Category Archive

We have this autumnal practice here in the south of going to “see color.” Leaf color, that is. It usually involves the car and a day trip to somewhere due north or west–somewhere where there are mountains. I’m guessing this is because, for the most part, the fall color in this particular region usually lasts for around, oh, 30 minutes before the leaves all turn brown and fall to the ground.

Not true this year. Yesterday I had to drive to a neighboring city for a school library conference, and I was stunned by the beauty of the trees lining the highway. It was breathtaking. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought I was looking at an artificial backdrop that someone hand painted. There was just enough balance of reds, oranges, and golds, with the occasional evergreen thrown in. The trees were bold and bright, and they blended perfectly into one another, and against yesterday’s weird half sunny-half gunmetal gray sky, they were as beautiful as any autumn mountain vista I’ve ever seen.

Even though it was the buttcrack of dawn, and even though I was late to my conference, and even though my university adviser and district supervisor told me there was really nothing they could do if my principal decided I had to teach a class, the leaves were beyond gorgeous. It was the best part of my day.

That is, until I went home to this:

And also, this:

At around 1:30 in the morning last Wednesday, I became semi-consciously aware of something moving in the darkness next to my head. I opened an eye to investigate and could just slightly make out the silhouette of my enormous cat standing at the top of the bed. I know that his back legs were planted on the pillow opposite my head, and that his front legs were planted on the Mission bedside table next to the bed (see diagram below). It gets blurry from there, but here’s what I think happened:

I numbly tried to swat him off the bed and startled him, thus causing him to attempt a total move to the bedside table, a piece of furniture that is sub-stable at best, and whose surface area, even when free of other items, is not large enough to accommodate my giant cat. Incidentally, said surface was not cleared of other objects (see diagram again), but was serving as a home for a metal and glass candelabra of sorts which contained stones instead of candles.

You don’t need a physics lesson to understand what happened next. I couldn’t give you one anyway, but I can provide a brief recap:

The cat is huge.
The table is unstable.
The cat tried to jump on the table.
The candelabra/stone vessel on the table is part glass.

It all happened in a matter of seconds:  swat…thud*…and then crash**crash***crash****…and finally, lots of swearing and the sounds of angry vacuuming. The only good thing I have to say about this incident is that my child made one small “eh…sigh” and went soundly back to sleep. Which is the only reason my cat still walks among the living.

*cat on table
**table hitting wall
***candelabra hitting the wall
****glass and stones shattering on the floor

I know you weren’t planning to help me clean up after my neurotic dog when you came to pick up your cat Snowball at the pet wellness clinic this afternoon. Hell, I wasn’t planning to clean up after her, either. I can count on one hand the times she has taken a big dump indoors in her adult life: once, today, at the wellness clinic. Go figure. Perhaps she was picking up on my own nervousness, what with having taken today off to be my own childcare, only to find out that I don’t have childcare for work tomorrow, not to mention my three-hour class tomorrow night.

Anyway, when I realized that Suzanna had littered the floor with her own waste by stepping in it with my left foot, I was literally frozen with shock. There I stood, a wiggly 8-month-old in the carrier on my back, and my dog attached to a 15-foot spiral tie out (because of course I forgot the leash and for some reason had this useless, even under good conditions, piece of crap, no pun intended, in my car), staring down at various dog turds, one of which was smushing out from the sides of my Reebok, and not a single person in the room made a move to help me. Finally the girl behind the desk slowly stood and left the area; she returned a good two or three minutes later with a bottle of disinfectant and a roll of paper towels, and when she handed them to me she didn’t even make eye contact, as if somehow it was my fault that my dog just shit in the floor of an ANIMAL CLINIC where I’m sure NO DOG HAS EVER SHIT BEFORE.

But then you, Lloyd, and you, Lloyd’s Mom, arrived to pick up Snowball, and I don’t know if you noticed that I was slowly dissovling into tears, having just knocked a box of fliers off the counter into a pool of disinfectant during the shit cleaning process, or if you are just nice people and saw that I needed help. Whatever your motivation for helping me, you are the reason I didn’t just drag my dog and my baby out of the clinic and leave. Lloyd, I really appreciate you getting that one turd I hadn’t noticed, and I’m much obliged to you for holding onto my dog while I went to the bathroom and washed my hands so I wouldn’t give my child some dog-turd-borne illness. And Lloyd’s mom, it was so nice of you to spray disinfectant on the bottom of my shoe while I balanced on one foot and tried to keep my dog from wrapping her lead around your legs. You continued to be nice to my daughter by cooing to her and later introducing her to Snowball, and even though Snowball looked like he had just snorted several lines of coke, my kid thought it was funny that his eyes were so big and his mouth wide open in a constant yowl, and for that brief moment of entertainment I thank you.

