Friday, October 31, 2014

Trick or Treat

I don’t care how old my kids get, I still love Halloween. It’s the only holiday that is just for fun, and the expectations are always met. No gifts to buy, no giant meal to make and then overeat. You don’t have to get together with your extended family and justify the choices you made in life.  If you drink too much, that’s on you and not your overbearing mother and emotionally distant father. Just costumes and candy. What’s not to like?

My daughters are in middle and high school now. They don’t wear costumes to school. They don’t have class parties with healthy nut-free treats. One of them isn’t even going trick or treating this year, much to my disappointment. Even though I don’t think fourteen is too old, she does. I decided I would put them in a holiday mood by making them a special Halloween breakfast. Maybe if they started the day with some Halloween fun, it would last throughout the day.

For the majority of their lives, my daughters ate frozen waffles or cold cereal for breakfast. They were never the eggs and bacon types, and who has time for French toast and pancakes on a school day? It turns out that, lately, I do. Now that they can get themselves ready and dressed and put on their own make up and shoes, I find myself with a little free time in the mornings. So between the time I make sure they are awake, which is never, to the time we rush out the door to drive to school, I cook a hot breakfast based on each of their personal preferences. Lately, they have been enjoying a Waffle House experience right here at home. Eggs cooked to order, turkey bacon or sausage, an assortment of fresh berries or other organic fruit to garnish the plate. Seriously, it’s getting all kinds of nuts around here.

I decided to go with pancakes this morning. I saw a sweet little idea on Pinterest for pancake spider webs, and thought, hell, that looks easy. It’s not like I am making pancake portraiture like that stay at home dad/engineer who is making all the talk show rounds. Just a little pancake batter X and some lines to make web spokes. No big deal.
No big deal if you have a squirt bottle. If you don’t, like me, well, there is no way you are making an X or spokes or anything other than blobs. I tried a small ladle, but no matter how thin I poured the batter, those pancakes looked like a mess of fat sticks. Instead of spider webs, my children had 2D rats’ nest pancakes. They cooked unevenly, and even the addition of pumpkin pie spice for flavor was not able to overcompensate for the poor visual presentation.

My daughters went with politeness this morning, begging off any extra pancakes because they were sooo full. Which meant I had a half a batch of batter and no takers. I decided to switch designs and continued cooking. This time, I went with a sort of free form ghost shape, like a lopsided ghost from Pac Man.
Again, my design did not meet my expectations. The heads of the ghosts ended up wider than the bodies, except for the base of the ghost, which was sort of broad and almost bumpy.  In short, the ghosts looked like penises.  Pretty scary, I’d say, but not in the way I intended.

The teen noticed right away, and refused to eat any. The tween, who is as wholesome as Laura Ingalls, had no idea they might be anything other than the ghosts I claimed, but was too full of failed cobwebs to have one.
My husband drifted into the kitchen around this point.
“Hey honey, wants some pancakes?” I said sweetly. The teen choked on her disgusting green machine juice she has every morning. I don't know how she drinks that cup of algae. What is wrong with a good old American glass of OJ?
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll just have oatmeal, like I do every day.” I am sure he didn't mean for that to sound like a hardship, but then again, he did not yet have a cup of coffee.
“Come on, they're fresh, and I hate for them to go to waste.”
He agreed to vary his morning routine. I set a plate full of pancake cocks in front of him and asked one of the girls to pass him the syrup. I almost said something, but from somewhere, a filter surfaced and kept my mouth shut. My teen gave me the look, the look that a mother is supposed to give, no the other way around. My husband, oblivious to the unspoken conversation that took place in front of him, ate up happily.
After I cleaned up, I went upstairs to find my phone and texted the teen. “I just served your father a plate of dicks.” She replied, “OMG.” She also refused to take any pictures for me.
I certainly hope the mummy hot dogs turn out better tonight.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Take No Crap

