Thanks for all your nice comments on the last post. They’re what I love about blogging — you can feel like crap, write about it and there’s always someone reaching out to you to make you feel better.

I wish I could say this week at work was better, but it was more of the same after working a solid 40 hours in three days and just having an altogether bad day on on a work-related road trip on Thursday. Thursday night I hardly slept a minute with my brain moving 100 mph and me coming to terms with the fact that I may have an anxiety problem. Driving home yesterday (on what was technically a day off) took an extra hour because of ridiculous traffic, and it didn’t occur to me until I’d been home for a while and napped that the extra vehicles were on the road because it was the start of a holiday weekend. I haven’t had a Labor Day off in four years, so I kind of forget it even exists.

You know the saying that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle? I pretty much spent the entire five-hour drive home yesterday pleading to God to ease up on me. Probably part delirium from not sleeping and part insanity from not having any down time away from work for four days, I felt utterly destroyed again and was sure that I was at my breaking point and could not handle a thing more.

When I got home, I took a nap. Then I got up, went on a date with the Modern Love Machine and felt better. The MLM was to coach a cross-country meet early this morning, and I was still exhausted from not sleeping Thursday night, so we went to bed early.

The MLM got up around 6:30 for his meet this morning. I was half-awake when a series of sounds occurred: the neighbors’ dog barking, our Lucydog growling, Mr. Neighbor shouting something I couldn’t clearly make out and the squeal of some tires from a car that clearly was driving quickly. In a half-awake state, these sounds can be explained as the neighbor’s dog getting out, and Mr. Neighbor was shouting at her to come back, Lucydog growling at the commotion (or maybe a cat) and the obnoxious kid from down the street driving like he usually does. When my phone rang a few minutes later and I saw it was Mrs. Neighbor, I instantly became fully awake and put two and two and two and two together to figure out that at least one of our cars had been broken into.

And all I could do was shrug my shoulders. I couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry, just enough to be mildly annoyed that I was going to have to call the insurance company and listen to them feign concern for my safety and well being while raising our premium.

Two white dudes about 21 years old or so appeared to be targeting older cars that didn’t have security systems and got five cars on our street, including the MLM’s 15-year-old Altima and Mrs. Neighbor’s Camry. The neighbors’ dog saw it go down and was barking up a storm, which caused Mr. Neighbor to look outside and wonder why his wife’s car’s trunk was open and then notice the two dudes. He screamed at them, they peeled off in their own car. They got the MLM’s radio and — more importantly to the MLM — his copy of GnR’s Appetite for Destruction. They got Mrs. Neighbor’s emergency kit and were in the process of getting her radio when they were interrupted. The cops came, wrote up their reports, dusted for fingerprints and left, and the MLM took my car and went to his cross-country meet.

The person most agitated by the whole event seems to be a guy whom I refer to as The Sheriff under my breath, though he’s got some more off-colored nicknames from some of the other the folks in the ‘hood. He lives around the corner and is so obese that he can neither walk nor work. Instead, he’s determined his job is Head of the Neighborhood Watch, and he spends his time rolling around the ‘hood in his motorized wheelchair and reporting suspicious activity to the cops, which he describes as ‘getting the neighborhood cleaned up.’ He tends to find a lot more activity suspicious than the average citizen. He actually tried to have the MLM’s car towed when we were on vacation last summer. As the crime lab officer was out dusting all the vehicles for finger prints, The Sheriff was all shouty about the ordeal and seemed upset at me for not being upset. Again I just shrugged my shoulders at being annoyed about having to clean the broken glass and fingerprint dust mess up on a day when the projected high temperature is 95 and I have to work again, but this was a personal affront to His Authority as The Sheriff.

There’s a proverb I had in the back of my head as I was pleading for God’s mercy yesterday. ‘Ask not for a light load, but for a strong back.’ Had this happened two weeks ago, I probably would have been as angry as The Sheriff. At this point, I just don’t care anymore, short of anyone being hurt or unhealthy. I’m not exactly happy to be at this point, but it’s a better place than I was 24 hours ago.