Let me tell you about MY weekend.

Worst weekend ever. EVER.

Let's break it down.

Friday daytime was busy, full of a busy work shift, time spent with all sorts of families. I'm already a very stressed out person, so it was a long day. But not as bad as...

FRIDAY NIGHT: Friday night was a fascinating experience of ups and downs. Many a time have we told my wife's mother that we have bad storms here in Minnesota. She, being an idiot, has no idea what this means. She lives in Nevada. They get slightly muddy out there. So while visiting us, every time we had a drizzle or some wind and a few clouds, she'd titter, "Oh you had your storm!"

"That was not a storm."

So on Friday night, we got hit. I mean nailed. On a doppler map, the extreme dark red part of the storm nailed St. Cloud, us in particular. The storm was a huge, violent, long-running, powerful thing. Lightning struck the field next to us and across the street from us. It brought down trees. At around midnight, it struck our building itself and we lost almost all the electricity in the building. The wind was at seventy miles an hour. Nickel-sized hail. Pounding rain, flooding. Everything.

So on the plus side, I'm happy that my wife's mother is going into a panic attack about this. I'm not keen on her anyway, and it's about time she got to experience a storm. "That's a mother-effing storm, damn it!" I would have gleefully shouted.

The hallways were mostly dark. There were patches of lights on. There was also a deep throbbing HUM from the elevator, God knows why. Anyway, it was deeply frightening in the hallways, and not just because I can give myself the heebie-jeebies at the drop of a hat. Creepy.

So, we had to go down to Mother-In-Law's guest apartment (where she lived, one floor below us, for the longest month of my life) to bring her some matches and candles, since we had no power. My wife went down there once by herself while I stayed with Tzinski 2.0. She came back up reporting that 1) M-I-L had not answered 2) It was creepy 3) All throughout the floor, there was this loud sound of a distressed cat meowing, as if it were coming at you from the walls themselves. Freaky.

So, I went down with her the second time. Her mom answered. It was delightful to watch her freaking out. Then, we went back out into the hallway. Standing in the apartment building's hallway was a cat. A skinny little cat, part Siamese, with beautiful blue eyes and a terrified meow.

I managed to pick it up, when it came to me. Without knowing what else to do, we took it back upstairs and locked it in our bathroom, gave it food or water. It seemed a bit like an outdoor cat, although it was trusting of people and knew how to use a litter box. We had no idea.

The storm went, and kept us up, until 5:00am. By the time the storm finished for good so we could have gotten sleep, it was 6:30. Zach was beginning to wake up. We had to meet Renee's parents at 7:00. They wound up getting some sleep. We got zero sleep.

SATURDAY DAYTIME: This is the day when we deal with her parents, and then with my parents, and then I have to go to work, where it was extremely busy. I am running on maybe a total of twenty minutes sleep. You thought I was hypertensive and an unkind person before? You should see me here. BY that night, I'm weird and tired and miserable and haven't really eaten any food all day. Which brings us to:

SATURDAY NIGHTTIME: Zach stayed up all night, and I do mean all damn night. And when he wasn't up, I was taking care of my wife, who was unable to get warm, despite the fact that she had four heavy blankets on her. She was also running a fever. She couldn't take care of the baby, or herself. So I had to do both. And also keep an eye on the hyper cat in the bathroom. Saturday night, I got maybe an hour of sleep. So, this is two nights of almost no sleep.

SUNDAY DAYTIME: I go to work. Half an hour later, my wife calls. She has a fever of 103.7 degrees. She is barely conscious. Certainly, she can't take care of the baby. So I made lots of frantic phone calls until I found someone who could cover for me. I got home and my sister and I took my wife (and son, who can't stay home yet) to the Emergency Room. We got to the hospital at 12:30. They admitted her to a room at 3:00. They treated her eventually. We finally got to go home at 8:30 at night. We also didn't get to eat all day. Nothin'.

SUNDAY NIGHT: We get home. We have to take care of Zach, who no longer wants to sleep. Also, a hyper cat. My wife fortunately began to feel better and tended to Tzinski 2.0 a little bit, and I mercifully got a little bit more sleep. Which brings us to:

MONDAY DAY: Where I worked, began to recover from the worst weekend ever, took the cat to the humane society (which is a whole blog post by itself, since Humane Societies are generally about as helpful as killing the animal yourself; I swear they get their rocks off killing things)

and

MONDAY NIGHT: When I write a blog post.

So. How are you tonight?