We're still on the payroll.

Okay, let me tell you about my day, which started really last night when I felt feverish, you know, with the alternating chills and sweats and the not much more than two or three hours' sleep. It then continued when I got out of bed and walked out in the dark to take the dogs out in my pajamas and my dog had peed twice in the hallway during the night and I stepped in one puddle with the foot that had a broken blister (thus spawning a series of paranoid fantasies in which my doctor, forced to amputate my foot on account of the disastrous infection, asks how I managed to get infected by urine), cleaned foot and floor up, and then stepped in the second puddle with the same foot. I nudged my glasses off the sink rim while drying my hair and stepped back to pick them up and stepped on them. My laundry room has sprung a leak in the several inches of rain we've gotten in the past few days; I discovered this when I pulled a little shower of water over my fully-dressed-for-work self and as an added bonus found that the leak had ruined five pounds of cat food which incidentally is the expensive sort. (This is the point at which I seriously considered calling in to work out of sheer self-pity.) I sat in a drug-testing center for two hours before peeing blind into a cup, was told that I am actually one inch shorter than I always thought I was and by the way have gained twenty pounds or actually gained thirty and lost ten over the past eighteen months or so which I already more or less knew but which is mortifying to have confirmed, and became the object of fascination for two physician's assistants who had never seen dermographism in the so-to-speak flesh. I came home to find that the dog had chewed up half the mail and the cats had unraveled a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom to the front door (about 30 feet, for the record), and incidentally, does anyone know where one might buy a mail-basket that fits over a mail slot on the inside of a door, such as may be seen in the Jeeves and Wooster series?

I passed the drug test, though. (I was actually worried about this, even though I have not so much as seen an illegal drug in over a decade. Because I am crazy, it seems.)

Also, I feel better for having flailed about a bit; thanks for letting me. Now I am going to go maybe take a nap and maybe eat something small and healthy. And try to grow an inch.