How Bad Can It Go?

This is not a drill.

things I re-learn every time my husband goes away

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Rhubarb Swank

An incomplete list, in no specific order.

1. The correct order in which the Morning Things and Bedtime Things must be done in order to satisfy the dog. Mark usually handles the Keppo stuff when we first get up and when we’re getting ready for bed. There’s a certain order to these routines and Keppo knows it. If I make the mistake of trying to make myself a cup of tea before we go out for walkies, for instance, I’ll hear about it. And gods forbid I take too long in the bathroom before bed, because the whole valley will hear about it. Keppo should just about have me re-trained by the time Mark gets back to resume these duties.

2. It doesn’t matter that I’m off work and don’t have to wake up early, don’t eat chocolate or sugary ice cream in the evening. Just because I don’t HAVE to get up early doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to get myself jacked on sugar or chocolate and then be unable to sleep for half the night. Also, my body is programmed to wake up at 6:30am regardless of whether I’ve fallen asleep at 10pm or 2:30am. Fighting it does no good. Going back to bed after waking up at 6:30 does no good.

3. If I buy a box of cereal and a carton of milk, that’s 3 meals a day for 3 days, at least, that I don’t need to cook. And if I get the puffed oatmeal squares that have a bunch of fiber in them, I don’t even need to worry about not eating vegetables! I’m not proud of that, but I’m nothing if not pragmatic.

4. The dehumidifier tank is heavier than I give it credit for when it’s full.

4a. I am perfectly capable of schlepping said heavy dehumidifier tank up the basement stairs to empty it. Is it fun? No. But I can do it.

5. It’s nice to have extra room in the bed, but it’s nicer to have company. Specific company, I should say. As in, my husband. I’m not interested in fighting just anyone for the blankets, thank you.

6. I will get bored after two days off by myself, and rather than converting that boredom into useful activities like cleaning the house, I will instead become a toad who only wants to read books, play video games, and eat cereal (and chocolate). All the to-do lists in the world can’t help me after day 2 home alone. If I’m not getting everything crossed off that list by sundown on day 2, it’s likely not getting done any time soon because I’ll be way too busy in Mediocre Supernatural Fantasy Romance Novel Land or Shoot Colorful Bubbles To Help A Cat Get To Space Land. I might switch it up a little and sit at my desk to try and struggle-bus through writing a blog post (ahem), but that’s about it.

7. I am braver when he’s here. I’m also funnier, smarter, less prone to bouts of extreme weirdness, and more responsible. I spent a large portion of the first half of my life alone. Not just unpartnered, but pretty literally alone. I don’t want to make this sound like I shouldn’t or can’t be alone, or that I think there’s anything wrong with being a solitary person, because that’s not it at all. I was often a very functional person whilst living alone, and there are still plenty of times when I really enjoy my own company. It’s just that I got quite used to existing mostly just inside my own head, and even after almost 14 years of cohabitation with another actual human being, it’s still SUPER easy for me to slip right back into that space, that rut of believing that I’m basically a ghost just flitting through everyone else’s lives instead of a tangible human being living my own tangible life. Mark grounds me. He’s the weight at the end of my balloon string that keeps me from floating off into the atmosphere, eventually landing in the ocean, and choking some poor unsuspecting turtle. Or something.

This is what I wake up to most mornings when Mark is away. I like to anthropomorphize and say that he’s laying in Mark’s spot to keep me company, but in reality I know that he’s probably been hotboxed out from under the covers by my constant flatulence because I’ve been living on Oatmeal Squares for the past three days.

box of hair

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Rhubarb Swank

We have a squirrel problem.

Thankfully it’s still a lower-case problem and not a PROBLEM…but still.

And yes, I know, I’m the person who is obsessed with chipmunks, and goes to outlandish lengths to befriend them. Chipmunks are not squirrels. Chipmunks hibernate in the winter. They’re tiny and cute and the holes they dig in my lawn are very small. They don’t inhale entire pounds of sunflower seeds on a daily basis. And, key point to this particular story: they don’t launch themselves bodily up the side of my house, trying to gain purchase on the siding so they can claw their way up to the bird feeder that is attached to my office window.

Did you know that a chunky grey squirrel traveling at a high velocity can hit a wall hard enough to knock things off the interior windowsill of the affected wall? It’s true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes multiple times the past few weeks.