My husband and I have been having a heated debate about the merits of getting a dog. We are not fast decision makers, so the debate has been both active and spirited for months now, and we seem no closer to a resolution. On one side is my husband. Let’s call that the pro-puppy side. He loathes the cats and hamster that currently reside with us and feels the time has come for a real pet, the kind that hops in the car with you, eager to join you no matter the destination. He has visions of a dog with a bandana around its neck, running along the hiking trail ahead of him or perhaps chasing a ball into the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am on the other side. I don’t want to call it the anti-puppy side, because seriously, who is anti-puppy? I am more against the part where I am the one who will have to do the majority of the bad stuff that goes along with having a puppy. After all, I am not the one working outside of the home. I do most of the domestic responsibilities, and I try not to complain too much about it, certainly not any more than any other person would complain about his or her job. I just know that I don’t want to take on the brunt of the puppy maintenance.

When I look at a puppy, I look beyond the seemingly smiling face and floppy tails and too big paws, to what a puppy really is, a fur shedding energetic vehicle of destruction. Puppies don’t know how to shit and piss in the yard or while walking because they haven’t been trained yet, and someone is going to have to do the training, now, aren’t they? Even then, puppies, like young children, are going to have accidents, most likely on the Turkish rug. Who’s going to clean that up? Yep, the one who doesn’t work outside the home.

You know how babies put everything in their mouths? Puppies do it too, but they are even worse than babies because they are much more mobile. “The dog ate my homework” exists as an excuse because dogs actually eat homework. Some dogs even eat the home. I have a friend whose dog ate the couch when they went out for the day. A couch. Who eats a couch? After a couch is eaten, it will need to be digested and passed as fecal matter, most likely on the Turkish rug. Do you see the pattern here?
Then there are the vet appointments. The person who doesn’t work outside the home will have to schedule these visits and then take the puppy. What if the puppy gets car sick? What if the puppy who goes on to eat the couch has worms? Do you know what happens when a dog is dewormed? Those worms have to go somewhere, and generally it is two exits, not waiting. This will either happen in the car on the way home, or more likely, on the Turkish rug.

Or just maybe, the puppy won’t be able to go at all. Another one of my friends is the grandmother to an adorable yellow lab. Her daughter, who is off at college and thus is the best candidate to make a ten to twelve year commitment to another life, got the puppy. She picked it out because it was adorable, in the face. She neglected somehow to check it out from all angles, having fallen in love at first sight. She brought the pup home, and immediately it began getting sick all over the house.

My friend took her daughter and grand puppy to the vet’s office, where they discovered the terrible truth about their perfect little puppy. Upon examination, the vet discovered that the puppy didn’t have an asshole. Without being able to take a proper crap, the dog was getting sicker and sicker. I don’t know all the details about how this particular issue was resolved, but my understanding is that an anal orifice was somehow MacGyvered and the dog is now able to have a proper bowel movement. However, because of the tenuous nature of the aperture, a human must wipe the dog after every dump to ensure infection doesn’t develop. The puppy is growing normally and has a lot of love to give. It just can’t take care of its own asshole.
I relayed this story to my husband as part of my debate. He countered with my obsession with animal assholes. He’s right; I have a thing about dog buttholes. I don’t like to look at them. I prefer a breed with a low hanging tail, or at the least, a fur color similar to that of the asshole. Some dogs, like German Shepherds, have an upright tail and underneath, a sort of tan fur patch with a dark asshole in the center, a third eye if you will. I don’t want to look at that all the time. According to my husband, the first thing I would inspect on a new puppy is the butthole, making sure it met my strict pet asshole specifications, which means that I would never select an asshole-less puppy. I have to agree, he has a point about that.

Let’s go back to a moment to the two cats and the hamster. The hamster lives in a cage, where it also shits. I don’t have to go looking for a smell or clean a stain on the carpet. It chews, but I can throw a little twig in the bottom of the cage, so my shoes and furniture are safe. I can hold it, and when I am through, I can put it back in the cage with the shit and the sticks. The two cats were both kittens when we got them. Have you ever trained a kitten to use a litter box? It’s pretty easy. You put the kitten in the litter box. It hops out. You put it back in. It digs around a little, then it might pee or poop, and, if you are lucky, it will bury it under more litter. Repeat that a few times, like two or three, and presto, the kitten is litter trained.