In short, Lloyd and Lloyd’s Mom, you renewed my faith in the kindness of strangers today. I hope that if I am ever in a similar situation, I will help some bedraggled, teary mom clean up her dog’s shit and enterain her baby and not sit around on my ass and watch like the other sons of bitches in the waiting area did me this afternoon.

Yours truly, hd

Everything I could possibly think of to say here (celebrate, party, yada yada) has been overshadowed by what just happened to me on the nightly sniff n’ poo walk with Suzanna. I was standing on the edge of the field waiting for her to do what she does, minding my own business, staring at the funky clouds and the oval-shaped moon, and a…

(I’m taking a cue from my girl Ellen again. In case you aren’t obsessed like I am–I tape the show every day–she’s doing cliffhanger monologues. It’s hysterical.)

…Luna Moth landed ON MY ASS!!!

That’s right, it came flitting out of nowhere and landed right on my left butt cheek. On TOP of it. Now I have proof from Mother Nature herself that my ass is as big as I think it is: large flying creatures can perch horizontally atop its looming shelf. Something MUST be done. Stay tuned next week for “As the Ass Shrinks,” coming to you live from the student fitness center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

My dog Suzanna is afraid of thunderstorms. (It seems random, I know, but all will become clear shortly.)

Last fall when Harry the Beagle came to live with me he destroyed a small patch of grass in my side yard*. At the end of May I purchased a large bag of Kentucky Blue grass seed and some Scott’s Weed and Feed in an effort to mend the destruction. There are one billion grass seeds in a single teaspoon** so there was a great deal of grass seed left over; the bag of seed has been resting quietly in an open storage bin in my garage since early June.

During the final week of my summer vacation I went to the beach for 4 days. I left my wonderfully responsible and highly competent co-worker and house sitter Amber in charge of my house and pets. When I returned last Saturday I discovered that the bag of grass seed had been ripped open and billions upon billions of tiny seeds were spread in and around the storage bin, as well as on the concrete floor of the garage and on the indoor/outdoor carpet that serves as a division between garage and laundry room (I’m still waiting for Vern from Trading Spaces to stop by and put up a nifty wall and lots of cool storage shelves, but in the meantime we do the best we can with our small areas). I was irritated, but I was sure I knew the whole story behind the grass seed massacre: there was a storm, and in her frenzied fear and anxiety about being alone in the garage, Suzanna blindly clawed at things hoping to alert someone of her situation.

At the moment of discovery, I decided I wouldn’t bother with cleaning up the seed until this weekend, when I had more time on my hands to do the job right. I left it there, convinced that its origin involved a scared dog and the sounds of an approaching storm.

Today I went into the garage to tackle the mess, and upon closer inspection I discovered two things that disturbed me greatly: 1) there were several small holes in various places on the surface of the bag that did not appear to have been made by dog teeth or claws, and 2) there were quite a few mouse droppings surrounding the bag and the seed. I conducted a thorough inspection of the rest of the garage and found mouse droppings in numerous other locations. I also discovered that my electric critter repellent was unplugged. In this moment I knew that Suzanna may have been involved in the grass seed incident, but she clearly did not actually instigate it.

I began an intense clean-up routine that involved gloves and lysol, but the idea that small unsanitary creatures with sharp teeth were possibly watching me from behind the dryer left me feeling dirty and unsettled. My plug-in repellent was back in business, but I wasn’t sure, given the mounting evidence, that it was enough to rid me of an already existing mouse population. I knew I was going to have to take drastic measures.

When I was a child I collected mouse figurines. I still have my collection in a box under the guest bed. I always stop to look at the mice at PetSmart. I think mice are cute–as long as they are not in my living space. Since I wash my clothes in the garage, and since my dog beds there while I am at work, I consider the garage part of my living space. But because of my aforementioned attachment to the little buggers, I am ethically against doing them harm. Mousetraps are evil torture devices, and those little sticky pads–horrors! But after a long, agonizing half hour in the pest control aisle at Lowe’s, I bought a box of D-Con. GASP. Just typing it makes me feel like a murderer. But they’re out there now as I type this–little boxes of poison. I put them out of Suzanna’s reach, but knowing that other creatures CAN reach them leaves me feeling very inhumane.

I see this post as a sort of confession. Bless me Father, for I have killed mice. And wouldn’t you know the damn grass seed never even grew.

*Harry doesn’t live here anymore, but his legacy lives on. I have yet to make grass grow in the wake of his destruction.

**This is an estimate. I think it might actually be more than a billion per teaspoon.