“The water’s brown.”
“It’s supposed to be brown. I’ve been cleaning stuff.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just smear mud on the clean spots?”
“It’s November. There’s enough mudslinging without me joining in.”
Cleaning the bathroom is a lot like electing a President. You need to wipe away all traces of anything nasty and create a sparkling platform that will stand up to all the dirt that will come to light later on.
This weekend, as I sprawled on the bathroom floor peering into corners that don’t always (um, ever) receive the full scope of my attention, I couldn’t help but think of the upcoming elections. There’s not a presidential candidate at stake, but given the choices on the ballot I found myself wishing I could scoop back through the litter box for some better alternatives.
I’m from South Carolina, an area where throwing your hat into the ring involves more hat tricks than rings and there’s not anybody in the limelight I’d want to tip my cap to without keeping a firm hand on my wallet.
“Trouble?” The Captain of my Scrub Boat lounged in the doorway, sipping coffee and checking his watch. He likes a clean bathroom as much as anybody, but once the scrubbing bubbles crowd lunchtime, he’s done with the dirty work. Besides, it’s his job to contain the mess I make when cleaning, and this time it could take a village just to get me off the floor.
“Toss me that sponge. I can’t get rid of this mystery spot.”
“That’s no mystery. It’s barbecue sauce.”
“Do I want to know the whole story?”
“It involves chicken nuggets.”
“Oh.”
“And the dog.”
“Never mind.”
“You don’t see any stray french fries down there, do you?”
“No, but there’s something in the litter box that I don’t plan to investigate.”
After a while I found that I’d scrubbed my way into a space up against the wall and it was either make a dramatic exit through the window or track dirty footprints back the way I’d come. Life is full of those times when neither choice sounds beneficial.
“Help!”
Cap appeared again in the doorway. “It's lunchtime. Need a life preserver?”
“I’ve backed myself into a corner.”
“Step on these newspapers and then grab my hand.” He laid the front page and the comics to make a pathway to the door. I never thought about it before, but they seemed to work well together and I followed the newsprint road to the door.
Free at last, I look backed to admire the morning’s work. The floor was spotless except for the tiny corner where I’d been stranded.
“Not bad for a morning’s work,” I grinned. Everything’s clean except one place that’s hidden behind the closet door, and I have somebody who can give me a hand when I’m in a tight spot.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Election Day.
Laugh
Showing posts with label hysterical newspaper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hysterical newspaper. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
One with the Sun
I’m of the opinion that if you don’t see the sun rise over the ocean at least once in your life, you can’t get into heaven. Don't risk taking the chance that St. Peter will send you back for a field trip. It might not be on your bucket list, but it deserves a place on your sand pail and shovel agenda.
The Captain says today’s sunset is tomorrow’s sunrise, just earlier, so there’s no need to launch yourself out of bed when dew is forming on the newspaper just to see one. If you’re upset about the direction look at it in a mirror.
Our priorities are different. His are wrong.
Vacationing at the beach, I undertook to secure him a spot on the scenic side of the Pearly Gates when he finally goes to the big place computer techs go when they die, and although I’m uncomfortable mentioning Gates and computer technology in the same breath for fear of a licensing agreement infringement, I don’t mean a big room with a high speed Internet connection and a billion users who know how to synch their own Blackberry.
It was 7:00 a.m. The sunlight streamed in the window like it was on a video loop. The Captain’s face was one with the pillow and held the relaxed, peaceful air of a summer breeze in a clover-filled meadow.
Time to get up.
But how to facilitate the waking process without also calling the enemy to battle? He doesn't so much get out of bed as he does launch a ground assault on the day. After the last unpleasantness, I decided not to use the car alarm ploy again. The resulting excitement cost me the chance to see the sun at all that day.
I sat in bed, resting against the wicker headboard, celebrity magazine in hand. I try to improve my mind, even when my body is on vacation. You can’t fight too hard in the fashion battle. Flipping pages like they were fan blades, I glanced over at the victim. I’ve patented a look that will freeze jalepeno peppers, but out of love I set my eyes to stun.
No response.
I cleared my throat meaningfully.
No response.
I repositioned myself repeatedly due to an uncomfortable wrinkle in the linens.
No response.
Inspired by the sheets, I succumbed to a previously undiscovered allergic reaction to thread count.
With a snort, he turned to face the other wall.
Somewhere on another street, possibly in another town, an unknown hand flipped a switch on a small countertop appliance, and a dark beverage began a slow drip into a pyrex pot. Nobody gives a wake up call like Mr. Coffee. If they could train Captain Caffeine to sniff out bombs like he can track down freshly brewed coffee, he would always have a job as an airport monitor.