 I just don’t believe that puppies are going to be that easy. Not only do you have to train them to poop when taking a walk, you have to train them to walk. And until that happens, if it ever does, there is going to be a whole lot of piss and shit in the house, probably on the Turkish rug. Ain’t nobody got time for that, especially not the two who go to school or the one who goes to work in an office.
It’s not that I am anti-puppy.  I love puppies. It’s that I am anti-shit. I don’t want to pick it up, still warm, with my plastic bag covered hand. I don’t want to scour the yard for smelly landmines before my friend’s kids play back there. And I sure don’t want to spend the next year or so scrubbing stains out of the carpet (or the Turkish rug.) I have a feeling I will be spending more time doing that than I will romping on the beach or hiking on a mountain with man’s best friend. For now, I am perfectly content with the animals I already have. I am used to their style of waste management. I can tolerate it. I rarely have to inspect assholes or wipe them, and even more rarely do I find the occasional misplaced turd, which is downright tiny compared to the massive human sized dumps of the larger dog breeds.

So for now, the debate goes on, unresolved, until I get some sort of reassurance or, better yet, a written contract expressing the rest of the family members’ commitment to feces removal and general puppy maintenance. I do enough of the crap around here. I really don’t any more actual crap. Especially not on my Turkish rug.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Just Say No

Do you remember that after school special starring HelenHunt, the one where she takes angel dust and jumps through a plate glass window at the high school? Well, I accidentally did the same thing to my cat.

Yoko is my nine year old kitty, a sort of almost long haired black cat with one stubborn white spot under her chin, which makes her seem less evil. She is smart in a creepy sort of way.  She is the one who taught herself to pee in the toilet by watching the humans in the house. She knows how to open several different door knobs. I’m convinced if she had thumbs, she would have already figured out how to murder us all and drive my car to Mexico.
One thing about Yoko that really worries me, other than the part where I shouldn’t trust her motives, is that she is underweight. She began losing weight about four years ago, but over the past year she has leveled out to a delicate almost eight pounds. For a few years, we, meaning the vet and I, were concerned that something was wrong with her. Not so concerned that we put her through expensive and ultimately unnecessary tests, but concerned enough that she had to go to regular weigh-in appointments like a newborn baby.  Now her weight is stable, if just below normal, and we are opting to continue with a wait and see approach. No one relishes the idea of doing bloodwork on a cat that makes doing bloodwork on humans her life’s calling.

It isn’t that she doesn’t eat. It’s that she doesn’t eat much. She is always first at the food bowl, but just nibbles daintily on a few little morsels, leaving the rest for my other cat, the one with the appetite of a starving goat, to swoop in and shove the rest in face like it’s the last meal he will ever eat. By the time she decides she is hungry again, she is left with a bowl of little bits of premasticated food that dropped out of the other cat’s mouth. It’s the cat equivalent of back wash, and I don’t blame her for not wanting to partake in that for snack.
I started buying her a variety of wet foods, hoping that would stimulate her appetite. I know it’s not as healthy as the dry kind, but seriously, Yoko is a bit of a bitch. I don’t know if I can handle her having a prolonged old age, it’s it a tradeoff I am willing to make. I decided to feed her the wet food when the pig cat was sleeping so she would be able to finish a meal undisturbed. Unfortunately, she has proven herself to be as finicky about wet food as she is about people.  Even the one brand she has agreed to sample will remain untouched depending on her mood, sitting on its paper towel, waiting for the constantly hungry cat to wake up and discover its aroma.

