It's cyclic, ok. I get that. Every couple of weeks I can more or less guarantee a breakdown in my life of some sort - emotional, mental, physical, financial... The really exciting ones combine all of those factors into an abysmal vortex of darkness and mayhem. I think that's where I am right now.

Tomorrow is Halloween. Since the very first day of this month I have been trying to make time to do the fall appropriate activities. You know, corn mazes and pumpkin patches and all that stuff. FAIL. Absolute fail. Today was the last straw. The last ditch effort. The final grasp for seasonal success. I don't work until 4, which is practically like a day off for me, and I wanted to take the Few Remaining Kids I could wrangle and rush down to the pumpkin patch and get some jack-o-lanterns made. Turns out the Few Remaining Kids had other ideas. One showed up at 7:30 AM and roused me out of what was quite possibly the best sleep I've had all week to tell me that she was taking my car to Spokane. Just as soon as I got back to sleep the next one woke me up to tell me that she and her dad were taking my truck to sell some of her rabbits. (By the way, you parents of young kids who think that it will get easier and you'll get more sleep when they grow up: you're dead wrong.) All of this means I am down to one kid (who, incidentally, sprained her ankle at a basketball game yesterday) and no car.

Meanwhile the beautiful, festive caramel apples I made on Friday night (another unsuccessful pumpkin carving time slot I had hoped for) between work at the school and doing the ambulance standby for the football game are sitting on my counter like the empty tokens they are of a Holiday Season that promises to be a series of hollow promises and crushed visions of sugar plums.

To make things even worse, on the way home from work last night at some god awful hour, a black and white cat (that was very reminiscent of my niece's fluffy kitten named Cake) darted out of the ditch and into my tires as I sped by on the highway. There was nothing I could do but scream in agony and pray it died instantly. I sobbed for the last ten miles home. I am a murderer. Visions of Crookshanks and poor little Bijour and ALL of the horror of this spring just wrecked me. It was the worst. I am the worst. I deserve the death penalty. I cried for a long time. Ugly cried. And I am doing it again. Because I just can't even. All of the things.

I need to quit some of my jobs. I could keep one of them and go on welfare. It would be perfect. I could stay home in my sweatpants all day and watch Netflix and eat junk food I get with food stamps. I don't know why I am not. There is certainly no reward in working 5 jobs to barely pay the bills and miss out on every good thing while I watch my friends and family frolicking in corn mazes and making amazing Jack-o-Lanterns and having costume parties. The stupid thing is that with all of this working (between 50-60 hours a week, not counting newspaper obligations) I haven't had a paycheck over $300. How is that even possible? I make more than that in one day on a fire. I feel like I am losing my mind.

Sorry guys. This has been a total rant. And it sucks. I should come up with some upbeat life lesson out of it that redeems all of my complaining and moaning. But I got nothing. If you have some inspiring memes you can share with me about hope and things getting better, all that darkest before dawn crap, I'd be grateful. In the meantime I guess I will pull up my big girl Broncos undies and hope for a win there. Because it ain't happening anywhere else these days.