He sat up, sniffing the air like Smokey the Bear on the trail of three matchbook packing Boy Scouts.
I padded to the kitchen and returned bearing a cup filled with the drink that never sleeps
.
He burst from the bedclothes like Superman in toddler-sized tights. “So, wanna go see the sunrise?”
“Sure, but you’d better gas up the car.”
“Why?”
“Because we’d have to travel three time zones toward the west to get a glimpse.”
He took a long drink from his mug. Some women go their whole lives without the type of caress that the Mickey Mouse on that cup was getting. Captain Serenity leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“That’s okay. We’ll catch the one tonight. Got a mirror?”
He took a draw of coffee that made Mickey’s ears stretch, and shot a boyish smile at me from across the room.
Just my luck. I have a plan to get to heaven and he finds a secret door to Paradise right here on Earth.
The Captain says today’s sunset is tomorrow’s sunrise, just earlier, so there’s no need to launch yourself out of bed when dew is forming on the newspaper just to see one. If you’re upset about the direction look at it in a mirror.
Our priorities are different. His are wrong.
Vacationing at the beach, I undertook to secure him a spot on the scenic side of the Pearly Gates when he finally goes to the big place computer techs go when they die, and although I’m uncomfortable mentioning Gates and computer technology in the same breath for fear of a licensing agreement infringement, I don’t mean a big room with a high speed Internet connection and a billion users who know how to synch their own Blackberry.
It was 7:00 a.m. The sunlight streamed in the window like it was on a video loop. The Captain’s face was one with the pillow and held the relaxed, peaceful air of a summer breeze in a clover-filled meadow.
Time to get up.
But how to facilitate the waking process without also calling the enemy to battle? He doesn't so much get out of bed as he does launch a ground assault on the day. After the last unpleasantness, I decided not to use the car alarm ploy again. The resulting excitement cost me the chance to see the sun at all that day.
I sat in bed, resting against the wicker headboard, celebrity magazine in hand. I try to improve my mind, even when my body is on vacation. You can’t fight too hard in the fashion battle. Flipping pages like they were fan blades, I glanced over at the victim. I’ve patented a look that will freeze jalepeno peppers, but out of love I set my eyes to stun.
No response.
I cleared my throat meaningfully.
No response.
I repositioned myself repeatedly due to an uncomfortable wrinkle in the linens.
No response.
Inspired by the sheets, I succumbed to a previously undiscovered allergic reaction to thread count.
With a snort, he turned to face the other wall.
Somewhere on another street, possibly in another town, an unknown hand flipped a switch on a small countertop appliance, and a dark beverage began a slow drip into a pyrex pot. Nobody gives a wake up call like Mr. Coffee. If they could train Captain Caffeine to sniff out bombs like he can track down freshly brewed coffee, he would always have a job as an airport monitor.
He sat up, sniffing the air like Smokey the Bear on the trail of three matchbook packing Boy Scouts.
I padded to the kitchen and returned bearing a cup filled with the drink that never sleeps
.
He burst from the bedclothes like Superman in toddler-sized tights. “So, wanna go see the sunrise?”
“Sure, but you’d better gas up the car.”
“Why?”
“Because we’d have to travel three time zones toward the west to get a glimpse.”
He took a long drink from his mug. Some women go their whole lives without the type of caress that the Mickey Mouse on that cup was getting. Captain Serenity leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“That’s okay. We’ll catch the one tonight. Got a mirror?”
He took a draw of coffee that made Mickey’s ears stretch, and shot a boyish smile at me from across the room.
Just my luck. I have a plan to get to heaven and he finds a secret door to Paradise right here on Earth.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Alfredo Agony
*Yep, I've joined another blog carnival. If I have to suffer, I want to share it with you. Today's humor topic is Injustice. Let's watch the fun.*
Injustice is a lot like a cat. Its path is unplanned and chaotic, but when it settles in your lap, it's there long enough to turn your legs into pincushions unless someone starts up the electric can opener and whirs your way to freedom.
That’s how I feel about the Alfredo sauce. Not the cat part; there’s no cure for that short of finding someone with a more comfortable lap or a bit of string stuck to their shoe. But from years of experience as the youngest of four children, and therefore susceptible to various methods of sibling torture, I have intimate knowledge that injustice is tolerable only when it is ruining the lives of people I don’t know.
When it hits me squarely in the grocery store shelf, it’s unbearable.
