Well, in keeping with typical Hellyness, the security system issue is not a simple matter of paying someone to fix what is broken although (quelle surprise!) Repair Guy did show up yesterday. Seems that my alarm system sends a silent alert to Headquarters should some miscreant cut my phone lines, and that’s what the mysterious Zone Five Breach is all about. There’s a problem on the phone line, probably related to some of the mall-expansion construction going on, and the guy couldn’t reset the system because there was no dial tone. He even unplugged the phone lines from the box outside to verify that there is no dial tone leading up to the house - in other words, it’s definitely a Bell South problem, not something indoors. He went out of his way to explain to me that Bell South would only deny that it was their problem and try to blame others - NO! Really?!? Once the phone gets fixed, he’s got to come back out and undo the stuff he did (he wired around Zone Five so I could at least arm the system). I have a bad feeling about all this, though, because even though I'm not on the phone much, I do know that it was working at least two different days throughout the whole "Zone Five Breach" during which the alert light never quit blinking. I can tell this saga is going to go on for a while, probably painfully. AAAAAAAAGH!

I didn’t go back to work after he left. I was suffering from one of the worst sinus headaches in recent memory, no doubt exacerbated by stress, so I repaired to a dark bedroom with a cold compress on my neck and repeated, “Ow. Ow. Ow.” It was one of those rare times that I was truly sorry that I live alone; Uncle Vanya had that much right - there’s no point in suffering unless there’s someone around to notice you doing it. Eventually I went to sleep (or passed out from the pain, I don’t know which) and when I awoke my cat was asleep on the pillow beside mine with one tiny forearm outstretched and a paw resting on my head, as if to say, “I feel your pain.” Okay, what he was really trying to say was probably something like “Your hair smells like mousies” but let me have the fantasy, okay?