The squirrels are also stressing Keppo the fuck out. Between the thumping on the wall, the scratching noises of them trying to climb the siding, and the chittering tirades when the red squirrels show up to invade what is apparently historically grey squirrel territory, there has been SO much barking. Patrols of the perimeter, which necessitate me being on the end of a leash because it’s not safe to let him out on his own, have also increased dramatically. Today we had to go out every 90 minutes all morning, for instance. I enjoy the walks but it’s really doing a number on what was my frankly already dismal rate of work productivity.

All of this is what led up to me desperately Googling “how to repel squirrels” the other afternoon. The top three ideas that kept coming up were:

1. Spray predator urine in the area you want the squirrels to stay out of. If you’re a country person or grew up around hunters, you probably know that bottles of synthetic fox and coyote pee are readily available in most stores that sell hunting gear. Some hunters use it to mask the human scent on their clothes before going out into the woods. Initially this seemed like the best and most effective option for my squirrel issue but then I realized that:

we already have foxes and coyotes all over the place here and I really don’t want to pique their interest, thus bringing them closer to the house that my small defenseless dog lives in,
the main spot that the squirrels hang out is under the bird feeder attached to my office window so that means I’d be spraying a canine-piss-scented substance directly under a window that I open multiple times a day, and
the smell would probably drive Keppo almost as bonkers as the actual squirrels have been doing.

2. Put up an owl decoy. This appealed to me simply because I like owls. I also got very excited at the prospect of neighboring owls possibly coming by to check out the decoy. Then I read that if you go the decoy route, you have to move it regularly because otherwise the squirrels will figure out its fake and then never respect the decoy OR you ever again. Which…that seems reasonable, honestly. What did NOT seem reasonable was the price of owl decoys though, so we were on to option number 3, which was…

3. Spread human and dog hair around the area you want to keep the squirrels out of. The idea is that they don’t like / are scared of the smells of humans and dogs so scattering hair around will keep them away. Since this was the cheapest, easiest, and most readily actionable of the top three ideas, I figured I’d give it a try.

Mark brushed Keppo on Friday evening and collected all the hair in a little cardboard box. We put the box out in the mud room so that, should it get knocked over, it wouldn’t go all over the house. That turned out to be fairly smart because literally the next morning I was out in the mudroom putting a bag of trash out and what did I do? Knocked over the box of hair. Side note: this is how we learned that Keppo will attempt to eat clods of his own hair once they are detached from his body. My special, special boy.

On Sunday morning I cut Mark’s hair and while that doesn’t result in a lot of clippings anymore (sorry dear), we figured what the heck, we’ll throw those in the Box of Hair as well. I also cleaned out a couple of my hair brushes, and I shed almost as badly as Keppo does, so by the time it was all said and done we had a pretty good stash going.

This morning when I took Keppo out for our first patrol, I also took the Box of Hair. I carefully sprinkled it all around under the bird feeder and my office window. Keppo only tried to eat one chunk before he found some bird seed hulls that were even more illicit and therefore became his sole focus. We got everything set and then did our circuit of the house and returned back inside. Once back in my office, I opened the window a little bit and looked straight down just to make sure our placement was good. Perfect…a nice even coating of…hair. A hair barrier, if you will. A…hhhhhbarrier? Hair-ier? Wait no, that’s something different. But you get my drift. Pleased with my ingenuity, I sat down to get to work.

All of ten minutes later I hear the characteristic scrabble-clunk-scrabblescrabble-crash of a fat-ass grey squirrel launching itself up the exterior wall. By the time I got up to go look out the window, a second had joined it. A red squirrel came barreling around the corner shortly thereafter.

Not one of them gave a sweet blithering fuck about the hair barrier. They didn’t even slow down to sniff at it. I might as well have just scuffed my feet around the leaves a little as far as they were concerned. It was right back to business as usual for them and lack of ability to get any business done for me.

So I guess it’s time to invest in an owl decoy and see how that goes.

This is not a drive-through, sir.

holding pattern

Posted on April 13, 2018 by Rhubarb Swank

Keppo just wants to be held.

Zzzzzz…

Sometimes he tries to eat his feet:

ANG NYANG NYANG

Sometimes he likes to perch up high and creep on the neighbors:

“12:30pm. Nothing to report.”

Sometimes he likes a good belly rub:

“Never stop doing this, ever.”

