Hello people.  I have taken as long a vacation as I can stand from this bleak and depressing page.  You whiners keep harassing me about the fact that there have been no additions in quite some time.  Well, here’s a news flash.  I have a job (in Audit-Land) and I have plenty of other things going on in my Super Glamorous Life which prevent me from relaying every tiny stupid detail of my day back to you losers.

That being said.  I have missed posting.  I could honestly care less if anybody reads this drivel….but writing away to the Anonymous Internet Masses is better <and cheaper> than therapy.  I have noticed a rather alarming increase in the violence of my road rage reactions at the poor unsuspecting country folk of Frederick, which is where Audit-Land has sent me for the summer.  My Car is no longer “New” as it experienced a small scratch a few weeks ago, which I mourned over vociferously.  I am quite certain my lazy no good neighbor is the culprit.  Without fail, this neighbor parks their bus-sized luxury car at a ridiculous slant in the parking spot next to mine which makes me go batty.  The parking spots in the Neighborhood are big enough….but seriously….stay away from my spot.  And the stupid neighbor has never actually crossed the line….but you know what I mean…I can't open my passenger side door all the way, and I'm painfully aware of the fact that they cannot possibly open their driver's side door all the way without knocking into My Car.  I’ll post a picture as evidence sometime when I catch them at it.  I can just imagine the stupid neighbor parking three inches away from the car and chanting like an irritating five year old – “I’m not touching you!  I’m not touching you!”  Stupid neighbor.  But going back to the original point, now that My Car has received a scratch….I am dangerously unconcerned with any future scratches to My Car or how it will end up in an accident if I don’t let Mr. SUV Bully merge in/cut me off.  I have plenty of insurance….and what’s the point of having insurance if you never need it?  I attribute this line of thought to my currently high stress levels.

The Other Neighbor drives a completely adorable Z something or other.  It’s tiny and cute and expensive and he obviously is very sensitive to the parking spot size as well.  But the Other Neighbor has his own set of problems.  The Other Neighbor recently got a new roommate, which I know because I was surreptitiously spying on the cul-de-sac as they were unpacking…and no I did not go out and introduce myself…..because I have learned that there are some neighbors here I just don’t want to ever know that well.  I would like to say that even though college was a while ago for me, I do remember very well the Roommate Selection Rules that everyone follows.  No roommates with poisonous pets.  No roommates with sleeping disorders, kleptomania, or recent stints in jail.  And above all else, most importantly, the one rule that is abided by at all costs – No roommates with drums.  The Other Neighbor with the cute car has broken this rule.  I know this because as I was laying in bed at…oh….probably one in the morning some random night listening to the Hubby do his grizzly bear imitation and trying to ignore the Pumpkin putting her cute little paws in my face to see if I am awake enough to walk downstairs and feed her….I am suddenly aware of this sound coming through the wall – THUMP, thump thump, THUMP, thump thump thump.  And then it repeats….and then it repeats again.  I cannot hear any melody, which may have been distracting enough for me to forgive this egregious violation of the public disturbance code of silence.  And I am fairly certain the thumping is not being caused by other normal nightly activity.  I contemplate calling the police, but after mistakenly dialing 911 when I had thought the Pumpkin was actually an axe-murderer who had broken into the house to kill us I am relatively certain our address/phone number/personal information is still somewhere on their “Don’t Help These People” list.  Then I think maybe I should just walk over there and tell them to shut it.  This option sounded good at first, but I would have to actually get up out of bed which means I would need to feed the Pumpkin to keep her from slashing me across the Achilles tendon and it would mean I would need to get dressed into something suitable for speaking to unknown drumming neighbors.  This sounded like a lot of effort at one in the morning.  Although, the prospect of shrieking like a banshee at this total inconsiderate poop head was almost outweighing my laziness….when just as soon as I had decided to summon up the energy of the Force to raise my bowling ball sized head off the pillow, like the jerkface was reading my mind or something…..the thumping stopped.  Blissful silence, now full of only the Hubby fitfully trying to breathe despite his apnea and the Pumpkin making noises like a squirrel from hell in the desperate attempt to convince me that feeding her will take less time than falling asleep listening to that awful noise.  Needless to say she won.  I am such a sucker.

