Since you asked
2005-07-07, 10:18 a.m.

I just spoke with a low-level bureaucrat working for a certain city in a certain state called Texas, who inspired me to mutter these words under my breath upon hanging up the phone �What a fucking babbling fool.� Ah, city bureaucrats. [If you are one, I know you are the exception to my over-generalization.] It was like mental charades � Guess What I�m Talking About! Geesh.)

OK, on to today�s bidness. We�re going to have nothing but fun in here today.

If you haven�t been here , you need to go NOW. It�s okay, I�ll wait.

(Muzak rendition of �Light My Fire� plays while you are gone�hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hm hmmmmm)

There is no second.

Third, I have become very regular about hollering out to our dog, in a screechy, high-pitched old lady voice, �MISHUS BEANSH! MISHUS BEANSH!� She comes running in to see what I want, and *poof*, I�m silent. She moseys into the next room, to see what kind of good trash we have for eating in that large plastic-bag-lined food bin in the kitchen, and I commence to hollering at her again. We do this over and over and over and over again. Yes, I�m fucking with the dog (oh! dirty!) for entertainment. Hey, she screws with us for her own personal entertainment, too.

Fourth, I like to announce, of an evening (to use the vernacular of my old deceased grandmother � of an evening!) to DW, in the same high-pitched, screechy, what-I-imagine-to-be somewhat British accent �I should like to take my tea with Mishus Beansh.� It sounds like this: �I should loik to take my tay with Mishus Beansh.�

I know DW is amused by this, I just KNOW it.

Last night, as I folded 3 loads of laundry plus a load of clean sheets, DW came in and started trying to help by folding all the clothes wrong, putting my stuff away in the wrong place, and then (oh the insult) MOVING THE CLEAN SHEETS OUT OF HIS WAY SO HE COULD GET IN BED. So I said to him �Did you clean the kitchen?� He looked at me in sheer and utter amazement, because I never ask him to do anything, despite his assurances that he can�t read my mind and I NEED to ask for his help, and I said �Well, one of us needs to be doing that, while the other of us does this. Because I�m not doing both.�

He scampered off to �clean� the kitchen. I say �clean� instead of clean, because that means he took his dirty dishes from the living room and put them in the sink. But at least? It got him away from the laundry so I could do it the right way, and I cleaned up the kitchen myself this morning.

It�s the routines, the give-and-take, the compromises such as this that make a successful marriage really tick. Oh, wait. I did all the work, didn�t I?

And one last snippet of misadventure: I noticed a bad smell in my car this morning. Like dirty socks, or a window was left open in the rain and there�s some kind of infesteration taking place. So when I got to work and opened my laptop backpack, I found it. Yes ma�am and sir, I had cleaned out my little office fridge yesterday and deposited two tupperwares of rancid leftovers into the pack. And then I left the whole mess in our 185 frillion degrees garage that smells of cats, even though WE HAVE NO CATS and, well, it�s all in an advanced state of decomposition now.

Thank you! Thank you and good night!