So where where we? It was March, and all the bright green stuff emerging outside of my home office window lured me to dream about planting flower beds lining my driveway, taking long walks after dropping the Big-Eyed Boy off at school, shedding my blogging-induced weight gain, starting a container veggie garden to adorn my otherwise rotting deck (and to feed my family). Oh, I was going to be busy. Productive. THIN.

Then the green stuff outside of my home office window is starting to get on my nerves because it’s predominately weeds and shit that bothers my allergies. After waking up for the third morning in a row with eyes swollen shut I decided that Mother Nature is my enemy and nixed the long walks. Even though I’d retreated indoors, I worked out daily, dropped 26 pounds doing daily kick-boxing and weight workouts, then screwed up my foot. Gained 20 pounds back seemingly overnight, added 10 more to keep them company. (Fortunately, five of them decided not to stick around.)

But my container garden is lovely enough that I don’t mind braving pollen for a few minutes each day to pick peppers, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and more zucchini than I ever thought one plant could produce.

Somewhere in there we visited my mother-in-law for a week, using up half of the Venomous Hubby’s summer vacation to help build her a deck. The following week, which he’d also taken off work, he’d promised to build me a new deck. GUESS WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN? Because, you see, he was tired and sore after that previous week laboring for his mother. For the record: I, too, helped build the deck and single-handedly screwed in all 35 feet of the deck walkway running alongside her garage. But, because I’m not a male, I didn’t get to whine about my sore back and knees for a week. I had meals to cook, dishes to wash, a house to keep clean and laundry to deal with while on “vacation”.

But that’s okay, because our deck took its revenge: VH got a nasty sliver in his foot while walking on it barefoot. It was a big sliver. A big honkin’ one, and it was so deep that when I tried pulling the thing out of his foot he cried like a little girl. So I gave up, and after his foot started bothering him the following day he went to the doctor to get the thing removed. (The sliver, not the foot.) Well, wouldn’t you know that thing was in there so deeply that the doctor had to give him a shot in his foot — right into the nerve — before she could go digging around to pull out the sliver, after which she sent the thing off to get tested.

And if you, like VH, thought that was the end of things think again: the following day we learned he’d come down with some weird, exotic infection more common in India than here and he needed to get on Cipro stat. Thus followed two weeks of VH feeling like crap from the medication’s side effects, all of which, as I like to remind him on a regular basis, have been avoided if he’d skipped going to his mother’s house FOR ONCE and, instead, used his limited vacation time to do some of OUR home maintenance chores that he never has time for.

Like: finding the source of the water stains on our bathroom that I’d pointed out two years ago when the warranty from previous roof repairs was still in effect. That would’ve been nice. Cheap, too. But apparently I’ve been nagging about those stains long enough, because yesterday they took care of themselves when we got 5 inches of rain on us in just a few hours. In addition to large chunks of my ceiling falling in, two of those inches of rain made their way through my bathroom ceiling and onto my bathroom floor.

But that was nothing compared to what my backyard looked like. Our picturesque little creek in the backyard swelled over its banks and climbed six freaking feet up the hill in my backyard! (Yes, I took the picture through a screened window. Sorry, but I melt in the rain.)

After the water receded we saw we’d lost about 3 feet of our yard all the way along the creek bank. That’s property we’ll never get back, of course, and yet we’ll still be paying taxes on. But, hey, we’re old hands at that because the very same thing happened when we lived in Hawaii, remember? So let that be a warning to you not to piss me off because, hey, I just might move into your neighborhood and bring a flood along with me.

Or worse, I’ll send my mother-in-law your email address. With VH talking about taking a week off work next month to finally fix the deck (and the roof), I’m sure my mother-in-law is busy thinking up chores she’ll need someone to do.

But that someone sure as hell won’t be me, because I’m back to blogging. It’s safer, easier, allergy-friendly and most importantly it’s 100% mother-in-law free.