I have too much crap to catch up on.

Seriously, the thing about being out sick for two and a half days is that I’m inevitably absolutely swamped with emails and random stupid crap when I get back. Today, of course, is no exception. I probably don’t really have time to write, but I WANT to write, and I need to, and so I am doing exactly that.

Thank you for your well wishes, by the way. It was a sinus or possibly upper respiratory infection, it knocked me flat on my ass, and although I’m still a little weak and tired and congested and coughy, I feel a hundred and ten times better today than I did yesterday.

It occurs to me that one source of my recent major writer’s block here is that I’ve been censoring myself, and that annoys me. It’s something I vowed never to do on this page, but I’ve found (or convinced myself) that it’s necessary to do exactly that sometimes.

I’m avoiding writing about work because I’ve been slammed with what I’m sure is a very healthy dose of paranoia, and although I have all kinds of freakin’ awesome stories about how terribly Dilbert my office can be sometimes, I’m taking a break from that.

And then there’s politics. I have plenty to say about the Presidential race, and I have quite deliberately chosen not to say it here. With the exception of my furious response to having my bumper sticker stolen (something I actually regretted a bit after writing but left up), I’ve stayed pretty true to my word on this, and I’m going to tell you why.

It’s not that I’m afraid of offending people – Lord knows I’m quite capable of offending tons of people without uttering a single word about politics, and most of the time, other people’s feelings on a subject are not enough to make me curb what I’m about to say. That may sound selfish, but it’s true. At the same time, though, it is about me trying to be sensitive to my readership, in a way.

You’d have to be living in a cave to miss how absolutely, unbelievably nasty this race has been. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s any worse than past elections, because I didn’t really get into politics until after I graduated from college – so, as unfortunate as it sounds, I paid very little attention to previous presidential races during my lifetime. But this one – I know for sure it’s nasty, and sometimes it seems like I can’t find a single place in the world (physical or virtual) that is free of this particular turmoil.

Like many of you, I visit a large number of web sites daily – probably way more than I should be, considering that I’m at work. But in the past few weeks/months, I’ve found myself avoiding some places I used to frequent. I have a lot of trouble dealing with the battle cries, the disenchantment, and most of all, the sheer anger I’m running into everywhere I go. The “all you stupid fucking liberals/conservatives” and the “our candidate is a genius, yours is a jackass” and the “anyone who thinks X is a complete idiot” themes are really getting to me.

I’m very sensitive, and when I run across these posts, I’m finding myself feeling personally attacked. And I know this is a ridiculous response on my part, that probably very few people out there specifically feel like I personally am a complete moronic lemming because of what I believe in or because of whose bumper sticker was stolen from the back of my car. But I’m thin-skinned, and sometimes I find that I can’t separate the writing from the writer, and then I’m tempted to defend my position and that’s a futile effort and it just gets worse.

Hugo wrote well on something like this last week, and shared his plan for the days leading up to the election. Here’s mine – I’m not going to talk much about it, if at all.

I care deeply about the outcome of this election. I have some very well-defined opinions on many aspects of it, and I have gotten involved in ways I never would have considered a few years ago. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m avoiding it because I’m uneducated or because I don’t care, or because I don’t want people to disagree with me.

The thing is, I have other outlets for my political ramblings, and you have many excellent outlets for whatever kind of political commentary whets your particular appetite.

I’ll talk about some other stuff here, like how I played The Sims 2 for like five hours straight yesterday while hacking and coughing on the couch, and have gotten so obsessed with it that I created a family with a young man designed to complement the teenager in my main family’s looks and personality so that they could get married when she grows up. And also how I’m so obsessed that I shrieked in horror when my main family’s mother got electrocuted trying to repair the dishwasher, and how my own actual real-life family has started to make little comments and weird faces when I inadvertently yell things like “Quit playing that damn computer game and go get the baby off the floor and feed it, you idiot” at the computer screen.

I just want them to grow up well. Is that so wrong?

2 Reasons Why Today Sucks:

1. It’s pouring rain. And flooding. AGAIN. I think Jamie said it best in the car this morning when she said, “Jeanne, you’re a turd.” Or something along those lines. There’s one thing Florida has on us, and that’s that they’re smart enough to stay the hell inside when there’s a hurricane on the coast. Up here, we just go on about our lives, despite the fact that in Salem, so many roads have closed due to flooding that the state police actually got on the radio and said, “Don’t come to Salem today.” And yet people (self included) are out driving around.
2. I am sick. Actually, I have been sick since Friday. And it’s not the “oh I don’t feel so hot but I can totally still go to the mall” kind of sick – it’s more like the “park your ass directly in bed and stay there” kind of sick. Sinuses are involved (shocker) and I’ve been running a fever off and on, which gives me these flushed cheeks that might actually be kind of cute if it weren’t for the fact that I’m a freakin’ breeding ground for death and disease.

