One of my nightmares is coming true. Creatures are coming out of the wall.

Last night I noticed a few more flies in the hall. I have no mercy for flies and would have fogged the whole house if necessary, but these seemed especially easy to catch. They were flies that didn't fly. They didn't even crawl very fast.

This morning they were covering the door to the laundry room, dozens of them. I swatted the ones I could reach, and there were so many that I tried to vacuum them off the rug. That was a big mistake, because all I did was smear fly blood on the white carpet.

So I began picking them up with paper towels, but every time I turned around more flies seemed to be materializing out of the air. Some of them flew off, but most were merely ambulatory.

Finally I couldn't take it any more and got out the Raid. The special Raid for flies. I sprayed it in the laundry room and shut the door, then sprayed along the baseboard and door jamb. Soon I had many dead flies in the hall, which I consider an improvement over the live ones.

I cleaned them up, and then cleaned up the later arrivals. By this evening I considered the invasion to have been halted. If there are no new bodies in the morning, I'll call the campaign a success.

Yesterday the Boss returned from two weeks on a job site so remote that he couldn't dial out on his cell phone. He hardly ever felt like driving for an hour just so he could call me, so it was peaceful around here. Now that he's back at his desk, it's back to perpetual crisis mode.

How can things that didn't matter enough to think about for two weeks suddenly become so critical that our very existence depends on them? This has been two days of total reaction. I don't expect to cross anything off my to-do list for the rest of this week, because I'm always dealing with whatever has worked its way to the top of the Boss's pile.

He never worries, though. He just hands out assignments and assumes someone (guess who) will get them done before he thinks about them again.

That works okay for me, most of the time. It forces me to focus, and anything that helps me in that department is a good thing. I get distracted easily these days, and I often feel as if I have so many things to do that I have to do more than one at a time. The result is not pretty.