Where have I been? In a dim, dark, grave place where everyone thinks I'm being overly dramatic.

I know it's been ages since I wrote an entry. I know it. I'm sorry for it. There is nothing I could have done. Something terrible has happened. Something hugely awful that makes even my apology for not writing a lie. I'm not sorry. I had to focus. To figure out how I'd screwed up so badly to deserve this. I mean THIS?! Really? My parents are super old. Old like dirt, like dinosaurs, like video tapes and drive-in movie theaters. It's embarrassing.

If I'm going to be honest. Really, really, almost honest. I do have to say that the first thing that happened was I got in trouble. No wait, that wasn't the first thing. The first thing was that the church spire poking out of the middle of my lake disappeared. We had a couple rains but nothing crazy bad. Nothing torrential ("Torrential." I love that word. LOVE it. I'm going to try to use it A LOT.) Just rain. Good old, soften the earth enough for rain boots rain. But the lake swelled up and ate my church. It made me feel a little silly, like it had never been there at all, but I KNOW the church is down there.

The fact that the church has been hiding is a bit of a blessing actually. Blessing--what does that word mean? Is it strictly god related. I'm not so much into god so I wonder if I can mean it without going Catholic or Baptist. Miracle. That's another one I wonder about. Can I believe in miracles if I don't believe in god. The church spire seems like a miracle, but then most people would say a church spire seems like god. My parents think what they've done is a miracle. I think it's yuck.

Okay, so the church spire disappeared and then I got in trouble. BIG trouble--forgive all the capital words, I guess that is proof for my parents that I am too dramatic. My parents found out I was going in the lake, trying to make the crossing, and then when they found out I'd built a raft. Well, they freaked. They said: "What were you thinking?" "How can we trust you?" "Do you know what could have happened to you?" Luckily they did not want answers to any of these questions. What they wanted was for me to stay in the house and do nothing but think about what I'd done. My mother even lost her mind a little and spray painted a white line around the house that I wasn't to cross. She made my dogs sleep outside and threatened to install an electric fence reverse style so that all my sweet dogs had to stay on the outside of the white line. I'm pretty sure she wanted to threaten to put a collar on me too so that I'd feel the zap, but she stopped short of that perhaps remembering that the whole point of the punishment was to demonstrate the extremes of her love for me. I was so mad. So mad. She was being ridiculous. RIDICULOUS. She was being so ridiculous that I wasn't even allowed to tell her she was being ridiculous. Even dad looked a little perplexed--still driven though to be her teammate in it all. Those two are friends like no others. You'd have to blow one of them up to make them stray.

Anyway, the truly evil,  distracting disaster came next. The only good thing was it helped explain mom's transition to super crazy. I'm going to make her a cap with SCMS--Super Crazy Mom Spaz--on it. Maybe then I can at least pretend she is a super villain and not just a plain old pain of a mom.

She's pregnant. My mother is pregnant. That's the secret. The disaster. The end of Amelia Osborne Baker as we knew her. My mom is in the midst of making me a baby sister.

Now you see what I mean by a disaster. I am an only child. I'm best that way. I like my space. I like my solitude. Dad says she will be a friend to me. A partner in crime. He seems to have forgotten about the part where she is a baby and then a toddler and then a little kid. Needy. Needy. Needy. No friend of mine. Boogers and poop and no imagination. They are going to name her Violet. I've got her villain name already picked out. Ultra Violet. Better yet: The UltraViolet Catastrophe. UVC for short.

Sucks. All of it. Really does.