It’s been raining for a week, and drought or no drought, we need it to stop. Cabin fever has set in, and from the amount of toe stepping going on you’d think we were in the deaf-mute beginner’s competition at the annual Walk In Closet Square Dance Championships (nighttime division). It’s made Ngnat bipolar, so she’s either goose-stepping around the coffee table shouting “Elmo, Huwwah! Huwwah, Huwwah, Huwwah!” or screaming like an Inquisition victim when some small thing doesn’t meet her approval, like the cat sleeping on the foot of her bed. Putting her down for a nap involves chasing her down, telling her very sternly not to get out of bed, again, and hoping that the neighbors don’t decide to call Animal Services to come and remove the dyspeptic family of howler monkeys we’re apparently housing on the second floor.
The sainted wife and mother’s project for the four day weekend was toilet training, which are the chocolate shavings on the giant sundae of stress. Pee score so far, 1 potty, 2 carpet soakings and 2 sofa cushions which will likely smell funny for a month or two. I’m no help, because my basic idea was to put the child in timeout each time she had an accident until the accidents stopped. Apparently this makes me the Genghis Khan of toilet training theory, as it was dismissed with the kind of look you give a person who kicks dogs in the park. I say you shouldn’t reject an idea like that out of hand. Before you can criticize a man, you should sit in his daughter’s sofa cushion pee pool.
We have managed to get out of the house twice today, braving the savage elements (67 degrees, with a light rain) to take the cat to the vet and visit the bird feeder store. Before we even got the pet carrier out of the door, Grey (that’s the cat. I named her. You can always tell which one of us named the cats. Sainted wife gives them names; “Toby”, “Jack.” I give them adjectives: “Hissy”, “Grey”), had muscled up to the bars and voom!, out she went, scrabbling for dear life on the linoleum to get away from us. We stuffed her back in, and made makeshift repairs to the plastic piece of crap that was supposed to hold the door in place. Sainted wife then loaded her in the car and drove off, trailing anguished metronomic cat howls behind her. It’s a horrible sound, combining the oh so painfully annoying quality of fingernails on a blackboard with the demanding yowl a cat makes when it wants something that it suspects you are too stupid or slow to delivery in a timely fashion, like an open door, and it comes once every second for the ten minute duration of the trip. And once you get there the vet is slow, and has overbooked, so a five minute examination is preceded by a 30 minute wait, and the cat screams all the way home as well, even though the vet visit is over you dumb shut up kill you shoot you in the head if you don’t stop that infernal wailing goddamn animal!
So I was pretty glad the wife did it, at least until I discovered myself sitting in warm pee that wasn’t even my own.
