It has been kind of a roller coaster sort of day today. It has been getting more and more windy over the past few days, to the point where my similarly allergy-inflicted coworker and I have been waking up with swollen eyes and stuffed up noses, and by this morning my sinuses had pretty much morphed into a pressurized ball of hate inside my face. Because my eyes are all itchy and irritated due to all the dust and pollen that’s whizzing madly around in the air, I’ve been having a hard time focusing on anything. So the day just did not start well at all, and it sort of went downhill from there.

The first big emotional smack upside the head was when my little sister called to tell me that they were taking my mom off to the hospital via the ambulance because she bumped her (new, still recovering) knee somehow last night and was in excruciating pain all morning, all of which had not been helped by the fact that the pain meds they originally gave her weren’t working very well anyway. And it did not help that the visiting nurse (who comes by daily during her recovery process to check in on her) made some comments about how she might have dislodged one of the pins in her new knee, or else maybe the pain was due to a blood clot (thanks, worse case scenario nurse, for suggesting these, since my sister and my dad and I weren’t doing just fine coming up with things to worry about on our own!), so off to the hospital they went, to get her seen by a surgeon. My sister said she would call me once they got to the hospital, to let me know how things were going and if it was something bad, I would immediately head out there.

And then no sooner had I finished having *that* nervewracking conversation with my sister, Richard called to say that he couldn’t find Sebastian. He (Richard, that is) worked from home today because we needed to chat with the contractor about a few things and it was just easier for him to just stay home after that was done. So at some point he wandered downstairs to check in on the cats, and noticed that the barrier we had put in place – involving baby gate, thick plastic sheeting (shower curtain) and copious amounts of packing tape – had been breached. I noted earlier that it’s been windy; well the stairs have always acted as sort of a wind tunnel, so since the crew had the back of the house open in order to work, the wind gusted in and apparently that was more than the baby gate could take. And apparently Sebastian decided that he could not pass up on this sort of opportunity, so he decided to go for a little adventure.

Luckily Richard found him – he’d only made it as far as the back yard and wasn’t in any particular hurry. But this happened at about 2pm, which means if Richard hadn’t been working from home that day, chances were pretty high that Sebastian would not have been the only escapee by the time we got home, and I am just trying very hard not to think about what a nightmare that would have turned out to be. Needless to day, the cat barrier has since been given significant reinforcement, and I think this weekend I might even break out the hammer and nails and see about constructing something even sturdier out of that big mountain of construction scraps in the back yard (might as well use it for *something* besides killing the grass!), because I am already paranoid enough about how the cats are dealing with being locked downstairs and I really do not need to spend even more time than I already am worrying that they are going to escape.

After Richard called to tell me that Sebastian had been found and I studiously told my brain to SHUT THE HECK UP ALREADY about the worst case scenarios it was playing in my head regarding construction zones and lost cats, my sister called to let me know that my mom was doing fine. They’ve swapped out her pain meds to something that actually *works*, and while she needs to take it easy for the next few days and lay off the physical therapy, she didn’t do any lasting damage.

So tonight, while Richard is off at his writers’ group, I am going to curl up on the couch and pop a fluffy, girly movie into the DVD player and try very hard not to think about injured family members or lost cats or any other horrible, emotionally draining thing, and maybe, once I am done with my fluffy, girly movie, I can go curl up in bed downstairs and close my eyes and if I wish really hard, the wind will stop with the blowing and the sinuses will stop with the trying to kill me, and everything will turn out just fine.