"Lord, Why Do You Hate My Trains?"

The week has just sped by, thankfully.

For some reason, I've really felt "besieged" recently. Like everybody requires their pound of flesh. And although in my roles as parent, professional and partner, that's par for the course, for some reason I've been much more sensitive to it in the past couple weeks.

It didn't help that yesterday I found myself making three round trips from one side of West Seattle to the other, during peak traffic times, behind every joker doing 10mph UNDER the speed limit. Or that I had to do the grocery shopping at the only time available to me, which was 5:30PM, which, coincidentally, is also when they let every inmate out of the asylum to do THEIR grocery shopping. We're talking freakshow. Of Jerry Springer proportions. I've spent 18 years maintaining the belief that Seattle is a step above the whole lowest-common-denominator, trailer-trash phenomenon, but then when I moved to West Seattle in '93, there were still two gun shops and a porn shack on California Ave. So I guess it has improved, but that just makes watching the freakshow that much more... freakish.

It also hasn't helped that my workstation blew the motherboard and I had to replace it (a new system was cheaper and quicker than ordering a new motherboard), and that said new system keeps having random lock-ups. And I have to call the State Department of Revenue to find out why they have two differnt UBI numbers for my company. And I have to meet with yet another teacher who has been assigned to Tyler's IEP. The same IEP that was put in motion at the end of 8th grade.

I think I'm just in emotional lock-down right now, putting out all of these little fires as they crop up. As we get further into spring and the weather starts cooperating, perhaps things will shake loose a bit and I won't be so "grrr".

50 points if you can name the quote that is today's title.