The Mean Reds

It's not just me, right? There's definitely something going around. Something in the air, maybe. Or in the water. Or in the multiple cups of coffee I drink to function during the day because I can't sleep at night.

Maybe it's that winter came back and ate spring and all the pretty little flowers that were blooming in my yard. Maybe it's because I even have a yard in the first place, and I miss our old condo and the cement and grit of the city.  Maybe it's that Noah's nose has been leaking like a faucet for days now, that Jason's already sick and I'm trying not to even acknowledge the scratchy feeling in my throat.

Maybe it's the terrible news at Virginia Tech and my inability to turn of effing CNN.

I don't know. Maybe it's just all these Girl Scout cookies I've been eating. (Damn you, Tagalongs! Fill the void already!)

Whatever it is, I don't think I'm the only one feeling this way. (Right? Right? That's your cue, commenty-type people. Hello? Fuck.)

I'm sad. Anxious. Constantly on edge. I've been having nightmares. Stupid anxiety dreams mixed with full-on weird ones, like a recurring dream where I've killed someone and gotten away with it -- but then the Backyardigans start singing to me from the television about how murder is oh so wrong, oh so wrong! and I am consumed with guilt --  Dostoevsky meets children's television, folks. Only in my brain. So I just stay up all night instead.

It's hard to write when I get like this. I know it will pass, I know everything is fundamentally okay, and I know I would regret writing some overwrought, navel-gazing rumination on any of the stupid petty shit that's wigging me out, so I should just...I don't know. Shut up and post some photos or something.

I would, except I don't know which Photoshop filter gets rid of toddler snot-face.

So here. Hold this photo up to a mirror and discover the name of the one thing that pretty much delights me to no end. It's the amalah.com brain teaser placemat!

(God, but I am dumb. Physics! Objects in mirrors, and such.)

We still don't have our archives back after this happened, and we don't have a solution to the Open Thread/captcha quagmire, but damn, it's good to have the site back. Because where else am I gonna post stuff like this?  The Muppets make everything so much better.