#congested

Power is not working. We've got no TV to distract me, no ability to do anything to calm me down! My stomach feels really sick. I feel nervous and scared for my life. I…oww. oww…my stomach really feels cramped and scared and stressed now. I hate this, I hate this, I hate this! I'm stressing out.

Okay, I'm calming down slightly. I'm scared of needing to pee a lot, because I do keep feeling an urge to pee. But beyond that, I feel better. I'm calming down a tiny little bit. My dad has assured me I will not die from a tree breaking into the house and crushing me. I've been assured I won't die, which is making me feel a little bit less like a scared prey animal. But I'm still nervous. Thank gods my phone still has some battery life. Because even if I don't have data, I'm gonna need something to get me through this. Something to help me not curl into the fetal position and cry.

This is the first time I actually feel willing to move. Move far, far away. Move somewhere the storms aren't. Move somewhere where storms never, ever happen. Because I can't keep doing this. This is the second time this spring. I can't keep going through this. I can't! There's gotta be somewhere out there where the storms don't come. There's gotta be somewhere. I can't handle more storms. I can't. I just can't.

We've lost all power, so now we can't play DVDs or TV or nothing! I need power to come back before 9 pm tonight, because me? Me, sleeping in the pitch darkness? Yeah, I can only see that happening if my dad is directly on call to help me and manage my panic. I can't sleep in the dark by myself, I just know I can't. I can't and I won't.

I'm still stressed. But thank the gods for the invention of noise cancelling headphones. I've put those on my head, and suddenly this whole experience has become a little bit more bearable. I at least don't feel like I'm going to die any more, although I'm still really nervous and twitchy. I hate this. I hate this so, so much. I don't have many other words for it all, because what else can I say? It's just… really nerve wracking and anxiety inducing. I just saw more lightning, and I felt thunder rumble the whole house. My stomach is feeling like it's got severe indigestion now, and I feel like I've now got such tremendous fear running through me. A fear strong enough to leave me craving to move somewhere where no storms will ever hit. Or at least a place storms would only hit 0.009% of the time.

I'm being kind of hyperbolic. I still never really want to move. But also…this definitely does make me feel more amenable to it. It's amazing what the power of fear does to me. It really makes me scared. And with power now gone, I don't know if we'll get it back it until tomorrow. And I'm nervous about sleep tonight and everything. It's awful.

The panic is all gone. I'm not scared of dying anymore. I'm not panicking or anything. But it seems like we're not gonna get power back until really late at night tonight. And that's frustrating (for lack of any other word). Since I'm now less scared and more bored, I figure I'll try to write some other stuff to take my mind off my panic. But idk what exactly I'll write. I'll come up with something, I guess.

Pokemon Violet is having it's pokemon designs grow on me more. But even still, the open world aspect of the game really throws me off. Also, I don't know how I feel about the game being basically a lesson in micromanaging three different stories at the same time. I don't want to manage saving a dog, fighting an evil team and becoming a pokemon master all on my own! I want the structured, orderly rules of games past. Pokemon has had multiple storylines crisscrossing each other before. But usually they all follow a nice, linear progression. I get the impression scarlet and violet doesn't do that, and that puts me off it a tiny bit.

I may still play though. Not like I've got many other ideas for how to spend my days nowadays. I've gotta finish Pokemon Shield, and then I can consider a Lego game or two. But Pokemon Violet is still an option, I suppose. I'll keep myself open to it. But the DLC is a whole seperate thing, I suppose. I'll wait to make a decision on that until I've actually started Pokemon Violet, I suppose. And who knows when that'll be? Who knows?

There's still the tepid light of sunset coming in the house. But on the whole, I'd say our house is getting really dark. Beyond that, there's a lot of heat seeping into the house. A lot of heat. Thank gods for the portable fans. I don't know what I'd do without them. But I'm still frustrated there's no DVD player option available to us. With no power, all I've got is the ability to communicate with my dad and write notes on here.

We saw a robin land in our yard before the storm. Then we saw a bird's nest with intact eggs inside a fallen tree branch. I wonder if those two things were connected. They may have been. My stomach pains are slowly going away. The stomach cramps aren't bothering me as much anymore. But I think I'm settling down. I still stand by the remarks I said in fear earlier. But now? Now I think we settle in for the long haul and keep writing or doing other things until power returns.

I started this note at 6 pm. It's now 8 pm. So we've been two full hours without power. Just me and my dad and our dog, sitting in relative silence. I'm sitting in our new recliner, mainly as habit. I moved here earlier out of fear the window would break or something equally paranoid (the really old recliner seats nearer our windows). I'm starting to really regret my seating choices now, though. The sun's going down, and I'm sitting right in the path of it's glare. It's kind of warming me up, frustratingly. But yeah, who really knows when we'll get power back? I guess I still have to keep waiting.

Great. Just fucking great. Apparently the power is estimated to return at 6 am tomorrow morning! Tomorrow morning (the 20th of May)! I'm stressed again. This is the first time in my life that I've dealt with sleeping without power, and it's very distressing. I know I'll live through it, but still. It's very distressing, and I'm dreading it. It makes me want to intensify those threats about moving somewhere where there are no storms from before become way more serious. Way more serious.

I don't like to sleep in the dark. I don't do that. It's not something I feel mentally up for. But I feel like I'm gonna have to be mentally up for it now, and that's so distressing to me. I'm stressed about this now, and I'm just not happy that this has become me and my dad's life. This has become our lives, and that's freaking killing me.

I went up to bed at 10. Me and my dad both did. I think I fell asleep by 10:30 or so. It's hard to say that definitively, but I know that I did get to sleep eventually. So I did it. I slept in the dark! Well…not quite true. My dad had a small battery operated light on in my bedroom, so that helped. And then I just kept yelling to my dad whenever I was nervous and stressed. But eventually I got to sleep.

I woke up at 12:40 am or so, mainly because we got power back then. Power finally returned at midnight or shortly after midnight, so that woke me up. I fell back asleep again shortly after that. Before I fell back asleep, I realized I was sweaty. So I took my shirt off to try and escape the sweat, and then I fell back asleep. Then I woke up again at 3 am. I used my phone for a bit, and then I passed back out. Then I woke up at 7 am, and that brings us up to the present moment in time.

I'm still not feeling great, mind you. I'm still feeling incredibly congested, and I feel like my face is really greasy. I'm generally still having all those standard head cold feelings I always seem to get. I'm still stuffy, frustratingly.