I am the Nightmare.

I hate this time of year.  I do.  I'm an asthmatic in one of the top ten worst air quality cities in the country, if not the world.  During summer, most days I can hardly step outside without my inhaler on hand, and if I do anything more strenuous than walk I have a terrible attack.  Or if a cat has passed in the area within the last fortnight (I'm over exaggerating here, I wanted to use the word fortnight.  I am highly allergic to cats though...).

Anyway.  Fireworks are pretty awesome.  It's controlled (mostly), fire-y explosions.  However, when everybody on the whole damn planet is lighting them off, the smoke is thicker than fog and you can almost burn more calories trying to push your way ten meters through it than you would sprinting on a treadmill for an hour.

So guess what that means for me?  Yep... pretty much death for the next two days or so.

My lovely father, his girlfriend and her family are up in a town about an hours drive away, partying with massive amounts of barbecue and explosives just like the founding fathers would have wanted.  I stayed home so I could shut the house up and pray that I can keep most of the bad air out for at least today and most of tomorrow.  However, none of them get that, and I keep getting teased for being anti social and told that I need to rejoin society (not just this weekend mind you, this is a recurring theme.)  I'm sorry, but blowing things up and watching the married couples do their thing is not my idea of social.

I had my first bout of scary alcohol poisoning the other night.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and I was more angry that I couldn't get to sleep than I was about puking my guts out.  Either way, I now know my red line limit in addition to my safe limit!  Whee!

So yay American independence from those nasty British (who aren't really that bad to be perfectly honest), I still want to move to friggin Canada (love what America stands for but hate the implementation, story for another time), boo fucktastic air quality, and wish me luck on finding a job this week.

Heck, at this point, I'd take leaving the house without dying tomorrow as the condition for tomorrow being a good day or not.  That made a lot more sense in my head than it did after I wrote it.