I'm cranky this morning.

A big part of it was that I took part in A Volunteer Effort last night and as I was the youngest/most able-bodied (there was another woman not that far off my age, but she dislocated her shoulder a week or so ago) person, I wound up doing most of the heavy lifting. So now my shoulders hurt, because a lot of it was not just lifting, it was lifting and HOLDING or lifting over my head.

It's also still hot - or perhaps I should say, hot again, here. Somehow heat indexes of 110* feel hotter now than they did earlier this summer.

I also received AN IMPORTANT DOCUMENT that I must read in a Word 2007 format - after having expressly told the sender I still have Word 2003 and cannot open 2007 documents. I tried downloading the "compatability pack" but it's giving me an error message. And I'm loath to screw too much with my computer. So I'm going to have to go down to the student computer lab with it on my flashdrive to read it. Argh.

(ETA: it was a letter stating, "If you have official acceptance of your paper, congratulations. Otherwise, please get the revisions in by such and such a date." No new information. Here I thought - from the tone of the e-mail accompanying it - it was going to be something like a "sign this form to sign copyright over to us" or one of the other bits of boilerplate without which a paper cannot be published. Well, that was a waste of five minutes.)

I'm also cranky because - well, I just need to stop listening to local news, because this morning it featured both "Oh noes! Women should eat NO MORE THAN 100 calories worth of sugar in a day!!" (hello? Does that include sugar like naturally occurs in fruit, or sugar like what you put in coffee or tea?). Of course, men get a whole 50 calories extra. What? I'm taller and more muscular than some of the men I know, yet they're allowed more sugar just by virtue of their Y chromosome? It's not fair.

I am so flipping sick and tired of every day being told that yet one more of the little comforts of life is going to kill me dead and it's somehow my duty to avoid it. We'll all look pretty stupid for having scourged and flagellated ourselves, and run five miles a day, when an asteroid hits the earth in 2014 or whatever and takes us all out.

Just you wait. They will find some way to make reading hazardous to your health. Or doing crafts. Or singing in church. Or something.

The other thing that makes me cranky is that there's a big scandal in a police department in a city to the west of me. And one of the local news channels thinks it's cool to show how bad this scandal is by having one of their reporters camp out in the offices of the police department for like five minutes of nearly-dead air just looking at the door that's been slammed in her face.

I maintain that local news could be cut down to a 15 minute segment - the local headlines, weather, and maybe sports scores- and cut out all the junk, and then show 45 minutes of cartoons for the rest of the time that's devoted to local news, and we'd all be happier.

Except cartoons are probably bad for your health.

If I trusted the Weather Channel's forecasts (I don't; they're often wrong for my area) I'd just watch them.