I’ve been looking forward to this coming summer since last year when it wasn’t summer anymore.
The mild winter was nice. Spring has been about average the last couple weeks.
But now we are on the precipice of summer, and it kind of scares me.
Summer is when we’re supposed to spend as much time as possible outdoors. We live in a part of the country where going outside isn’t enjoyable for many months.
I feel like this summer is going to be different, however. There are already telltale signs of trouble ahead.
A few weeks back, I taunted people whose lives were revolving around the eclipse. Perhaps I should have channeled all my time and energy for days into a few short minutes of staring into the sky. Am I paying the price now for disrespecting this force of nature?
Weird things have been happening all around. Last week, I was locked out of signing into my computer. It’s never happened before. Everything is set up with these layers of security now so hackers can’t have at our stuff. I passed the first round of questioning and retrieved a code from my email. That brought me to another firewall. I’m not really tech savvy enough anymore to know if I’m using the term “firewall” correctly. Probably not, but the challenge this password quest sent me on might as well of been trying to get me to talk through a wall of fire. When I put in the code from my email, I was then directed to answer my security questions. I knew where I was born, so question one was a piece of cake. Question three was simple too. However, I had to take a stab completely in the dark at question two: “Who is your oldest cousin?”
I know for a fact I never set up that question, because I don’t have the foggiest notion who my oldest cousin is. I know it’s from my mom’s side, because there are only two cousins on my dad’s side, and they’re younger than me. There’s a whole bunch on the other branch of the tree, though. The problem is, many of them are older than me. If we visited, they weren’t hanging around with a kid 10 years younger than them long enough for me to quiz them on their age.
So, I failed that challenge and had to drive to the office and use my computer there. If anyone has an idea who my oldest cousin is, please let me know.
If the computer issue wasn’t bad enough, within the last week, my vehicles have been absolutely getting attacked by birds. To start things off, I narrowly missed hitting a turkey with a car. Now, I wonder if it was actually trying to hit me. The rest of the birds are taunting me. They are absolutely bombarding the area where they know my car is going to be parked with their ultimate weapon. There’s about a 30-foot radius that has just turned into ground zero.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, word must have got out in the natural world that backups were needed, because when I returned to my car after briefly running into my house for coffee this morning, my car and the area around it were swarmed with flies. Were they there because of what the birds were leaving behind or had they been summoned by another force?
It’s going to a long summer. I know the mosquitos and wasps will get the word, and I’m going to be on the defensive for the next several months.
If those cicadas really come out of the ground this spring, I’m out of here.
