Today was the first official day of my spring break and it couldn’t have come soon enough to please me. The week before a vacation always seems to drag, but this year the pre-break week was not only seemingly endless, but downright strange. Encountering a jumbo jet-sized palmetto bug in the middle of my bedroom in the predawn hours of Monday was my first clue that the week was not going to go my way.

If you are blessedly unfamiliar with this most loathsome of creatures, a palmetto bug is a giant flying cockroach that tends to live in palmetto (and other) trees, but is not above wandering indoors to terrorize law-abiding and highly insect-phobic citizens. Your run-of-the-mill indoor cockroach is a 2-seater Cessna compared to the Airbus palmetto bug. They are huge, hideous and not at all what you want to plant your foot next to when rolling out of bed.

The worst part is despite their gargantuan size, they are incredibly fast and able to squeeze through the smallest of nooks and crannies. Before I had a chance to grab a sizable weapon, the stinking thing skittered away and disappeared, I think, into a virtually invisible gap between the baseboard and carpeting in one corner of my bedroom. Which meant, of course, that it was just biding its time, waiting to ambush me at a later point. Try falling asleep with that image in your mind.

By Tuesday, I was so focused on the palmetto bug launching a surprise attack that I failed to see the dangerous obstacle which lay directly in my barefoot path to the kitchen. For some mysterious reason my dog Harper, whose mouth doubles as a shop vac—seriously, he once tried to eat gravel and wood shavings to get to a fallen M&M—had uncharacteristically left sharp-edged Milk Bone chunks uneaten on the kitchen floor. Stepping on a Lego in your bare feet is nothing compared to impaling your instep on a Milk Bone shard. New swear word combinations were needed to express the pain involved.

Wednesday I was afraid to get out of bed, but I managed to get dressed and off to work without a major mishap. I had planned a lesson for my class that involved the extensive use of that scourge of modern existence, technology. When I tried to log in to the computer in my room, I was “told” that I was an unrecognized user. Okay, I wasn’t wearing mascara and my hair didn’t look all that great, but seriously, I was unrecognizable? Just since the day before? Several log in attempts followed, all with the same response. Fortunately, I had a back up lesson which could be presented by a living human being.

Thursday brought the kind of communication breakdown usually associated with Mercury in retrograde (which actually starts today, but maybe last week was a warm up). At least this episode brought much needed comic relief to hell week. Some background info is required for this one. 1) My husband’s first language is Spanish and he sometimes has trouble understanding English expressions. 2) My daughter, named Torrie, is very near her due date with baby #2. 3) Toys R Us is going out of business.

Those disparate facts led to a hilarious miscommunication between my husband and me Thursday evening. We were talking about the new baby coming when I suddenly remembered that Toys R Us was scheduled to start its liquidation sale. I grabbed my phone to check the store’s website and saw that the sale was underway. While looking at the screen, I exclaimed excitedly, “Oh, Toys R Us has started liquidating!”

My husband thought I was reading a text message, and I had said the words so fast that to him it sounded like “Torrie’s started ‘liquidating.’” He imagined “liquidating” might be an Americanism for her water breaking! We went back and forth several times, both completely lost in translation, with him not understanding why I wasn’t more concerned about checking on my daughter, and me insisting I could buy whatever I wanted without checking with her.

By Saturday, I was exhausted. I overslept and miscalculated the time I would need to walk the dog at the park and return home in time to change clothes for my hair appointment. After the walk, I had just enough time to drop the dog at home and continue straight to the hair salon. I surrendered my last bit of pride/shame and presented myself, covered in dog hair and muddy paw prints and without one drop of make-up on my post-menopausal face, to the perfectly coiffed, meticulously groomed receptionist. Although I’ve been going there for twenty years, I was afraid she might give me the same response my classroom computer had—unrecognized user.

Fortunately, she was more gracious and after squinting a little and turning her head sideways, she realized it was me and checked me in. Looking at my reflection in the mirror at the end of my appointment, I had to laugh. My stylist’s usual expert job of coloring and cutting my hair was certainly at odds with the rest of my shabby appearance.

Well, I thought to myself, that old hairdresser joke is apparently true. It may be a beauty shop, darling, but they only wield curling irons, not magic wands.

Happy Spring Break!