Week from heck.

Longtime readers may know that yesterday's hilarious tomato gag was in fact a holdover from the old defunct blog. They may not know that I grew all those tomatoes in pots on my porch. That goes back to the days B.D. (before dogs), when pots full of dirt on the porch could be safely unmolested.

Anyway, that was yesterday, and it was not the entry I would have wanted to run on Fiction Friday!, but this was the week from heck. My life isn't so bad that I have really had weeks from hell, although some have come close. My idea of a real Week from Hell might be June 28-July 4, 1863, for the people of the United States in the vicinity of Gettysburg.

Some of my issues are luxury problems. I have a lawn. It was long and wet because it's been raining like God is mildly sore at us but not quite furious. I asked a service to cut the lawn and they could only come Friday. (My electric mower could in no way handle this mess.) Sure, I said. Then, the driveway guys I originally contacted last fall finally said it was dry enough to come... Friday. I got the lawn guys to come Thursday with a tip and some mild begging. And the very big dog got sick and had to go to the vet Thursday, where he becomes a very loud, very whiny pain in the butt. A very big dog pain in the butt is a YUGE pain in the butt. And at that exact moment my wife had to go to the doctor for an unexplained injury. We're awaiting the result of X-rays. (I blame Paul Manafort, because everyone else is for everything.)

Meanwhile, back in heck....

I have been working all week on jobs I wanted to get out of but couldn't. I think my clients thought I was playing hard-to-get, but I really needed time for all the things that were going on. I did avoid some work, despite being desperate for money to pay all these doctors and service professionals, but had to work on a total bloody Mary Sue novel. It was the kind of book where people are made to seem much more cruel and murderous than anyone the writer has ever known, so she can hold up a mirror to her twisted characters and say "See how evil people are?" (Yes, they are, in your books. And hey, nice anti-Trump wish fulfillment.) Plus the characters in the book were all so clueless that I hoped the villains would kill everybody in the last scene, but alas, the villains were stupid too.

People may say that Harry Potter turned kids on to witchcraft, and Twilight made girls want to bompf the undead, but the Hunger Games has made idiot children even dumber than they were before.

Workwise it was a long week.

And that doesn't even get to my own health issues.

They claved me, man.

But that's a story for another time.

While driving home I was listening to the Larry Miller podcast, and he was talking about how hot it had been that week in Los Angeles, and how when his father was a poor kid in Brooklyn they had no air conditioning, no one did; they had to sleep on the fire escape to get a break from the city heat. And it reminded me that, if nothing else, my family went in one generation from sleeping in the park to escape the heat of the city at night to full-time central air conditioning.

So whatever else is going on in my life, it's not that bad. If this is heck, I can live with it.