.

Ricky Gervais is doing stand-up in the other room and I can’t concentrate anymore, so I’m off.

In other news…am I fixed?  It looks like it on every browser and every computer I have access to, but I no longer trust that.  If it looks weird to you (no picture, tag line in the wrong place, etc), please let me know.  John found a way to make it work again, but it’s not the right way.  Of course, it is, it works, but we can find no earthly reason why it wasn’t working before.  I’ve compared my CSS file to the original one, before I tinkered with it, and we don’t see any differences. But hey, it works (I think), and I still might tinker with changing the look over the weekend.  This whole thing started because I wanted to change the picture, and I still want to do that, so we’ll see what happens.

So John is wonderful (I don’t say that enough), not only because he fixed my website, but also because he came home with flowers for me today.  He stopped to buy wasp killer, but the store didn’t have it.  Instead, he bought ice cream (for himself – I swore off ice cream when I quit eating pound cake) and flowers for me.  ‘Cause that’s what you do when they’re out of wasp killer.  Or that’s what you do when you know you can’t immediately kill the wasps that are threatening your wife.  I love flowers.