But mostly, he just wants to be held:

The thing about Keppo is, if he wants to be held and for whatever reason you CAN’T hold him right that second (like, say, if you’re trying to work on the laptop, or you’re eating a sandwich), he doesn’t give a fuck. Your needs are irrelevant to Keppo. If he can’t force you to hold him, he will proceed to find a way to wedge himself up against your body, likely in the most awkward and uncomfortable way, and will have himself the nap he was planning to have before you tried to ruin it by doing human stuff.

“Oh, you’re busy right now? It’s fine, I’ll just curl up here and look sad.”

“Why work when we could be making out?”

It took him a full five minutes of huffing, grunting and repositioning himself dramatically behind my head and shoulder before he finally settled here.

I had to lean forward. He slid, and instead of going to sit somewhere else, he doubled down. It’s been 20 minutes and he’s still wedged in there.

Keppo’s name comes from a character in Legend of the Five Rings, a card game my husband and a lot of our friends play. In the game, Keppo was a resourceful little goblin who liked to steal things. He had a hoard of treasures in a cave, and always seemed to have a special something hidden away that could save his ass when he was in a jam. The Keppo character became a mascot for our playgroup – we’ve even had art pieces commissioned for T-shirts that include the goblin Keppo’s likeness. When Mark and I were trying to come up with names for the puppy, we wanted something suitably nerdy, but also something easy. The shelter had named him Cupid because he was surrendered on Valentine’s Day. The name Keppo had the distinct advantage of sounding kind of like the name the shelter had been using for the pup for the last six weeks. Plus, most puppies are at least a little bit thieving goblin, aren’t they? So far, our Keppo mostly just likes to steal personal space.

not today, Satan

Posted on April 4, 2018 by Rhubarb Swank

This morning when I logged on to WordPress to catch up on reading some blogs, I noticed something odd. The display name next to my avatar was no longer showing as “Rhubarb Swank”, but rather “sexy.jvhrt.ru”.

Cue mild panic.

Not that I have years of irreplaceable material here, and not that the whole thing probably doesn’t deserve to be put to rest in a giant dumpster fire, of course…but I do pay for this domain, so my credit card info is squirreled away in the depths of my account somewhere. I don’t need some hacker slurping that up and selling it on, thank you very much!

After a few minutes of clicking around I managed to restore my display name, update my password and tweak a few other settings that will hopefully keep things more secure going forward.

Hopefully no one is gleefully dildo shopping with my credit card. Actually, scratch that. If they DID end up stealing it, I hope they DO use it for dildo shopping. Just so long as the bank doesn’t make me pay for it.

Anyway, that’s what I get for using crap-ass passwords and not updating them regularly.

LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES. Unless you like buying other people dildos. In which case, you’re probably doing the world a service, really.

Now please enjoy this picture of our new dog Keppo:

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He’s the one with the whiskers. Apparently I had remembered to shave mine that day.

He came home with us from the shelter almost two weeks ago and we are, frankly, fucking exhausted. We were 8 years younger the last time we had a puppy and I think we both forgot just how much work it is. Worth it, certainly…but holy hell.

a month and a day

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Rhubarb Swank

It’s been a month and a day since we lost Junior.

This morning on the way out the door to head to work, I almost turned to Mark and asked him to check if Junie’s water dish was full. The dish hasn’t been in its spot for a month and a day.

I don’t hear him anymore, at least. For the first few days, I’d swear I could hear him snuffling in the living room or at the foot of the bed at night. I think my brain just automatically knew what sounds he’d be making when, and was filling them in of its own accord. My brain only wants to be helpful with remembering things when it comes to me being haunted, I guess. Go figure.

We still have all of his stuff. His bowls got washed and tucked away in the cupboard almost as soon as we got home. His harness and leash are still on the back seat of the car, which seems perfectly fitting as going for rides was just about his favorite activity. Most of his toys are still piled up in the same place we always returned them to on the rare occasion we bothered to tidy them. A few of his special toys got put aside in other places – his little stuffed bantha sits atop the carved wooden box his ashes are in on the table-cum-altar in the living room. LeRoy, the wee squeaky giraffe whose squeaker gave out but who Junie still often picked up and tried to make squeak, now resides on the bookshelf with some other mementos. L’Alligator the stuffed alligator whose head I once had to surgically reattach due to Junie’s frequent, enthusiastic attentions, sits on the desk upstairs in our bedroom. He’s a far quieter night sentry than Junior ever was, but we do feel like he’s getting the job done OK so far.

