The crickets are driving me batty. Chirp — chirp — chirp. All night long! They just won’t shut up, and they seem to be under the house. It’s downright maddening.

The women’s US gymnastics team sucked and got silver. Of course, Bela and Marta are blaming it on the Chinese using “babies” on their team and the Olympics officials breaking the teams concentration “on purpose” instead of looking at the simple fact: the US team turned in a very poor performance. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were competing against four-year-olds, falling off equipment and stepping over lines (which they did in the prelims as well) isn’t gold medal material, and anyone competing in any kind of event has to deal with things that might break concentration (you just don’t let it happen). For Bela and Marta to blame their team getting the silver rather than the gold is nothing more than feeble excuses. It sucks, but they sucked and got the silver, which is better than I could have ever done … so kudos, right?

Nothing wrong with a silver anyway! It’s not worth crying about. They apparently did their best, and it just wasn’t good enough. Even all my national pride and desire for the US to always win the gold didn’t make me think they were worthy of it. They all really screwed up in some big ways.

In other early morning news: I will not be going to the grocery store today. I’m feeling a little “wrong” physically, and I have a strange non-muscular pain in my abdomen that actually has me a bit concerned. Statistically speaking, appendicitis is somewhat rare, but if I should develop a fever or nausea today, I will actually be going to get checked out. This pain is weird, it started about ten hours ago, and it is currently centered in the area of the appendix (which isn’t where it started, but that’s where it is now). It’s been getting more intense too. It’s not at “OMG! PAIN!” levels just yet, but it’s certainly making moving around and doing things bothersome. Anyway, keeping an eye on that. I don’t like weird pains appearing suddenly with no easy to determine cause. I’m hoping it’s just some kind of upset gut problem, but the fact it’s been hurting in the same place (right beside my right hip bone) for the last eight hours or so is, well, just weird.

So, I’m staying close to home today and getting the rest of the household chores done, interspersed with some laying around moping. We’ll survive until tomorrow with what we have in the house. Maybe I’ll convince Lin we need burgers for dinner tonight … or fried chicken. We haven’t had chicken in at least a month again. I miss chicken, but we can’t afford the ones at the farmers market, and my grocery store doesn’t have the free range ones anymore.

Anyway, I’m not feeling so great today. Some of it is the weird pain, and some of it is lack of sleep. No, I don’t have insomnia at the moment. I’ve been staying up late and getting up early to watch the Olympics. I’ve become somewhat addicted it seems.