I would like to talk (translate: complain) today, gentle reader, about a few things one should just never do.  These things are perhaps on the fringe of everyday etiquette, possibly never addressed or even considered by Miss Emily Post, but regardless it is extremely important to me and my mental health that people stop doing these things.  Immediately.  And so, let us begin.  First, people need to stop sending me e-mails with threats at the end of them.  I like the funny e-mail forwards, they make me laugh.  I even like the funny pictures, the fat cats and dogs with hats and babies making faces.  What I don’t like are the e-mails which foretell my cursed bad lack for the next decade if I do not forward said e-mail to everyone I have ever met in my entire life.  And I am sure you all know and can empathize with why I feel this way.  I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person, not particularly superstitious, not particularly paranoid.  And yet, as soon as I get one of those stupid e-mails – FORWARD OR ELSE, I become this whimpering medieval fortune teller.  I get anxious.  My blood pressure goes up.  Now I feel like I have to forward the stupid e-mail….which I am sure is why I got the e-mail in the first place.  Cause you just never know…..

Of course I never forward them.  I have been tempting fate and my bad karma scorecard for years now…I have probably racked up three lifetimes of bad luck thanks to my stubborn refusal to send on e-mails which promise me paradise on earth if only I will test the spam filters of my friends and family.  This does not change how I feel though when I get these little electronic omens of my doom.  So please, stop sending me this trash.  It makes me crazy.  I don’t like e-mails telling me what to do.  I have enough of that already.  Seriously….what sadistic person writes these things.  Forward this e-mail or your toes will have warts, your dog will fart all night long, and a tree will fall through your deck for no particular reason. 

Moving on.  The second thing that people must absolutely stop doing is trying to save money on the energy bill by turning down their air conditioning.  What is this nonsense!  Stop driving your car so much.  Stop eating food.  Sell a child.  But please, please, please turn up your air conditioning.  It’s August for crying out loud.  It’s 99 degrees outside and with the humidity it feels like four thousand.  I sweat when I see the weather report on the news in the morning.  I sweat when I walk the twenty feet to my car.  I will donate to your energy bill.  I will pay you cash out of my wallet, but please don’t expect me to be pleasant or social or alert or conscious if, when I stop by for a visit, your house has no air conditioning.  And if it’s above eighty degrees in your house, just go ahead and turn it off, because there’s really no point in having it on at all at that point.  I’m already miserable and being a little more miserable will not change my mood that much.  I realize I should probably care about carbon emissions and saving the planet and all that nonsense….but hey….I recycle just about 90 percent of our trash.  I paid seven dollars a pop for those stupid energy saver light bulbs.  And I sat through the entire Inconvenient Science Lesson, which was taking up a precious spot on the Netflix Queue.  So, I think I now deserve to have my house colder than Yellowknife on an ice road <smile, yes I still watch reality TV during the summer>.  So fie on you, my economic earthy green friends and neighbors.  Fie on you!! 

