10/5/05 – Bitchypoo

* * * At dinner the other night, the spud told us about a couple of kids she knows who are dropping out of school. Immediately, I puffed up and got very disapproving. “If MY kid was dropping out of school, she’d ALSO be dropping out of MY HOUSE, because I’ll be DAMNED if my kid is going to drop OUT of school and continue living in MY HOUSE!” and I turned to her and gave her The Eye. On the other side of the table, Fred gave her The Eye as well. We were double-Eyeing her. Because it’s a good thing to let your kid know where you stand on the dropping-out-of-school issue. Pre-marital sex? Not so much, but definitely dropping out. She responded by rolling her eyes. “I KNOW,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about THAT, I have no intention of dropping out of school.” “Damn straight,” I said. “Damn straight,” Fred echoed. There was a time when I hoped that the spud would never realize that college wasn’t an option, that we’d just present to her that everyone goes to college and she’d accept that as a given fact, but she seems to be doing this “growing up” thing, and when kids “grow up”, they at some point start “talking” to “other kids” and somehow the information that kids can drop out of school and PAR-TAY is distributed amongst them, and the dropping out spreads like wildfire. Little fuckers. Why can’t they just listen to what their parents tell them ’til they’re 18? What’s with this “mind of their own” shit?

* * * Last weekend Fred was out hiking, and the spud was still sleeping, so I went in and visited the kittens (who were still spending all their time in the room and not out running around the house). While I was in there, I noticed that one of them was spending a lot of time chewing on the cords that went to the phone base plugged in on the far side of the room. The phone base belongs to the cordless phone that the spud uses (the phone plug in her room and the guest bedroom don’t work), and she only leaves the phone on the base to charge when the phone has gone dead and needs recharging. Got that? Good. So I noticed the chewing of the cords by the kittens, and decided that rather than letting them chew through the electric cord and be electrocuted, I’d plug in the phone base in our bedroom where no kittens could get to the wires, and all would be well. All I’d need to do is plug one of the numerous line-splitters we have scattered around the house into the phone line in our bedroom and then I could plug our phone in, and the spud’s phone in as well. The phone plug is located at around knee level, behind our bed. I got down on the floor and reached for the plug, but couldn’t quite reach it. I assessed the situation, and decided to pull the mattress away from the wall, then reach in from between the mattress and headboard, unplug our phone, plug in the line splitter, and then re-plug in our phone and the spud’s phone. I reached in and did all that without much of a problem – though it was still a bit of a reach for me – and after everything was plugged in, I began to pull my arm out… and it was fucking stuck. I mean, STUCK. It was stuck at that point right above the elbow, where that bony part is, and no matter how I tugged I couldn’t get my arm out. I tried moving to the side of the bed, with the idea that I could slide my body onto the floor and use my other arm to pull the mattress further from the wall and then slide the stuck arm out. Only, when I started to move toward the side of the bed, apparently the space got smaller and I wasn’t able to move more than a few inches. I tried moving to the other side, and the same thing happened. So here I was, in my big stupid-looking pink nightgown (pictures at a later date, if I think of it) (of the nightgown, I mean, not me in the nightgown), sprawled across the bed with my arm stuck between the mattress and headboard. What’s worse is that I had started the shower before I began with the unplugging and plugging, so I was sprawled across the mattress in my oversized ugly pink nightgown, arm stuck between the mattress and headboard, with the shower running. And then Miz Poo jumped up on the bed and settled down in the middle of my back. To recap:

In ugly pink nightgown.

Sprawled across bed.

Unshowered.

Shower running.

Fat cat snoozing on my back.

No adults around.

Teenager sleeping like the dead on the other side of the house who wouldn’t wake up if a nuclear bomb hit. And even if she would, she’s not strong enough to move the mattress with me lying on it.

And then the last straw came along and broke the fat woman’s back. Mister Boogers jumped up on the bed and sniffed at Miz Poo, who reacted by hissing and slapping at him, and then the little fuckers had a slap fight atop my head. “GodDAMN!” I bellowed. “You fucking fuckers! Get the fuck off of me!” and I flailed about until Miz Poo and Mister Boogers ran off, and then I said “You goddamn piece of shit! STOP IT!” to my arm, and pulled as hard as I could on my arm, until it slid out from between the headboard and mattress, causing a nasty scrape on the back side of my arm, DRAWING BLOOD and leaving a nasty bruise that is just now starting to really heal. And Fred laughed his fucking ass off when I told him about it, because he’s a fuckfuck. * * * This morning was a busy one for me. I left the house at 8:45 and didn’t get back until almost 1:00. I had a hair appointment (I’ve gone back to long layers, though to be honest you can’t much tell the difference from how it looked before), then had to go to the bank and make a deposit, to the pet store to look for something to put cat food in (we already have one thing to put cat food in for our cats, but now that they eat two different kinds of food, I wanted to get a second container) and a new water bowl for the living room (the old one is metal and ugly and was getting on my nerves); to Target to return something and buy kitty litter (we use Arm & Hammer kitty litter, and it’s cheapest at Target – $9.94 for 35 pounds; it was over a dollar more at Walmart); to Walmart to return the monitor I bought last week and buy a new kitty condo (the old one in the kittens’ room has so much poo on it that I can’t even fathom trying to clean it, so it’s a new cheap condo for the kittens!); to the post office to check the PO box (reader Kristin, your thank you note is on the way!); and by Wendy’s for a Biggie Diet Coke, since I was dying of thirst. I’m not sure how that ended up taking me more than four hours to accomplish, but it did. Probably the fact that I go into a daze when I step foot into Target and Walmart and end up wandering around the store for far longer than I need to has something to do with my errand-running taking up so much of my day. * * * Tomorrow the kittens go to be spayed and neutered. It’s going to be quiet around here, but at least it’ll give me a chance to go around the entire upstairs and spot-clean with the steam cleaner. They’ll probably be able to come home late tomorrow afternoon, and by then the carpet will be mostly dry. Bear’s starting to do the thing Rambo used to do, jump up and sink his claws into my back, then climb to my shoulder and jump onto my desk so he can sniff around. I had a bunch of really cute pictures of he and Smitty sleeping on Miz Poo’s bed, but my camera’s being a pain, and somehow those pictures got deleted. GRRRRR.