The trouble is that I’m not the type that spends a lot of time in the kitchen for fun. For me cooking doesn’t have the allure that, say, cruising down the Autobahn at a number divisible by 150 or stalking Johnny Depp on Twitter might have.
So in the interest of compromise, which is acceptable whenever it benefits me personally, I like to visit the “bottled for your convenience by the loving hands of somebody else” section of the store for a couple of jars of Alfredo sauce for a quick, pre-Twitter meal.
I’ll even go as far as opening the jars myself when I get home instead of asking the “What’s For Dinner” twins to do it for me. Teenage boys are nice to have around the house when you’ve got leftover pizza on hand or there’s some obvious body humor jokes that have been seriously overlooked, but when it comes to kitchen labor, they’re about as useful as a bonnet on a tom cat.
My doctor tells me that eating the stuff is kind of like caulking your arteries, but I don’t know much about caulk, either, except that it’s not near as good as the white sauce when you add it to noodles. It’s just one of nature’s little jokes that something so good to eat fills the body’s passageways with the stuff that Elmer’s is made of. But that’s injustice for you. Once you get a little patch, it spreads like tacky clothes in Ashley Olson’s closet.
If it’s that bad for me, I want to get it on sale. The savings offset the petrified artery situation. But it’s when the little glass jars of goodness go on sale that I have a problem.
I suspect my family is holding the newspaper hostage. Or perhaps once the newsprint hits the breakfast table, Scottie beams the whole thing down to a planet filled children who rip out the comic sections and stuff the rest behind the couch. So before I find out the stuff is on sale, it’s all sold out.
You’d think you could count on your family when time is short and price reductions are on the line. But the priorities in my house vary widely according to random factors such as the amount of gasoline in the car or the availability of high-speed Internet access. When it comes to something as mundane as the grocery store circulars, interest polls reach a new low, and the newspaper ends up as kitty litter.
So when I aim my little grocery cart toward the pasta aisle, there’s nothing there but an empty shelf and an echo.
I guess it’s take-out for supper again. But there’s an Italian restaurant right down the street. I think I can live with the injustice.
Injustice is a lot like a cat. Its path is unplanned and chaotic, but when it settles in your lap, it's there long enough to turn your legs into pincushions unless someone starts up the electric can opener and whirs your way to freedom.
That’s how I feel about the Alfredo sauce. Not the cat part; there’s no cure for that short of finding someone with a more comfortable lap or a bit of string stuck to their shoe. But from years of experience as the youngest of four children, and therefore susceptible to various methods of sibling torture, I have intimate knowledge that injustice is tolerable only when it is ruining the lives of people I don’t know.
When it hits me squarely in the grocery store shelf, it’s unbearable.
The trouble is that I’m not the type that spends a lot of time in the kitchen for fun. For me cooking doesn’t have the allure that, say, cruising down the Autobahn at a number divisible by 150 or stalking Johnny Depp on Twitter might have.
So in the interest of compromise, which is acceptable whenever it benefits me personally, I like to visit the “bottled for your convenience by the loving hands of somebody else” section of the store for a couple of jars of Alfredo sauce for a quick, pre-Twitter meal.
I’ll even go as far as opening the jars myself when I get home instead of asking the “What’s For Dinner” twins to do it for me. Teenage boys are nice to have around the house when you’ve got leftover pizza on hand or there’s some obvious body humor jokes that have been seriously overlooked, but when it comes to kitchen labor, they’re about as useful as a bonnet on a tom cat.
My doctor tells me that eating the stuff is kind of like caulking your arteries, but I don’t know much about caulk, either, except that it’s not near as good as the white sauce when you add it to noodles. It’s just one of nature’s little jokes that something so good to eat fills the body’s passageways with the stuff that Elmer’s is made of. But that’s injustice for you. Once you get a little patch, it spreads like tacky clothes in Ashley Olson’s closet.
If it’s that bad for me, I want to get it on sale. The savings offset the petrified artery situation. But it’s when the little glass jars of goodness go on sale that I have a problem.
I suspect my family is holding the newspaper hostage. Or perhaps once the newsprint hits the breakfast table, Scottie beams the whole thing down to a planet filled children who rip out the comic sections and stuff the rest behind the couch. So before I find out the stuff is on sale, it’s all sold out.
You’d think you could count on your family when time is short and price reductions are on the line. But the priorities in my house vary widely according to random factors such as the amount of gasoline in the car or the availability of high-speed Internet access. When it comes to something as mundane as the grocery store circulars, interest polls reach a new low, and the newspaper ends up as kitty litter.
