Doomsday.

I wish I was an inventive person.

As creative as I may be and as capable as I am of finding a solution to a problem, I will always hold in my heart a burning candle of love for parameters. Just enough instruction to empower me to take it from there, but not enough to crush my soul. This is why I love craft projects and recipes and instruction manuals. A box to check? For me? You shouldn't have.

But tell me to write four pages of fiction or to paint one square-foot of still-life and you will find me in a rather unpleasant mood.

This is my long-winded way of explaining that any story I write to you here, I couldn't make up if I tried.

Thus, I begin to recount my most recent Thursday.

It began like any Thursday might. My mother, having the day off, suggested that we ride our bikes to a neighboring town to enjoy some pizza together. Looking forward to 26 lovely miles together, we set off. The trip out was uneventful and the pizza was delicious.

About a mile into our return trip, my mother's best friend's son called to inform us rather nonchalantly that his mother had sustained a head injury and extended a cordial invitation for us to join her at the nearest urgent care center. Upon further questioning, we surmised that there had been blood but the bleeding had slowed to a trickle and a concussion was unlikely. Apparently there had been an incident involving a bike and hook and a garage and lots of awkward maneuvering. We waited to be picked up, loaded our bikes into the mini van, and made our way to the urgent care center.

According to the professionals, minimal damage had been done, but five stitches were in order. We were glad everything was ok, but disappointed our afternoon of bike riding had been derailed (pun intended). We returned home with just enough time for me to shower, become presentable, and head off to work.

Not even an hour into my shift, a woman sitting on the patio fainted and vomited. The order of these events remains unclear. What was most certainly clear was that she required medical attention and a fire truck was there ten minutes later. We cleaned up the mess, made some margaritas to calm the nerves of her excitable friends, and assumed that if each shift were a fireworks show, we had already seen the finale on this one and could now enjoy some time lying in the grass until the parking lot cleared.

Instead, the vomiting turned out to be a relatively exciting opening number for a police drama in which somewhere around the seven o'clock hour, two unmarked police cars, a K-9 unit, a police hummer, and what appeared to be a UPS truck painted with the police department logo pulled up and proceeded to raid the house across the street. Men in helmets and absurdly thick Kevlar vests with guns of a size I didn't know we'd ever need in western Michigan poured out of the UPS truck. A man with a megaphone began shouting commands (i.e. "get down", "put your hands up", things that seem simple but I imagine become less so with a gun in your face) and we decided to evacuate the patio. We rushed around, handing people glasses of water and cashing out customers so they could go home to their theoretically criminal-free neighborhoods. Around eight, four brave souls decided to risk sitting outdoors and, until they left around nine thirty, someone got arrested every time I came out to check on them. We decided I was either a harbinger of justice or doom, depending on your perspective, and should never come to work again to prevent the entire neighborhood from going to jail.

True story.