There’s a lot of stuff at work that isn’t done, and that I should be doing, but I’m not focusing well at all so I think I need to sleep. It seems like I’ve done nothing but sleep for the past four days and yet I’m still completely fatigued. It sucks.

That is all.

File under “WTF”:

Someone in my office keeps taking reading material into the bathroom. I suspect it is the same someone who thought that it was a good idea to affix a wall pocket to the side of the stall in the first place (making it what I now call the stall pocket).

I don’t object to bathroom reading material in general – as a matter of fact, the last several issues of Entertainment Weekly have gone straight to the magazine rack in the bathroom, because if I don’t skim through it in there, I’ll forget I even subscribe to the damn thing. There’s a pile of magazines on my bedroom floor that haven’t been touched because I’ve been so busy lately. So yeah, bathroom reading material at home is mostly okay.

But there’s a time and place for bathroom reading, I think, and my office is neither.

This has been going on for quite some time, and for months I paid no attention to it. But finally I started to get sick of seeing it there every time I went to the bathroom (and I go to the bathroom like twelve times a day), so one day when the suspect had already left for the day, I decided to throw all the reading material into the trash can.

Except that I made the mistake of throwing it into the trash can right there in the bathroom, and housekeeping doesn’t visit our office more than once a week unless we call and suggest that the overflowing garbage might attract rodents. Then they come.

So. Housekeeping didn’t come that night, and the next day when I made my first of twelve bathroom visits, I noticed something odd.

The reading material had found its way back to the stall pocket.

So I threw it away again.

Next day? Same thing. The reading material was back in the stall pocket.

It happened for at least three days. I felt like I was living in Groundhog Day or something.

Finally, one night when I was working late, I stole all the reading material, shoved it in the bottom of one of my office trash cans, and called housekeeping to come pick up the trash the very next morning.

Problem solved. Or so I thought.

Because when the fall brochures and fine arts schedules and stuff started getting delivered to my office, our bathroom librarian helpfully placed a seasonal array right back there in the stall pocket.

And this time, it freaks me out even more because one of the brochures has a picture of the president and his wife on the front, and their smiling faces are exactly at the same height as my ass when I’m sitting down.

So I feel like they’re staring at me and I get performance anxiety and then I have to turn them around before I can, you know, go. And now every time I go in there, the very first thing I do is turn that brochure to the wall so I don’t see them looking at me.

But someone keeps turning them so they face the front and it’s FREAKING ME OUT.

I do not, however, think that the bathroom librarian is the same person who has been folding hotel points on our toilet paper rolls.

The storm on Friday wasn’t nearly as bad near my office as it was near our house. Apparent tornadoes my ass.

There was, in fact, an actual tornado that hit about a mile and a half from our home. Fortunately, no one was hurt, although a lot of people sustained damage to their property and houses.

We are friends with a family whose land was right in the middle of the tornado’s worst damage. Their house has a little bit of damage, but it is mostly okay. They did, however, lose almost every tree on their several acres of property (and they have a lot of trees – they estimate more than a thousand were lost). Their livelihood comes from a tree service they own and operate, so it’s lucky in that they already have a lot of the equipment they’ll need to clean up, but because their livelihood comes from trees, losing their trees is more upsetting to them than it might be to some people. Their yard looks awful, and last I heard they still didn’t have power or running water.

My family went over there to help with the beginning stages of the cleanup on Saturday, and Sammi meant to take pictures for me to post but forgot. I’ll try to get some up here later. As for me, I did hold the workshop on Saturday as planned and everything went very smoothly. I’m so relieved that it’s over.

Annoyances/Bad Things:

• The engine in my parents’ Jeep blew up today. The minivan was already out of commission, so now they are down to one vehicle (Ginny’s truck) between them. Why does everything have to break at once, and always between pay periods when no one has any spare money? I hate that.

• After being on the mailing list for nearly the entire time it was being developed, I finally got The Sims 2 yesterday. I rushed home with it, all excited about parking my ass in front of the computer and controlling simulated lives for hours, but it ended up taking forever and two days to get it installed. It took three tries to get DirectX 9.0c installed, and I had to do some technical somethingorother with the cryptographic somethingorother which I did correctly but can’t possibly explain to you. Once I finally got that all done, it took two hours and three tries to get the game itself installed. The CD-ROM kept freezing up and messing up the installation. After all of THAT, Jamie and I sat like kids on Christmas morning in front of the monitor and loaded up the game – only to find that the graphics card on our PC isn’t compatible with DirectX 9.0 – a fact I never would have figured out on my own, since there isn’t a lot of info about required graphics cards on the game box.

  It turned out mildly okay, though, as my laptop does have a compatible graphics card for the game, so after another hour of installation, I got to spend about thirty minutes playing before I had to go to bed. That whole saga began at 6:30 and ended after midnight. Oy.

• We had a power outage in the office this morning at about 9:30, and sat around Swiffering our desks and putting things in the shredding box until 11 when the power was restored. That sucked.

