First world pain makes life so hard

The first world pain I’ve had to deal with has been terrible this week.

First of all, grad school. I’ve complained about this numerous times in the past. Luckily, I am now on a 12 day break before the summer semester starts. Even more luckily, my summer class is 7 weeks, and then I can kiss higher education goodbye forever and never learn again.

But for now, it takes up time that could otherwise be spent sleeping, reading, or generally being lazy. Wednesday night, I had to give my capstone presentation (basically a project summing up all my work for the past four years). While public speaking is on par with the dentist in terms of fun activities for me, it gets worse. The presentations lasted until past 9pm.

I can barely make it until 9pm to watch TV (actually, can’t make it), so being engaged in professional/academic discussions was a major problem for me. Thank god my friend offered to drive so my life was not at risk, but it was still brutal.

While I was writing this post, things went downhill. First, our internet stopped working. For someone who enjoys screwing around on the internet as much as I do, that essentially ruins my evening. After 25 minutes on the phone with Comcast where they pretend to try things that everyone knows aren’t real and never work, they finally agreed to send out a technician. After I informed them that three days of no internet was unacceptable (obvi), they suggested this genius plan.

“We’ll just take your number, and call you tomorrow in the morning or afternoon if the technician gets a cancellation and he can come over!”. Great, except I have this highly unusual situation that would prevent success here. It’s called a job. I can’t blame them for being confused, I’m sure they deal with so few customers who are unavailable between the hours of 8am and 5pm.

After another long wait, the guy finally came back on the line to tell me he had an appointment for me Friday after work. Then, of course, the call was dropped.

I finally got someone else on the line. While I was giving him my information, A MOUSE RAN ACROSS THE ROOM. Right where I’d just been laying on the floor, because Comcast guy kept asking me questions about the modem and putting me on hold and bending down was uncomfortable and I was tired.

While I could barely focus on what the new guy was saying, I managed to get that despite the previous guy telling me there were no outages in our area, there was, in fact, an outage causing the problem. So no modem replacement or appointment or nonsense was needed. I better be able to stream Buffy on my run tomorrow.

Which left me to focus on the new crisis – rodent infiltration. Now, I don’t have a specific fear of rodents. In fact, at our old house, we had numerous mice and giant rats and saw them pretty much on a daily basis. The same goes for my classroom, except it’s mice and cockroaches instead of rats. One time I took a picture of a mouse running around while I was eating my lunch and showed it to my class in a plea for them to stop sneaking food in.

But I’ve never had one this close to my bedroom (our old house was 3 stories and they mainly hung out downstairs). Also I was having a weird freak out that it would still be here in 5 months, but much bigger, and attack the baby. And that scene with Polliver on Game of Thrones still haunts me.

There's a mouse inside that bucket. Now you are all afraid of mice too.

I called Eric on his way home and told him the terrible story. He offered a variety of solutions, like buying traps, putting in a work order to catch it, sleeping in our cars (actually that one was my idea). He didn’t seem to understand what I wanted, which was the mouse to instantly disappear in front of my eyes so I could be assured it was gone and there was no messy cleanup. (I once arrived at work to find TWO live mice on sticky traps next to my desk. NO. )

The week hasn’t been all bad. I had a great run Wednesday, and good workout (kickboxing DVD) Thursday. I was really concerned about seeing all my grad school buddies last night for the first time since December (this semester was more like an independent study). I’m still not really showing, and I was concerned they would just all think I got kind of fat. I said I don’t care if strangers think that, and I don’t, but I know and like these people. Luckily, right away everyone said congrats and asked when I was due and stuff, so apparently if I dress right it’s clear that I’m P, not F. 

The baby, and my sweet sunburn.

Don't judge us for taking cutesy chalkboard pics, this is the first one I've shared on social media and I don't plan to continue. They are just for us to save in a file on the computer and probably never look at again.

Another high point of the week is that the baby has been moving like crazy. Later on, can you distinguish specific movements? Like, “oh, that was a kick! That’s a hand! He rolled over!” or whatever?

I’m just going to pray that the mouse doesn’t eat through my chest and I don’t have to face further trauma by trying to exercise without Netflix in the morning. Update: (I wrote this post Thursday night in word and saved it to the flashdrive since I couldn't use blogger, horrible, I KNOW) the mouse has been apprehended and I was able to enjoy some vampire slaying on the treadmill this morning.

What’s the worst infestation you have dealt with/don't want to deal with in your home?