Busy week. Wednesday (last week; the 22nd), I lost my job. I didn't actually lose it, though.

I quit. Essentially, weeks and months of pressure and stagnation took their toll. I snapped. I walked.

Thursday, I tried to calm down and recenter myself. Friday, I began cleaning, certain I'd be ready to look for work on Monday. But my sleep schedule had been off, due to stress, heat, etc. So I was up until 7:00 AM on Friday dusting things and wondering if I could rig the vaccuum cleaner to run silently (I was manic).

I'm woken up sometime around 9:00 AM by my mom calling my cell-phone, explaining to me that something bad is happening to my brother Jason, and she needs me to get a truck to move his things out of his place before anything gets worse. I'm still half-asleep, so I tell her I'll have what she needs in two hours, and warm-boot my brain into crisis mode (which, oddly, I seem to handle well, generally).

After a few phone calls, I arrange transportation, a driver, and one extra warm body to help move things. I call my mom to let her know what's going on, and she cries that my brother was arrested.

Damnit.

My parents are a handful of hours away from their vacation, and now this crisis blows up in their faces. Being unemployed, and having no other obligations, I make it to my mom's place and offer to house-sit for them, and take over handling my brother. After they leave money for his bail (ouch!), they leave, and I promise to give them updates as they come to me.

I spend most of the night waiting for a call from my brother to say he's completed booking, and needs out. He calls at around 4:00 AM, tells me he's been booked, and his bail has been set at 25,000$.

As it turns out, the way this works is that you pay a bail, and if you show up to your court-date, your bail is returned to you. I didn't happen to have 25k lying around, though. The way a bail-bondsman does things for you, is he takes 10% of the bail, and keeps it for himself. You don't get it back when you show up to court, though. This is probably old news to most people, but it was the first time anyone in our family ended up in jail (I've been put in the psych ward, though).

I explained to him that my parents already paid a bail-bond place the maximum possible bail he'd have set, and we just needed it to finish processing. This ended up taking until 5:00 PM on Saturday. He was in jail for over 24 hours.

Still, I managed to get one of my friends to pick him up, and while waiting for him to arrive, I get a call from my brother's ex's father, trying to get a hold of my mother. I don't identify myself when I answer the phone (as a rule), or I lie about who I am (in a humorously obvious fashion: "Thank you for calling Shinji's Wholesale Ninja!" or "You have reached Abduhl's Discount House of Worship". In this instance, since it wasn't MY home, I just said, "Hello?"). So Dude doesn't know he's talking to family.

The reason for this is that my mom wanted to talk to my brother's ex's mother, but asked the police first if this would be okay. They said, "No, this could be seen as an attempt to intimidate the witness". And yet, he called us. I told him that the people who he was looking for weren't around, and to try back on Wednesday (they'd be back on Sunday, but much to my surprise, I can not only lie easily, but apparently quite well). Still, I took down his message, which was pretty much, "We want to make sure that Avalon's not around any time Jason comes over to pick up his stuff."

Whatever.

Next call is from Kaiser, trying to get ahold of the Harper side of the family, the ones who are responsible for my grandmother's health; she took a bad fall down the stairs. No status update on her health because we're not Harpers, don't have the insurance information, and Anita Harper, the one who does ... ran away from the stress in her life.

I stand in the middle of this, watching my family literally crumble around me for a few minutes. Time for a margarita.

Good times.

My brother gets back to the house, we have a discussion about how Mom says he's to handle his affairs, and explanation of just how much debt he's in to Mom, and an offer to get some pizza. Mmm. Pizza.

Things start to calm down around then, and I realize that I'm running on about 6 hours of sleep across the last 72. Most of the last 24 hours has been fueled by adrenaline.

I go home. I crash. I wake up on Monday, and another crisis; my brother's things need to be out of his apartment that day. Using my madly leet arrangement skills, I aquire what U-Haul will not give me. A vehicle.

We move all my brother's stuff within the alloted hour (even though this involves me and my brother walking a quarter mile with a book-case).

I'm kinda tired, still. It's good to be able to try and help, but I'm so numb and ... drained.