Paranoia the Destroyah

It is one of those weeks when I have to drink beer every night. Such things happen once in a while and when they do there is nothing for it but to plunge straight ahead and remind yourself that you really don't need a waistline anymore anyway and isn't that a relief? Thus it is that on Sunday night S & I walked from her house to the Admiral for a couple beers (the walking burned off the calories) and then on Monday I had work to do at home which necessitated the drinking of a couple of beers while I stuffed and stapled (you can't stuff and staple alcohol free, for pity's sake) and last night, which was purely going to be a virtuous night, A came over to eat dinner, chat, check her email and make crafts. Tonight, or, actually in like an hour, I must be at the Westville for a meeting (yeah, yeah, it is a meeting, a meeting with beer!) and then tomorrow night is the hideously named Twestival that I am determined to go to in case I get to meet some new friendly geeks as well as the geeks I already know who are going to be there. Plus it's for a good cause. You should go too. I'm still trying to figure out what to wear.

However, that is just a week of beer and not what I was going to blog about at all, which was paranoia. Every time A comes over we seem to manage to work ourselves into a small yet vaguely justified paranoid frenzy. Last week we heard some mysterious thumps right outside and then Theo barked like crazy, so we were convinced there was a burglar out there. He kept on making random thump noises for a while and finally I pointed out that if somebody really was coming in to stalk or burgle or cut you up into little bits, they wouldn't fuck around with making thump noises for an hour or two first. No self respecting psychopath bothers with a whole hour of thumping unless there are a fair amount of teenagers to be gone through first and my house is currently rather delightfully teenager free (although I am missing young M something fierce lately and am ready for him to come home; I wouldn't even mind his friends, no, seriously.)

Last night my worries centered first around the furnace and then around the cat. It got really hot in the house for some reason so I started fretting that the washing machine (R2 as we affectionately call it for its plaintive beeps) had been somehow hooked up not to the hot water pipes that run hot water to the sinks and tub and dishwasher but to the hot water pipes that heat the house. This, I think, would be very bad. I also think it might be impossible or at least supposed to be impossible but at my house, which has a creepy control room so you can watch whatever is going on in the glass room (just in case it's too inconvenient to stand outside any one of its walls which are, you know, made of GLASS) anything is possible. Anyway, the furnace, which goes through propane at a ridiculous rate anyway and has been mysteriously a lot louder lately, has been on my mind a lot, as in, I hope it doesn't either blow up or give me carbon monoxide poisoning or just die: I do not trust my furnace. Therefore, last night when there was a sudden extremely strong smell of propane - well, propane or fuel oil or kerosene, something like that anyway - I went into full paranoia mode and so did A. We went all over inside and outside the house sniffing like beagles but the strange smell vanished as quickly as it had arrived, so who knows? My nose was starting to hurt with all the sniffing and I just gave up and concentrated on the brain cell destroying odor of the A 600 glue we were using for our crafts.

A pointed out that I should get a new furnace, because I worry about mine too much. "Yes," I said, "But remember, I am neurotic."
"Oh right" she said, and we left it at that, which is good because then Pebble got out by wiggling through the screen and she didn't come back until 3:30 this morning, which time I mostly filled by lying in bed thinking about how sad I was going to be when I found her small cat corpse and wondering if the thumping psycho from the other night was still around and would notice the door being open so Pebble could get back in and then wondering why it was that I have dogs who, while they would totally notice another dog trying to break in, would probably not even worry about a person unless they made the mistake of knocking loudly on the door and yelling "Anybody home?" really loud. Ah well.