Morbid thoughts.

Sometimes my mind gets stuck on a worst-case scenario and I can't stop my brain from going down the rabbit hole of what would happen.

For example, yesterday when I was running, I kept picturing myself collapsing on the sidewalk. I was really struggling with my run (so maybe the jogging stroller isn't the cause of my problems...?) and I've also been having this weird issue where twice in the past two days, it's felt like my heart or lung is ripping inside me when I try to breathe deeply. So I guess that's where it came from. But instead of just brushing it off and moving on, I started picturing details about what would happen. Someone would drive by and see me laying there, and would grab the phone off my arm to find out who to call. They'd probably call the number labeled Home, Adam would answer, and they'd describe a person laying (dead?) on the street. He would freak out, get the kids in the car, and pull up as the ambulance was loading me in. Very detailed. I just couldn't get my brain to move on.


Obviously I was fine, but exhausted. And I should also mention that I waited to get Lorelai from daycare so I could run without the jogging stroller. #don'tjudge


It also happens regularly when I'm driving on a bridge over water (I admit, I have anxiety when it comes to bridges--driving to the OBX was really scary for me and you will probably never see me with fewer than two hands on the steering wheel over water). In my mind, I can't help but picture and play out what would happen if I drove off the bridge. Not that I would purposefully drive off the bridge, but if we had an accident that caused us to go over.

And I do it with the kids, too. It'll be a completely harmless situation--like they're at school when I get a call that something tragic has happened. It's always very disturbing. Kind of like a nightmare, but I'm wide awake.

I don't know, maybe it's just me subconsciously confronting my own mortality in the wake of senseless tragedy like the Boston Marathon bombings. Or my kids' mortality whenever I (often) get sucked into terrible news stories of kids dying...

Do other people do this too, or am I mentally unstable? And did I just admit that I'm mentally unstable to the entire interwebs? Maybe I should also ask: has anyone else had a similar feeling like your heart's going to tear or like your lung can't expand anymore or it'll tear (it's hard to describe)? I know better than to google...(or do I?)

There's a shrimp crawling up the driveway!

Ok, so it wasn't actually a shrimp, but that was the only little sea creature that came to mind when we saw this thing crawling up our driveway when we opened our garage door on Tuesday morning.

Turns out it was a crayfish (duh, shrimp don't have claws), but that didn't make it any less weird in my mind since we live in the middle of NC and there's not a stream or other body of water within reasonable crawling distance from our house.

Adam actually called me outside in a frenzy to get me to look, and my first thought from a far glance was that it was a ginormous tarantula. Then I thought scorpion for a split second before I realized it was a crustacean. Adam and I pulled out our phones to get a picture because we could hardly believe our eyes. It was seriously just so bizarre. I actually asked our neighbor if they had some dinner that had gotten away (go ahead, laugh, but that made just as much sense to me as anything at that point)!

When we got up close, he raised up and either got defensive, or tried to ask for directions, cause clearly he was way lost.

"Back the heck off or I'll pinch you!"



"Oh hey, guys? Which way to the water?"


We didn't know what to do with it. Adam initially was just going to leave him there, and told me not to run over him on my way out of the driveway. I told him he was crazy, I didn't want squished shrimp in our driveway, so he had to get rid of it. He ended up getting it to grab onto a stick and dropped it down the storm drain in the hopes that it would make its way back to water.

So apparently, it's not weird for crayfish to burrow in yards, which is obviously something I've never heard of. One of my coworkers said he's got some in his yard, and when he was younger, they'd drop a hot dog down into the hole to fish them out. Fun stuff.

We're thinking our neighbors somehow unearthed it during some landscaping they've been doing, but honestly we have no idea. So now I feel kind of bad that we dropped him down the storm drain, probably away from his home. Oh well...