Yoko spends a good portion of every day standing in the kitchen near the paper towel holder, waiting for someone to come along and rip off a sheet. That is her cue to start caterwauling, as she believes that with every paper towel comes the promise of that precious wet food. I now have to sneak paper towels because of the constant screaming of food she won’t even eat.
I came up with what I thought was a great idea. One thing Yoko does like to eat is catnip. When I sprinkle dried catnip on the rug, she does exactly what she is supposed to do; she rolls around in it and licks it and her eyes get all dilated and she seems pretty relaxed, although maybe not exactly chill. I thought, hmm, what better way to stimulate her appetite than to sprinkle some of her catnip directly in the food bowl? She would smell is heady scent and then gorge herself before slinking away to somewhere secluded to sleep it off.

I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong. Yes, she loved the food. She buried her face in that bowl like she was going downtown. I don’t know if she ate more because I didn’t stick around to see how she responded. Instead, I went to my bathroom to get ready for the day. I was in there putting on my makeup when my older daughter, E, started screaming.
“Mom! Mooommmm!”

I generally ignore the first few bellows of Mom. If I rush right in, how will they ever learn to solve their own problems? I continued to apply my mascara.

“Moommm! Help! Mom! Yoko!”
Ok, now I had a clue. Yoko was probably threatening E in a menacing manner. Or more likely, E was annoying the shit out of Yoko, and Yoko was ready to retaliate. I dug around in my makeup bin for my lip gloss.

“Mom! Oh my god, Mom!” and there was a blood curdling scream, followed by a horrible thud.

I assumed E had fallen down the stairs and ran from my bathroom to find out what happened.  I found E at the top of the stairs, sobbing hysterically, her back sliding down the wall, until she sort of crumpled into a pile on the floor.
“What is going on? Are you ok?” I was genuinely concerned. I looked at her face and arms for bloody claw marks but didn’t see any.

“It’s Yoko. She fell, oh God, she fell from the bannister. Is she dead?” I could barely understand what she said, since it was all in gasping sobs.
I walked over to the top of the stairs and looked down. No cat.

“I think she is ok,” I said. “Why don’t you try to calm down and I’ll go see if I can find her.”
I ran down the stairs and looked around. No Yoko. She wasn’t in the front room. Not the hall way. Not the kitchen. I finally found her loafing under the dining room table, looking pissed off, like normal. I picked her up and moved all her limbs. As usual, she hated being touched.

I trotted back up the stairs to where E was still sitting on the hallway floor.
“She’s fine. Seriously.  What happened anyway?”

E tried to catch her breath. “It was horrible. I came up the stairs and she jumped right in front of me, on the banister. I thought she was going to attack me. She looked so wild. And I called for you but you didn’t come. And I called you again and that’s when it happened.”

“What happened?”

“She fell. She kind of jumped backwards, and she thought she could hold on. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She clawed at the railing on her way down. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. She just fell, right in front of me.  I stared into her eyes as she fell. It’s the worst thing I ever saw, that fear. I thought she died.” E isn’t dramatic at all.
It wasn’t the first time Yoko had jumped atop the bannister, but it was the first time she ever freaked out and fell to the first floor. And I knew why.

“E,” I said. “I think it’s my fault. I kind of put catnip all over her food.”
“Wait, what? You got the cat high? Why would you do that?” She stopped crying.

“I thought it would make her eat more,” I said.

“So you thought if you put catnip all over her bowl, she would have the munchies? Good one, Mom.”
“I didn’t think she would try to fly. I just thought she would eat a little more. I guess I won’t do that again.”

“I guess not, Mom. I guess not.”

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

All the Rage

What is the world coming to? It’s getting so you can’t even give someone the bird anymore without fearing for your safety.

