ESCAPED CONVICTS

I think Natalie's a little bit mad at me. She sounded it. When I told her everything that happened, at first she was just quiet for a long time, and I thought that maybe she'd hung up the telephone. So I kept saying, "Hello? Are you still there?" until she assured me that she was, she was just battling what might be an unreasonable anger.

I apologized for breaking the window. She wasn't really angry about the window, and didn't think it was my fault per se. She said, "The window wouldn't have broken if you hadn't somehow, with your weird magnetic force, lured an escaped convict into the yard."

The weird thing is that I had thought pretty much exactly the same thing earlier.

It all started with the mosquito. I keep getting mosquito-bitten here, and the bites swell up immediately into these huge red welts, about an inch and a half in diameter. Natalie tells me that this happens to Charity as well, and it's some kind of allergy which I've apparently developed. So anyway, as you might imagine, I'm trying not to get bitten any more because it's really unpleasant.

So I went into the bathroom the night before last, pulled back the shower curtain, and there it was. The mother of all bloodsucking fiends. I looked around, and finally came up with the plan of smashing the mosquito with this long-handled bath brush. After considerable thrashing around, the Battle of Death ended, and the mosquito was vanquished.

Unfortunately, at the moment of vanquish, it had been poised on the shower curtain directly in front of a window, and although I didn't swing the brush very hard, I did manage to shatter the window.

It was pretty late at night, and I thought, well, this is Spokane, I won't worry too much. I'll just fix the window in the morning. Besides, not all of the glass fell, and it's mostly big, jagged shards. Nobody will bloody themselves trying to get into the house.

So I slept that night, not terribly worried, although now with no window in the bathroom, many more mosquitoes entered the house, so I ask you here, who really won?

Anyway, the next morning I was getting onto my bicycle to ride off on whatever the cycling equivalent of a morning constitutional is. Just then, my neighbor, Agua (he's a very watery guy, heh heh) drove up and told me that the guy who escaped from prison last night was in my yard this morning, and he chased him off. He thought that the guy might have been trying to steal my bike. It looked like he had spent the night sleeping in my yard, and had just woken up, so Agua chased him off, went to the post office, and upon his return, had to chase the guy off again because he had returned. After several attempts, he was pretty sure the guy was gone (he'd last been seen wandering into the apartment complex two doors down), but I might want to check my windows just to be safe.

I had an appointment with another temp agency yesterday, and almost cancelled it in order to take care of the window. As you may recall, weird things keep happening to prevent me from getting temp work, and it's getting quite irritating, so I decided I was bloody well going to go, and if some freak decided to break into the house while I was gone, so be it.

Much later, I returned to the house and decided to repair the window. First, though, I decided to go onto the front porch. This is how I discovered that the lock on the front door, which has been tricky since I arrived, had ceased working entirely. No matter what I did, I couldn't lock the door.

Eventually, I wandered out to the garage (where this guy may have slept; I'm not sure. It's one of those detached shed thingies) and found some shelving, measured a bit, took the electric saw to them, and then boarded up the bathroom window. This isn't so bad, since I've been convinced since my arrival that the shower curtain is actually transparent and the neighbors have all seen me naked and bathing. Then I ended up fixing the front door using a large hammer and a railroad tie-you don't want to know.

At any rate, by the time this was over, I was feeling terribly butch. I was bemoaning the whole thing, whining to myself, "But I don't want to be butch! I'm a girl! I want to be a girl! There is not a single chromosome in my body that wishes it was a Y! I'm a girl! I'm a girl!"

So I did what anyone would do. I spent the next couple of hours playing with makeup and plotting my next cosmetics purchase.

I eventually called my friend Laura to ask her to call and check up on me here and there for the next day or so, just in case this guy decides to come back, which I doubt, but hey, better safe than sorry. She agreed, but first asked, "Please tell me that you didn't pray last night, 'God, send me a man, any man!'" She is so not funny.

Anyway, I wasn't going to tell Natalie at first, because I thought she'd freak out and call the National Guard. I figured I'd wait until they caught the guy. But I decided to tell her anyway, figuring that if the roles were reversed and she hadn't told me, I'd be furious.

The last thing I remember her saying was, "I'm just trying to think. These weird things didn't start happening in my house until you arrived."

It is so not my fault.

By the way, the fainting spells have returned with a vengeance, and it's really bloody annoying.