So when I aim my little grocery cart toward the pasta aisle, there’s nothing there but an empty shelf and an echo.
I guess it’s take-out for supper again. But there’s an Italian restaurant right down the street. I think I can live with the injustice.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Lost and Found
I received a call from my son today. Early in the morning. On my cell phone. All indicators that a crisis has risen with the sun and was threatening to bring on gnashing of teeth and rending of garments before breakfast. He’s a wonderful guy, but stress transforms him from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hulk. (Hulk smash toast for getting too brown!)
It’s too early in the day for him to be concerned about the dinner menu, so there must be some other need like, say, the funnies are missing from the newspaper or he’s supposed to have a complete physical before soccer practice that afternoon.
Mothers can’t ignore hysterical children. At least not until they find out if there’s broken bones or missing teeth and whether the crisis is covered by insurance. I thought briefly of hurling the phone into the jaws of an oncoming minivan, but instead pressed the button and faced the mutant.
“Hello.”
“Mom, I can’t find my name tag.”
“I can’t find our house on a city map, but I don’t use your minutes.” It’s not that I don’t love the kid, but everything’s a crisis.
“I have to have my name tag to go to work.”
“They can’t tell it’s you from the joyous way you bound through the door in the morning?”
“Mom, it’s not funny.”
“Look son, it’s not like you work in the Oval Office and you’ve accidentally misplaced launch code numbers for the first volley of thermonuclear missiles. You work in a sandwich shop.”
“It’s not a sandwich shop. It’s a sub shop. The best sub shop in town.”
“Well can’t the best sub shop in town afford a new name tag?”
“That’s not the point. I don’t want to look unorganized.”
This from the kid who refers to the pile of T-shirts in the corner of his room as his “spare clothes.” Several generations of dust bunnies have called that pile home and lived a very nice life indeed.
“Have you looked in the dryer? I heard something making that clickety-clunk sound in there this morning.”
“I’ll look. Hold on.”
I paused at a traffic light and studied a man tracking his vacation itenerary on a shiny GPS while I mentally computed the number of minutes my cell phone plan was losing to dryer lint.
A relieved voice in my ear said, “Got it. Thanks, Mom.”
“It’s nothing. I live for these moments. It’s even better than getting AARP rates for my room at the retirement home.
“Huh?”
“I said you’re welcome.”
“Oh. You’re the best.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say down at the Piggly Wiggly when I have enough teenage boys in my living room to qualify for gangland activity and I buy enough hamburger to feed them all.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, son?”
“That reminds me. What’s for dinner?”
It’s too early in the day for him to be concerned about the dinner menu, so there must be some other need like, say, the funnies are missing from the newspaper or he’s supposed to have a complete physical before soccer practice that afternoon.
Mothers can’t ignore hysterical children. At least not until they find out if there’s broken bones or missing teeth and whether the crisis is covered by insurance. I thought briefly of hurling the phone into the jaws of an oncoming minivan, but instead pressed the button and faced the mutant.
“Hello.”
“Mom, I can’t find my name tag.”
“I can’t find our house on a city map, but I don’t use your minutes.” It’s not that I don’t love the kid, but everything’s a crisis.
“I have to have my name tag to go to work.”
“They can’t tell it’s you from the joyous way you bound through the door in the morning?”
“Mom, it’s not funny.”
“Look son, it’s not like you work in the Oval Office and you’ve accidentally misplaced launch code numbers for the first volley of thermonuclear missiles. You work in a sandwich shop.”
“It’s not a sandwich shop. It’s a sub shop. The best sub shop in town.”
“Well can’t the best sub shop in town afford a new name tag?”
“That’s not the point. I don’t want to look unorganized.”
This from the kid who refers to the pile of T-shirts in the corner of his room as his “spare clothes.” Several generations of dust bunnies have called that pile home and lived a very nice life indeed.
“Have you looked in the dryer? I heard something making that clickety-clunk sound in there this morning.”
“I’ll look. Hold on.”
I paused at a traffic light and studied a man tracking his vacation itenerary on a shiny GPS while I mentally computed the number of minutes my cell phone plan was losing to dryer lint.
A relieved voice in my ear said, “Got it. Thanks, Mom.”
“It’s nothing. I live for these moments. It’s even better than getting AARP rates for my room at the retirement home.
“Huh?”
“I said you’re welcome.”
“Oh. You’re the best.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say down at the Piggly Wiggly when I have enough teenage boys in my living room to qualify for gangland activity and I buy enough hamburger to feed them all.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, son?”
“That reminds me. What’s for dinner?”
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