rajung:
You are not nuts.

Since this is a vinyl pool and your CH is fairly low, while your T/A is high, I don't think you have a big risk. The two risks of high T/A are: pH continually trending up; and of cloudy water and scaling if CH gets high as well (400ppm or greater).

You MAY want to go through our T/A lowering process, but never let your pH go below 7.0, and don't pour a giant slug of Muriatic Acid into your pool as that can damage your liner. Instead, either mix M-A into a 5 gallon bucket of pool water and add THAT to the return stream (always add the acid to the water, not the other way around), or you can add M-A directly into the return stream so it cannot settle. In either case, I wouldn't add more than 1 cup at a time and work pH down slowly, which brings T/A down with it.

You can use dry acid instead, but I STILL like to dissolve it in 5 gallons of pool water first.

Then aerate your water with splashing kids, a sprayer, etc, to raise pH without raising T/A. Lower pH again as above to bring T/A down again, and aerate to raise pH. Repeat to "ratchet" T/A down without putting your pool in danger by too low pH, or by a slug of M-A settling on the liner and weakening it.