a tough week

     This is a picture of Jim after the kids turned him into a "merman", complete with seaweed and seashells.  I can't remember the year.

     This has been a tough week.  I don't know why-- nothing I can pinpoint... it just was.  I cried a lot.  I haven't cried in a long time.

     This morning I ran errands and then went to work.  And cried.  Then I went home.  And cried.  I've decided that I'm a depressed cleaner.  When I got tired of crying I decided to clean out the window frames and screens.  Well, I'm more of an ADD cleaner.  I went to a window to open it (because we have spring in Texas for about one week out of the year and I love to open our windows in the spring) and was disgusted at the depth of dirt that had accumulated inside of the screens.  So I lugged out the vacuum cleaner and started cleaning them out with the hose.  Then I noticed that one of the screens on my bedroom windows was off and leaning against the house.  I thought that was strange, but then I moved on to the living room windows.  Then I noticed that one of those screens was off and leaning against the house.  Now this was beyond strange ---- and creepy - especially since there had been some break-ins in our area a couple of weeks ago.  So I went into the family room and had this conversation with my child who is going to Harvard (as opposed to the other 5, who are not) which just goes to show that intelligence does not always walk hand in hand with common sense:

Me:  "OK, this is creepy -- 2 windows screens look like they have been taken off of the windows.  I'm not sure when this happened but I think it was recently."

Daughter #1:  ---- she gave me a look, which I assume was very much like the look I gave Jim went he put the $2000 cell phone bill in front of me --- and then she said, "Ummmmm, that would have been me."

Me: "What?!  When and why would you have removed -- and not replaced -- window screens?"

Her:  "That would have been the day I was locked out of the house."

Me:  "The day you were locked out for three hours?!"

Her:  "Yes, that day."

Me:  "So when in the three hours did you try to open the windows?"

Her:  "Ummm, about 2 1/2 hours into it.  But it worked -- one of the windows was unlocked."

Me:  "You didn't tell me you climbed through a window."

Her:  "Well, I put all of the screens back."

Me: --- nothing, I just looked at the window with no screen on it.

Her:  "Well, almost all of them."

I then went outside to put the screens back on.  I struggled with one of the screens, then a thought popped into me head, so I went back in to talk to her.

Me:  "Ummm, how did you manage to get the screens off?  You've never done that before."

Her:  "I found a machete lying out back and used that."

Me:  really, not much of anything was said on that.  I must say that I am HIGHLY disappointed that a crazed (cuz let me tell you that after 2 1/2 hours of being locked out of the house, that girl was very crazed) twenty-plus year old person could attack my windows with a machete and CLIMB in one of them and not one single neighbor seemed to notice!!!  What kind of neighborhood do I live in?!!!

Oh, and since I live in the same house with teenage males, who sometimes have moronic tendencies,  I didn't question the fact that there was a machete lying in my backyard for one nano second.

Just one of the regular bumps on my roller coaster.  Welcome.

Tomorrow's ride will feature the stomach-dropping and heart-stopping turns & twists of my mother-in-law's roller coaster.  There will be plenty of seats--- it's  long & a little lonely.