Still Dumbstruck

I am still absolutely dumbstruck by the events of 6/1. For those of you who haven't heard on the news, an EF03 tornado ripped through western MA in a 39 mile path of sheer destruction. I have family and friends in every single affected town and city, and the tornado missed them all by as little as a half mile and my house by about 8 miles. By sheer dumb fucking luck, we were all either just to the south or north of the tornado's path.

My former stomping grounds from my teenage years are all but totally leveled. People have lost everything. Again, by dumb fucking luck, only 4 people were killed. One of them, a mother, was killed when she acted as human shield over her 15 year-old daughter as their house came down on top of them. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it.

I've seen many people on the news and on Facebook talking about how they prayed for God to spare them and their homes, and how it was a "miracle" they came through unscathed. I am amazed at the cognitive dissonance that belief requires. It has taken all of my self-control not to ask - do you somehow think you prayed harder or had more faith than the people who lost everything? Do you think you deserved to be spared and those affected didn't? How can you possibly believe in and justify the actions of a god who would do something like that?

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure that if my house had been in the path and I was forced to take cover in the basement, shielding my baby from flying debris, glass, and mother nature's blind-ass fury, you'd probably catch me, an Atheist, praying my ass off too. I think that's just human nature in the face of impending doom - not necessarily praying to a god, but to anything, everything that might be listening - even the tornado itself - "Please Mr. Tornado, please spare my baby, I am BEGGING you PLEASE!" - throwing your will and desperation out there to the universe and hoping it sticks somehow.

But then if you ARE spared, if you are one of the lucky ones, how can you possibly sit there and say, out loud no less, that "God" saw fit to save YOU because he heard your prayers somehow over the prayers of thousands of others praying just as feverishly and desperately as you?

I am dumbstruck by all of it. The destruction, the violence of it, the terror I went through calling my family members and saying "There's a tornado heading straight for your house!!!!!" while I'm watching the shit happen on the news. Being in a panic the entire rest of the evening with every rumble of thunder, every flash of lightning, a yellow-orange foreboding sky above - the whole time saying to myself "But this shit doesn't happen HERE! Not HERE!!!"

And I've been having nightmares about it ever since. As someone who truly loved thunderstorms my entire life, I don't think I will ever see them the same way again. Ever.

Nature? I Forfeit.

Fucking tornadoes now? Really? REALLY?????

I bought formula at this grocery store at 1pm yesterday. I bought some booze at this liquor store around 1:30pm. This photo was taken around 5pm:

Nature 2. JLK 0.

My loyal readers might remember the last time I tried to take on nature at our new house. It didn't go so well.

And it's only getting worse. In fact, I am looking forward to winter and it's only just Memorial Day. And I used to LOVE summer.

It got pretty hot around these parts pretty quickly. I was happy for the nice weather, but we don't (yet) have air conditioning in our house so the nights have been steaming hot on the 2nd floor. We've been forced to open the windows at night, knowing that the shitty screens were going to let some bugs in. And so for the last week or so, my house has been damn-near infested with every little creepy crawly you can imagine.

Then, on friday, we found ourselves having a pretty serious carpenter ant problem, especially in the living room. But even then I was okay, because I can kill ants, I'm not scared of them, and my husband all but eradicated the problem when he got home from work that same day.

Today we had all new windows installed in the house. We've been counting down the days for a month, so we were pretty excited. Every single window in the house is open right now and I am enjoying the bugless fresh air. Except for two nagging things:

1. One of the window guys felt the need to tell me that on one of the 2nd floor storm windows there was a big ass spider with fangs that jumped off the house before he could kill it, and...

2. The thing about new windows is, in order for them to install them they have to take the old ones out. Which means that for at least a few minutes, there were gaping holes in the house. So for most of the afternoon I have been killing MORE bugs and spiders and only keeping myself from losing my shit by telling myself that this is the end, these are the last bugs that are getting in here.

