The Frog That Broke the Camel's Back

I am a resilient person. I can take a lot before I break, and when I break, it's usually just in a sort of silly way. Like a pinata: I might be broken but I'm spilling candy and goodies all over the world, so it's kind of okay.

Right?

The point is that there is always some sort of catalyst that pushes me over the edge, some very little thing that just shoves my brain from "tired but still more or less cognizant of reality" to completely pants on my head crazy.

This time, it was this:

This last Tuesday, as I was climbing the stairs that lead up to our driveway, I spied this in the foliage out of the corner of my eye. I had never seen it before.

In a more rational state, I would have just assumed that my mother or father-in-law had placed it there as garden decoration. Which is, I should state, a perfectly reasonable thing to assume as it is in fact garden decoration.

My brain, however, was in absolutely no condition to process reason or, apparently, the fact that local frogs do not come in "coral." Or in the size of a Rottweiler puppy.

It was huge and pink. And to my frazzled brain, it also looked very real. I stared at it for several minutes, completely transfixed like a frightened gazelle. Would it move? If it moved, was it going to come at me? Was it an angry pink frog? Because (and yes, I really thought this) if I got stuck being a frog and pink I would be wicked pissed at life.

I was still undecided as to a course of action when I saw that there was another one.

HOLY SHIT. It was like some sort of pink frog apocalypse. I freaked a little. It didn't help that the other one was more concealed and kind of behind me so it looked a bit like I was being flanked.

At some point, the voice of reason (which had been sleeping on the job for some time, because SOME part of me had to sleep) perked up and said, "Oh my god, are you really worried about this? They're fake. They haven't moved a muscle and they are Pepto Bismal pink."

Still unconvinced, but beginning to acknowledge the point, I resorted to the only possible course of action to determine if they were real: The Poke It With A Stick method. When it "clinked" instead of "squished" and failed to either hop away indignantly or attack me with some sort of amphibian breath weapon or something, I began to laugh at myself. Here, reason came awake fully and naturally I decided that they had been placed there by my in-laws (which is not to say that there wasn't still a voice in my head telling me that the only two other options were some of sort creepy frog-leaving stalker, or terrifyingly sentient raccoons trying to fuck with us).

The rest of the week has been a bit of a blur of uncontrolled giggles, giddy happiness over absolutely nothing, and... well, there's a Rooster in there too somewhere but that's a whole different blog post.