• Also, SOMEONE STOLE THE KERRY-EDWARDS BUMPER STICKER OFF MY CAR. Motherfuckers.

  I think it must have happened yesterday, but I didn’t notice it until today at lunch. I was in a very Republican area of town and noticed another car with a Kerry-Edwards sticker and thought, “Cool, I’m not the only Democrat up in this joint.” Then I glanced out the other window at my car – and there was no sticker.

  I immediately tore out to the parking lot, because after my initial rage came an overwhelming fear that whoever took the sticker had also vandalized my car in some way. I checked all over for signs of keying or other sabotage and didn’t see anything, so I guess I’m lucky there.

  When I got the sticker and put it on my car, I immediately worried that someone would vandalize it. That kind of stuff happens around here. When I stopped in at the Democratic headquarters last week to pick up some campaign material, they were keeping a three-ring notebook with pages and pages of people whose yard signs had been stolen. That’s really sad. And the thing is, around here I see three times as many Bush-Cheney promotional materials as Kerry-Edwards ones. I guess it could be because the Kerry-Edwards ones keep getting stolen, but honestly I just think there are more Bush suppporters in my area.

  We’re already outnumbered, so what in the hell do people think they’ll accomplish? If they steal all the signs, will we forget that Kerry and Edwards are running and just vote for Bush because there’s no other option? Am I going to change my vote because some asshole TOUCHED MY CAR and took a sticker off of it? Hell no. And luckily I have a spare at home, but I’m still furious about it.

  I am sure that there are just as many Democratic assholes out there stealing Bush-Cheney material as there are Republicans. I’m certainly not the kind of person who’s going to be all, “See, you damn conservatives are all the same.” But somehow I suspect that the out-of-control conservatives greatly outnumber the out-of-control liberals around here. I do work less than a mile from Jerry Falwell’s fucking church, after all, in a neighborhood where a concerted effort was made by his congregants to force a prominent gay rights activist out of town. It is sometimes as difficult to be a liberal in this area as it is to be a conservative in others. But really, that’s not the point.

  The point is that I parked my car in a public lot and someone found it appropriate and acceptable to remove something from that car. I don’t care if it’s a two dollar bumper sticker, a fifty dollar hood ornament, or a three hundred dollar stereo. It belonged to me, and someone took it, and that’s bullshit.

I hope the week doesn’t turn out to be as long and annoying as today has been so far.

Oh my God, Ivan, pleeeeease stay away until at least Sunday. Please.

I know, dude. I know. Virginia’s a lovely place to visit. But just don’t. Especially not on Saturday freakin’ morning.

Do you think Ivan’s the type who’d fall for it if I, like, chucked a giant ham bone out toward the ocean? He’d be all “ham bone?” and go chasing after it and leave us alone? Maybe?

Because, see, I have my thing on Saturday. It’s a workshop, actually, for volunteers, and I have worked so hard for the past few weeks on it that I am going to be absolutely devastated if we have to cancel it. It’s fall, and every weekend is full, and if we don’t do it on Saturday I don’t know if/when we’ll be able to reschedule it.

And furthermore, we won’t know for sure if it’s going to be here by Friday night until Friday night, and that’s kind of too late to go canceling things for people traveling from out of town, and so I’m terrified that I’m going to put myself in peril driving an hour in torrential rain early on Saturday morning and then no one will show up and everyone will think I don’t know how to do anything.

I know how horribly selfish that sounds, that my primary reason for wanting Ivan to stay away is so that my hard work doesn’t go to waste, and it’s really not just that, but a lot of it is. I’m losing sleep over it. I’m checking the Weather Channel’s web site obsessively.

I never got around to writing about this last week, but when Frances lumbered on up the Eastern seaboard toward us, she kicked our asses. (That’s a slideshow, by the way, and pretty interesting.) It poured rain for about a day and a half straight, and pretty much every body of water around here flooded. On Wednesday morning my mom had to take detours to get to work, and I ended up leaving here in the middle of the day. I drove home, white-knuckled and shaking like a leaf, in the worst rain I’ve ever witnessed in my entire life, and stopped by the high school to get my sisters so they would have seat belts and wouldn’t have to ride the bus home in such bad conditions. Someone in the high school office told me that the two main roads leading toward Roanoke were closed due to flooding, and I knew from talking to my dad that a third road near our house was flooding. We ended up taking a long way around and making it home safely, but I was so worn out by the drive that I passed out on the couch about ten minutes after we got home.

The point? That was last Wednesday. The ground around here is still saturated, and the rivers and creeks are still full. They’re predicting anywhere from 4 to 10 inches of rain over the weekend, and I am certain that this much rain will cause a very bad situation. It will be dangerous, it will be expensive, and while it might not be a hurricane, there’s still going to be a lot of damage.

Gaaah. I’m freaking out and I don’t know what to do.