But the absolute KICKER today was when I headed out through the garage to go see the progress of the install. I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye and noticed a 6 FOOT LONG SNAKE dangling from the side wall of the fucking garage, trying to slither its way on top of the now-open garage door. I freaked the FREAK out.

A got the thing down and out of the garage, probably injured it in the process, and laughed at me for being such a chicken shit when we used to have a pet snake. But a snake in a cage that you raised from the time it was a baby and a wild snake from the woods that you don't know from Adam are two different things.

Either way I thought it was over.

Late this afternoon I noticed the garage door was still open. "Gee honey, I wonder how the snake got IN the garage in the first place????" I decided that since it had been open for so long, I should probably go out and check to make sure the snake hadn't returned. I didn't make it 3 feet in before I noticed a giant-ass snake skin hanging from the crawlspace above the interior entry door. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there last night. I'm also pretty sure it wasn't there this morning. Hubby isn't home to check it out.

I am now at the point where every time I go outside, I feel like Owen Wilson in Behind Enemy Lines - under constant fucking attack from creatures all around me. Bugs fly into my head, mosquitoes bite me, bees screw with me, spiders somehow decide that my yard isn't big enough and they need to come investigate ME. I've gone from telling my husband not to use pesticides in our yard at all, to saying "Spray that shit until it glows in the dark for all I care, just get rid of the fuckers!" Irresponsible and selfish? Yeah, probably. But I'm developing phobias left and right here.

So much for my gardening and landscaping plans. I have an awesome Yankee Doodle lilac to plant but I can't bring myself to go outside long enough to dig a hole.

This summer is going to suck. :(

Nature 1. JLK 0.

I grew up in a medium-sized city. As an adult, I lived in a large town/suburb where my husband and I had a condo with a very small yard. Back in November, we moved to a town that can only be described as rural. Although it is really only separated by 9 miles and a large river from where we used to live, it is an entirely different setting.

We have an acre of land with woods and a small mountain behind our property. We have deer, owls, all sorts of cool animals living around here. I have seen more species of birds on my bird feeders in the past 2 weeks than I have seen in my entire life. Since spring began, I've been all "Yay! Nature! I'm going to start GARDENING and shit!"The original owners of our house spent a lot of money on landscaping at one point, but it's been neglected for awhile and the yard is kind of a mess.

The bird feeder next to my patio area.

Despite the fact that I have never really been a person who gardens or does any kind of dirty outdoor work, I felt myself getting really into the idea of doing stuff outside. I bought garden tools, decided to start a compost heap.......I was feeling very GREEN.

Yesterday, as I headed out to the side property line to start my compost heap, bag of cantaloupe rind, strawberry tops, and various other refuse in hand, I thought to myself "You know, I haven't really had an issue with any bugs turning me off to being outside yet. Other than the annoying gnats, I'm doing okay!"

FML.

That afternoon, I went to move a small pile of debris from the concrete pad that is going to become my little hideaway/patio area, and I encountered a wolf spider. A big one. I was going to put a picture here, but they freaked me out too much and couldn't do it. Feel free to google an image and see for yourself. I'll wait.

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Fucking GROSS, right????

I was like "Holy shit! I am so DONE right now. Won't do that again!" And I promptly moved to a different area of the yard and left my pile of shit right where it was.

This morning I noticed that the top of my right ass cheek/hip felt really bruised and painful. "WTF?" I thought. So I pulled aside my pajama pants and saw a variation of this:

No, that's not my ass. That's someone else's pic. I was too busy screaming to take a photo.

I freaked the freak out, called my husband, and made him come home from work and remove it. 20 minutes and much whining later, he had removed the deer tick's body and all the legs. 

But the fucking head is still in there. In my ass cheek. In my FREAKING ASS CHEEK!

I called my doctor and she said to just let it work its way out, but if it was really bothering me I could come in and she would excavate it. I decided to stop being a wuss for now and see how much it's bugging me by Monday. 

Seriously, though. WTF.