Ever have a day/week/month when you wish you could just run away and start a new life in a new town, where no one knew anything about you and you could start fresh?

I love my job, and my family, and I know I’m very fortunate to have the life I have -- yada yada yada. But I feel I’m at an impasse.

I’ve been thinking more and more about selling off all my belongings and moving to Spain. I’m sure part of it is that I’m increasingly dissatisfied – and scared – at the direction this country is moving in. But another part of it is the desire to just start over. No strings, no connections, just a fresh start.

Could I be going through a midlife crisis? Probably. Experiencing the beginnings of a nervous breakdown? Perhaps. But when your days are filled with daydreams of witnessing a major crime so you can be put in the Witness Protection Program, you know it’s time to start rethinking things.

Now I just have to decide what it is I actually want to do. That’s the hard part.

Good fences make good neighbors? Sometimes it takes more than a fence.

When we get heavy rains, our neighbor's basement floods, and that often makes our basement flood. If the water gets high enough, it doesn't have anywhere to go, so it goes through the walls into our basement.

A year ago, we asked our neighbor (let's call him Señor Douche) to fix it by putting in a sump pump. To his credit, he did. Unfortunately, he also put the other side of the pump -- you know, the side the water comes out of -- into our backyard, without asking, by tearing down two slats in the fence that divides our property.

Imagine waking up and looking outside to see a part of your fence torn down and a hose lying on the ground. "WTF?!?"

We asked Señor Douche to remove the hose, which he did -- by piping the hose into our gutters.

So we asked him, yet again, to come up with another solution, and to fix the fence, to which he replied, "Oh, we're just going to put in a new fence." Ok, great! Even better.

However, when Señor Douche replaced the fence, he put in a door that opens up into our backyard. I know it sounds like I'm pulling your leg; I promise I'm not.

We nailed the door shut and told Señor Douche he needed to find another way to drain the water that didn't involve our gutters, as the hose would often pop out of the gutters and spray a rush of water onto our backyard, drowning our poor plants and giving Plato heart palpatations as he sat on the ground next to the fence door and got molested by the onrush of tepid rain water.

Can you guess what Señor Douche's brilliant solution was? If you said "cut a hole in the fence and pipe the hose into your backyard while you're not home," ding, ding, ding -- you win the prize!

Still, I didn't want to cause a fuss, since it's just water, so I let it go. But in the winter, the water would freeze, causing a safety hazard to anyone walking by. So, last month I wrote him a letter asking him to remove the hose from our property and fix the fence.

It turns out Señor Douche is either stupid or crazy -- or both. He wrote a letter back saying the fence is a shared fence, and he had a right to cut a hole in it. Furthermore, since our house is a corner house, he has a right to use our backyard, and would be re-installing the door. And, if we remove the pipe, he can't guarantee our basements won't flood again.

Dude, you know what? You messed with the wrong woman. I think we've been more than accommodating. I could have called the police on your stupid ass the day you came onto our property and piped the hose through our backyard. I was trying to be nice, and that was my mistake. But now you have awakened the beast. You won't like the beast when she's angry.

I'm talking to a lawyer now, and he has advised me to call the police and file a report for trespassing. I think that might just make it worse, though. Instead, I'll probably just take the pipe and shove it up ... er, I mean, back onto his backyard. Either way, it's not going to be pretty.

I'm baaaaaaack.

I have decided to start up the ol’ blog again. I love Facebook, but it just is not a great outlet for sharing my deepest, darkest thoughts about a number of Very Important Issues. And forget about Twitter -- that’s just for work, so you know I can’t share what I really think there...

I haven't posted here since September 2008, but it feels like hardly any time at all has passed since I wrote about fly poop, my brief brush with venereal disease, and the horror of being called my sister’s mom.

I’ll try to keep things as entertaining and light as possible, unless another priest ticks me off.

Feel free to comment whenever a posting strikes your fancy, and if there’s an issue you’d like me to tackle in my own inimitable Maria Diarrhea style, let me know.