IT'S another week so, right on cue, it's time for our overlords, overladies and overalls at Stormont to serve up another crisis.
But of course. Habitual crisis is our political process's default mode. Like Japanese knotweed, crisis is the invasive thug that won't go away and won't be killed off. Even when things look ready to bloom in the sunlight, there it is, lurking beneath the surface, poised to choke the life out of the seeds of progress.
Perpetual crisis is just one of the distinguishing features of Northern Ireland politics. You'll have your own list, but others include a lack of shared vision, unbridled enthusiasm for photo opportunities and an almost admirable dedication to developing a cabal of £92,000-a-year Spads, who fulfil much the same role in the corridors of power as Oompa-Loompas in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
So repeated, and indeed repetitive, are the crisis warnings that you may not even have noticed that the crisis warning klaxon has been sounded. Again.
That's the problem with talking the language of crisis all the time. It's cry wolf politics and soon, no-one listens to what you have to say because the wolf you warned was on its way to huff and puff and blow the house down was, when it arrived, actually no more threatening than an Andrex puppy asleep on a bed of feathers.
A common sense approach to all this might be to take the politicians' suggestion that this week is going to be the one in which we face the wolf for real with a JCB shovel-sized pinch of salt.
But then again, this isn't a Standard Crisis.
It's not even a Properly Serious Crisis. No, according to the latest dire warnings, it's worse than that - it's a Doomsday Crisis.
Or at least that's what Arlene Foster says. And she should know.
Newly unencumbered from general holding-things duties in the blur of photos she courageously coped with in her old job in enterprise, trade and investment, Mrs Foster is now finance minister.
She says that unless a deal on welfare reform is sorted this week - the assembly vote is scheduled for tomorrow - it means Stormont's budget will implode under the weight of £600 million cuts.
If there's still stalemate by July, then responsibility for paying the bills will pass to a senior civil servant - Doomsday indeed - and an eye-watering £2.8 billion will have to be slashed.
Ultimatums like that can be hard to ignore.
Say what you like about Mrs Foster, but when she thumps you at least she gives you a choice about whether she clobbers you with the hammer or the anvil.
Public services are hardly going to be improved by any of this.
Take the suggested £600m cut: according to Mrs Foster's memo to the executive, that will mean £280m lost from the health budget and £114m from education.
Leaving the smouldering wreckage of the Stormont House Agreement to one side for the moment, at this point it does seem more than a little odd, to the point of near inexplicably, that Sinn Féin is so dogmatically committed to resisting any welfare cuts. The logical consequence of its position seems to be that it would rather see fewer operations performed and school books bought.
If things get to the Defcon 1 levels of £2.8bn cuts and civil servants at the helm, then we really are in trouble - and all this before whatever other cuts are coming at us when chancellor George Osborne delivers his budget in July.
Like the plotting of a Dan Brown 'thriller', there's a predictable pattern to these Stormont crises - cobbled together last minute deals, petitions of concern, fudges, cans kicked down the track, patient entreaties by the secretary of state, that sort of thing. Whether by accident or design, at least Brown - perpetrator of The Da Vinci Code and a number of other identical books with different titles - manages to inflict upon us books which are enjoyably awful; Stormont does the same thing, only without the enjoyment and with an extra helping of awfulness.
Being in government with Sinn Féin, the money-grows-on-trees party, must be as hard for the DUP as being in government with the DUP, the party-comes-first party, is for Sinn Féin.
But in government they are. And much as we might wish to see progress towards goals like a shared future, the eradication of sectarianism and prosperity - you know, the sort of noble aspirations that normal people have - all the evidence suggests anything like that remains some way beyond the grasp of the lurching Sinn FéinDUP alliance.
And it will continue to do so until they can demonstrate that agreeing and then managing a budget - a modest ambition which is, after all, the basic function of any executive - does not have to end up strangled by political knotweed.