needing mood kitty

I wrote the previous post last night.

This has not been a good day so far.

My house has been invaded by "critters" - there are fleas that hasten to bite me when I am near a certain window. I've been killing "waterbugs" (which is just a nice name for the American cockroach, Periplanata americana) and am wondering what about my loose housekeeping is allowing them to enter and apparently proliferate and how soon it is before my house is condemned. And I have slugs.

Not in the garden. They come up the pipe chase and I find them slowly crawling across the kitchen tile. They are Limax maximus, I think - humongous and leopard spotted. I can't quite bring myself to kill them as they are kind of pretty in a strange way, and also, I don't want to get slug slime everywhere, which is what most fatal methods would cause.

And backing out this morning, I scraped my front bumper on a tree. (It's complicated). I don't think I dented it but I think it did scrape the paint. I will have to take my car to the car wash and see for sure when it's clean.

And, worst - I could not find my Principles I book, which I need badly to update my teaching stuff (it's a new book this fall). Nowhere in my office. Not in the classroom where I taught last. I even ran back home and looked, it is in none of the likely places I would have had it to work from.

So: either I dumbly forgot it in the classroom and someone was like, "Whoo! Free textbook!" (a lot of the students don't have their financial aid money yet) OR - there were more scratches inside my office door when I came in Wednesday and I wondered if the thief had been in my office again, so it's possible HE stole the book with a thought to selling it at the bookstore. (The book costs maybe $200, so that would net maybe $20 in a sell-back).

(If that happened, either he ditched the book somewhere or it's squirrelled away in a hidey hole he had, because it would have been stolen most likely after the bookstore was closed, and he was arrested before they re-opened. I know I had the book in class on Tuesday)

But still: I'm mad at myself for maybe being irresponsible and forgetful and forgetting the book in the classroom where it's then seen as common property. (And I know: the onus is on the person who stole it, but you do have to be careful about stuff here. I've lost calculators by forgetting them in rooms).

I have a loaner copy from my chair but I'm still peeved and unhappy. (And secretly hoping that it turns out the thief had my book, because then I will feel less like an idiot. And I'll get my book back)

I think if I do get my own personal copy back I will plaster it with Hello Kitty or MLP stickers (in fact, I do have some MLP stickers at home) to make it recognizably mine and unappealing as a theft-item to a good percentage of the population.

My ecology and biostats books are still here but they are older and more beat up and also there were papers on top of them so I don't know.