Moving on.  The last thing and this is probably the most important, so pay attention people.  Take notes.  I need to tell you a little story.  Some of you may or may not know this, but Skywalker is back in town after her brief foray into Seattle.  I am ecstatic about this….as I suffered greatly without my misanthropic dark half here to balance out my whining and complaining.  You see, Skywalker does not complain about people.  She decides, pretty quickly, that she likes them or hates them, and that’s it.  You get one chance, maybe two if you happen to be coked up on pain killers in a hospital when she first meets you, but usually just one chance to make a good impression on Skywalker.  If she finds you frivolous or slightly moronic or irritating….she won’t bother herself with you anymore.  She does this in a surprisingly polite way.  It’s a breath of fresh air to see Skywalker handle people in this way, completely unapologetic about her judgmental nature.  I sit in awe and admiration as she poo poos people while typing madly away on her online chat rooms.  I have already told you she does not suffer fools.  So, anyway.  Skywalker is back and because she is my twin sister and therefore hates to drive cars as much as I do, I am driving her around on Saturday morning.  She had agreed to go with me to run errands.  I had to go to the Mall, which I normally avoid like the plague.  And I had to buy an ice cream cake for a party.  So Skywalker, for whatever reason, decides to brave the sun and excruciatingly oppressive heat to ride around and listen to me complain about how bad everyone else is at driving.  And we’re driving along….everything is fine….Skywalker is being pretty quiet, which is normal.  When all of the sudden, she says with an eerie sound of evil glee in her voice, Uh ohhhhhhhhhhh, you’re in trouble!  Except it wasn’t just “trouble”, it was the even worse – “truuuUUUUUuuuuuuble”.  At just about the same exact moment that Skywalker is apparently chastising me about something, I hear police sirens going off.  The completely annoying thing about police sirens, when you’re too close to them, you have no idea where they are coming from.  The sound surrounds you.  So I immediately jump into panic mode, which is if you can picture this, me hunched up over the steering wheel elbows at ridiculous perpendicular angles to my body and head lowered as low as it will go like………I’m hiding from someone……..and I shout at the top of my lungs “WHERE ARE THEY!!!!”  Now.  This was probably not the ideal way to react to Skywalker’s innocent little remark.  But, instincts kicked in too quickly for me to respond any other way.  Why on earth I hunched over the steering wheel that way….I cannot say.  Perhaps I thought I would not get pulled over if the cop could not see anyone actually driving the car.  If I slid far enough down in the seat so that only the tops of my eyeballs peered over the dashboard maybe I could successfully evade what I must have thought was going to be hard time in a maximum security penitentiary.  I have no idea why police officers scare the <bleep> out of me….but they do.  Of course after my blood pressure has already gotten dangerously high and I have plotted out the route I will take on my high speed getaway attempt (after consulting the scenes I can remember from the Transporter and any Jason Bourne movie in my movie archive brain), Skywalker looks at me and kind of laughs and says in that purely evil way she has – oh……..I didn’t mean you……….I meant that guy over there………….the one getting pulled over.  HA.   HA.   HA. 

Now.  Of course the moral of this story is that there are certain things you just don’t say, ever, while riding around in someone’s car.  For example – “I hope you don’t mind, I put my cocaine in your trunk,” or “What’s that burning smell?”  You get the idea.  Some people, who get in the Driving Zone, can probably handle this kind of running commentary because they just block it out.  You know those people who completely ignore you while they’re driving…well, needless to say, I am not one of those people.  Except, the story is not over.  So, for whatever reason after Skywalker has scared the <bleep> out of me, she thinks she’s gone and done something funny.  And that’s how it starts.  Skywalker and I both, thanks probably to our Dutch heritage and bowling ball physiques, don’t laugh like normal people.  Here’s how it goes – it starts with the kind of chuckle chuckle giggle that most people do when they think something is funny.  And then it becomes much much worse.  The chuckle chuckle giggle quickly becomes a loud ridiculous guffaw that shakes you whole body and makes your chipmunk cheeks start to ache.  And of course if Skywalker is laughing this hard, which she is, I am going to start laughing too….because laughing like yawning is highly contagious and really listening to Skywalker laugh is just about the funniest thing in the world.  So she’s laughing and now I’m laughing and we’re both laughing so hard we’re crying and I can’t breathe and I can’t really see……..and oh, by the way, I’m still driving.  Yeah, so this probably wasn’t an ideal time to be having a laughing attack.  So please, no cryptic warnings while you’re a passenger in my car and please, no ridiculous laughing fits either.  I can’t handle either one.  I’m a terrible driver, and I really need all of my attention to be focused on not killing either of us while I try to make it to our destination.  Thank you.  Here endeth the lesson.

So, I’m back baby.  Yeah, that’s right.  The blog is back.  I hope this makes you all happy….or at least contented enough to stop harassing me.  A lot has happened to me over the summer – cake baking disasters, parties with the #2’s, and vacation planning.  So there are plenty of things to talk about…and even if there’s nothing else to talk about we always have my endless complaining about whatever annoying thing has happened to me during the week.  So, thanks for listening, whoever you are.  <sigh>  I feel so much better.

Later gators,

Heather