Blogging took a backseat to life over the past few months, primarily because I am pregnant and found myself unable to form coherent thoughts in the face of 24/7 nausea and hormonally-induced headaches. I didn’t really want to blog about being pregnant, because I find pregnant women who are totally wrapped up in their childbearing experience (and expect you to be riveted too) to be insufferable. The fact that our house is for sale has been a contributing factor; all of the little energy I possess has been devoted to keeping our home in a constant state of unnatural cleanliness. However, I am feeling a bit more human now and have given up on cleaning a house that no one sees, so here I am.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that I am ready to write a respectable blog post. After all, I still feel kind of wretched and the kids just busted out the guitar and accordion (seriously). But I didn’t want to leave you hanging.

Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging…

The leitmotif of this week is “Denise in Peril”.

Part 1, Where Denise Is Almost Swept Away In A Flood:

Monday marked the arrival of some crazy monsoon weather, which happened to roll in while the kids were at dance class. I immediately thought of Kyle standing at the bus stop (for the free shuttle that runs from the main university campus to the east campus right across the street from our house), drenched in the downpour. Since we happened to be relatively close by, I called and offered to pick him up from work. While we were talking, the power went out at his office, meaning the whole situation took on a greater sense of urgency.

I collected the kids and started to slowly make my way to Tempe. The rain brings out an amazing amount of stupidity in Arizona drivers, it was rush hour, it was raining so hard that I could barely make out the lane lines- I was pretty stressed out by the time I exited the freeway. As I followed the surface streets to our destination, the level of water in the street suddenly increased. As in, so deep that one could not see the sidewalks or median. The police had seen fit to close the side streets in the surrounding area, but left everyone to slog their way through something resembling more a river than a street. To make matters worse, the power outage extended to the street lights.

Visions of the kids and I being rescued from the roof of our car on the local news broadcast ran through my head (but there would be no news helicopters to show my plight). I saw a man on the sidewalk nearby walking along with the water lapping his knees and I knew I was in trouble. Because things looked a heck of a lot worse at the intersection ahead, I said a prayer and gunned through the water into a grocery store parking lot. This conveniently allowed me to cut through to the street near Kyle’s building, where he was standing outside along with other employees who were contemplating the best approach for wading to their cars parked down the street. Things got better after that- if you can call creeping along for 1 1/2 hours in heavy traffic “better”.

And to think all of this was caused by 0.57″ of precipitation.

Note to the city of Tempe: Invest some tax dollars in a better drainage system.

Note to Michael Crow: It’s kind of absurd to expect your professional staff to pay $180-660 a year for the privilege of rolling up their pant legs, taking off their shoes (which may float away down the river/street- true story!), and wading for a great distance to get their cars. I’m sure your gold-plated Bentley is parked right next to your office, so you may have difficulty empathizing with their situation…but trust me, it truly sucks.

Part 2, Where Denise Is Followed By A Mysterious Person:

I left the house to run to the post office today with the boys in tow. As we pulled out of the driveway, a man sitting in a car parked in front of the vacant neighboring house pulled out behind us. I had a suspicious feeling about the situation, so I followed the roundabout back the direction we came. And the guy followed. So I took a turn down some random little side street- and he did too! I determined that it was time for some evasive action, so I started doing some crafty manuevers and eventually lost the car that was apparently tailing us. Quite weird and creepifying.

So if anyone reading this has hired a private investigator to follow me: he’s not very subtle, and you should get your money back. And in the event that you’re a stalker: I am totally going to take you out with my handy-dandy pellet gun.

So stay tuned for further adventures, as it’s only Wednesday.