Anything before noon on Saturday is too much, too early.

I was wide awake this morning at 7:30am. And I was pretty stinkin' mad about it.

A major Stressor (capital S because it was a capital S) was taken care of this week, so things will slowly begin to get better in my wonderful world of stress and anxiety. But for quite some time now, I've been, well, stressed about it. It's kept me up nights. At this point, I'm in that place where I'm so tired and so drained that I'm pretty much too tired to sleep and I can't relax. It will take awhile for me to readjust.

I had high hopes today to sleep at least until 9:30. But . . . not so much.

Seven-stinkin'-thirty

Then, the bug guy came at 10:00. This was on the schedule for today. But, by 10:00 I was already ready for a nap. And I'm not so much ready for people before, like, noon on most days. Much less on a Saturday.

After the bug guy left, I got myself in gear to go stock up on tax-free pants. On a normal Saturday, my rule is that if I have to go to a mall, I have to go before noon. After the noon witching hour, malls are ridiculously full of people. And since I hate malls and all of the people in malls, I want to run into as few people in a mall as possible if I am forced to go there.

But before I could get out the door, the doorbell rang. It was 10:45 in the morning. And I wasn't expecting anyone.

Jehovah's Witnesses

I open the door and there are two ladies who start talking to me about faith of some sort, and I see that she is holding a copy of The Watchtower in her hand.

Even after I mention that I'm a Christian, she keeps going. It didn't faze her AT ALL. Plus, now that I've gone ahead and confessed that I'm a Christian, I have to stand there and be polite and wait for her to finish. Because I assume this is what Jesus would do.

They finally finished and left me with The Watchtower (which is somewhere over there on the floor right now . . . right at the top of my To Read pile). But Jehovah's Witnesses? Here's a tip for your recruitment method. It's never a good idea to ring doorbells of strangers before AT LEAST noon. Even if I was interested, I would turn you down just because you came to my door before noon.

Had I been able to abide by my plan to sleep later than 7:30 this morning, if I had been asleep when you rang my bell, I probably would have left that whole "I'm a Christian" thing out of my yellling at you to get away from door this early in the morning on a Saturday.

Anyway, I finally get to the mall (which . . . yep. I still hate it). And I head to Gap, where I can replenish my pants inventory with brand new, tax-free pants . . . only to find that, um, someone STOLE the Gap right out of the mall!

Um, that Gap has been there at least since I was in highschool, maybe longer. And who in their right minds doesn't have a Gap where I can get to it on Tax-Free Weekend?

Seriously, they are losing serious pants money from me, y'all.

Anyway, turns out that the mall has other stores with pants. So I still managed to find some pants. Although I'm not sure of a world where I don't have new Gap pants. This is all very new and frightening.

It's quite possible that this lack of Gap pants might actually add to my stress and anxiety where I am hoping that stuff will go away with the recent removal of the Stressor (capital S).

I need a nap. Actually I needed a nap by like, 11:30 this morning.

C.T.