Yesterday afternoon, my lovely young tween and I were victims of road rage. We were coming home from the monthly allergy shots, and it was mid-afternoon. Rush hour had not yet begun, so there didn’t seem to be any urgency or stress related to the commute, just a typical drive home from the allergist’s office.
I drove home on a three lane road and had one car in front of me, with about a car’s length between us. I passed the Publix on my left when another car pulled out of the grocery store lot into the median next to me. Instead of waiting for the lane to be clear, he just kept coming and squeezed between me and the car in front of me. No turn signal, no warning, just a quick veer into my lane. I had to brake to avoid hitting him and honked my horn, not out of anger, but to let him know I was there.  It was a single short honk, a little more than a friendly tootle, but certainly not a long fuck you honk. I live in South Carolina, not the Northeast US. We don’t generally honk a lot down here unless we have a good reason.

Now, instead of realizing he just almost hit me, he rolled down his window and started waving his arms around in a crazy fashion. I did what any normal person would do in response; I flicked him off.

Let’s review for a minute. I was in my lane. A car without any warning or right of way serves into my lane because god forbid he had to wait his turn to drive. I honked because I thought he was going to hit me. He gestured at me, and then I returned the gesture.
This is where the crazy train leaves the station. He slammed his brakes, hard, so that I had to do the same. Okay, I have seen this dangerously stupid move before, and I will never understand it. Why would you want someone to hit you, especially if you are in such a big fucking hurry that you don’t have time to make sure you have the right of way? I didn’t hit him because I could already tell he was nuts and was keeping a safe distance from him. Unfortunately, he was making me nuts too. So I gave him the double finger, both hands.

He slammed on his brakes again. Then he stopped the car and got out, yelling angrily. What the actual fuck? Who stops a car on a roadway in the middle of the day like that? I locked my car doors. My tween next to me looked up from her cell phone and asked me what the matter was.
Crazy Train stood right next to the driver door screaming at me. I was impressed with how well insulated my car was because I couldn’t hear a word of his. Cars were backing up behind me, but no one honked or did anything. I wonder if anyone realized someone had just lost their shit on a suburban road in front of them.

I cracked my window to hear what he had to say. It was probably not the smartest thing I could have done. The smartest thing would have been to call the police or to write down his license plate or maybe even to start filming him with my phone. In the heat of the moment, however, I didn’t think of any of those. I thought instead of listening to why he was yelling at me.

“What is your problem?? You are supposed to let me in!” he screamed.

I have been driving for years. Years. I don’t remember that rule of the road. I remember the part about the turn signals and making sure the coast was clear, but not the part where if you try to force yourself into a lane, someone is supposed to know what you planned to do, and then to let you do that.
“Have you ever heard of a turn signal?” I yelled back. “You almost hit me!”

“Great example you are setting there for your kid,” he yelled.

I might not be perfect, but flicking someone off in front of my twelve year old hardly seems the sort of thing that deserves criticism from a stranger. I came back with a real zinger. “Great example YOU are setting for my kid!” 
He walked back to his car, and I rolled my window all the way down and yelled, “JACK…ASS!” Take that.

He started his car and instead of driving away, he looked like he was getting ready to do the asinine breaking thing again.  Luckily I was at my neighborhood, so I just put on my blinker and made a right turn.
And scene.

The tween was scared, legitimately. I drove extra slowly to our home just to make sure he didn’t turn into the other neighborhood entrance and follow us. When my own anger wore off, I was pretty scared too.
All I did was honk my horn. I didn’t let him over because I had no way of knowing he was planning on coming over. I didn’t lay on the horn; I didn’t honk it multiple times, and I didn’t do it in anger. I did it to get his attention, the way God intended us to use horns. Instead of getting a sorry wave or nothing, I got some seriously fucked up shit.

Looking back, should I not have honked when he came in my lane without warning? Should I have attempted to swerve around him in the median and risk possibly hitting him with my car when he got out of his car and angrily approached mine? Should I have done nothing? I honestly don’t know what I could have done differently in that instance, other than not rolling down the window and yelling back.

Now, when it came to the giving the bird, sure, that I could have left off. That man could have had a gun. He could have blown my brains out all over my daughter in the seat next to me. I didn’t think about that, I just thought he was a total dick, and I lifted my middle finger to let him know.

Let’s be safe out there, folks. And if you think about, try to be nice too.