His beds are still there, all four of them (one for each bedroom and two in the living room), though Mark moved the one from the foot of our bed into the spare bedroom, and I tucked the favorite living room bed under the other, deeply hated living room bed (he took after me and had a complicated relationship with beds), so that we wouldn’t have to see them empty. We really should get rid of at least two of the beds. One belonged to our old dog Buttons and predated Junior by several years. The faux sheepskin atop the other one bears the scars of much scuffing, as Maltese tend to like to scratch up their bedding into a suitable nest before settling down to nap. We should go through the dozens of toys and donate some of them to the local shelter as well…but we’re not there yet.

It’s only been a month and a day, after all.

L’Alligator and Junior

the boss of me

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Rhubarb Swank

Scene: My living room, Thanksgiving eve. I’m sitting on the couch and Mark is sitting in the chair. Junior is on the floor between us.

Junior: *exasperated huff*

Mark: What’s wrong, buddy?

Me: It’s like 7:30. He probably wants a walk.

Mark: You want a walk, buddy? I can take you for a walk. Let me get some music going on my phone first.

Mark stands up and starts fiddling with his phone.

Mark: Pandora is trying to give me turkey recipes and dinner party music. Fuck you, Pandora. You’re not the boss of me! I’M not even the boss of me, so YOU don’t get to be the boss of me.

Me, in a supportive tone: You can be the boss of you!

Distracted by his phone, Mark slowly rounds the corner to go up the stairs and hits his leg on the baby gate set up across the bottom of the stairs. The gate makes a loud clunk.

Mark: Raaauuuuggggh!

Me: Maybe you shouldn’t be the boss of you, actually.

Mark: It may be for the best…

Mark disappears up the stairs while I laugh. Junior sits near the doorway to the kitchen, wondering how he ended up stuck with us.

-Fin-

*********

Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving holiday was filled with delicious food, time spent with loved ones, a lack of family drama / fights over politics, and zero mentions of Pilgrims / forefathers / founders of this country.

And if you’re not American, then I hope your Thursday and Friday last week were everything you wanted, and I hope all us silly Muricans taking over social media with our public displays of #thankfulness (which seems a lot different than actual gratitude, at least for many) didn’t annoy you too much.

catching my breath

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Rhubarb Swank

August was a rough one, friends.

Yes, I realize that it’s already almost mid-September and I’m just getting round to telling you about August. That should be a pretty good clue as to how my August went.

My mom had a stroke at the tail end of July. We were very lucky as it could have been far worse, but it still left her with no use of her left hand, heavily slurred speech and trouble swallowing due to weakness along the left side of her mouth and throat. We were also very lucky that it happened one evening while she and my dad were sitting up visiting with my aunt and uncle. Had it happened while my mom was home alone, or even worse, driving…yeah. It’s not fodder for pleasant contemplation.

Anyway – there was a lot of driving back and forth between home and hospital, then home and rehab facility, for about a week and a half. I was also trying to keep an eye on my dad, as he has a habit of running himself pretty ragged when my mom is unwell (which we know from experience the last few years with her being in and out of hospital so much). It was busy, full of stress and worry, and just all around not a great time.

And then things really took a nose dive into the deep end of the shit whirlpool.

Our beloved Maltese, Junior, had been having some problems keeping his balance for a couple weeks prior to all this. It started out as just a little bit of wavering when he’d cock his leg to pee, and the occasional stumble while going up the stairs. When it got so that he was almost tipping over when he squatted to poop, was losing his back legs out from under him while just walking across the floor, and when he stopped even trying to go up the stairs at all, I knew something was wrong.

Two days after my mom’s stroke, I took Junie to the vet to be checked out. The vet hemmed and hawed and decided it was probably arthritis in his trick knee. She sent us home with a bag of joint supplement chews and orders to not jump up on stuff or tear around crazily for a while. We dutifully administered the chews and kept things to a dull roar for a week but things kept getting worse. Junie would get up on the couch next to me and basically not move for hours, which was very unlike him. I kept trying to convince myself that it would just take some time for the joint supplements to kick in and then he’s start feeling better, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more going on.

Instinct finally won and I made him another vet appointment. We saw a different doctor than our normal vet that day. He had me put Junior down on the floor so he could observe Junior walking around…or skittering and face-planting, as it turned out. He watched him quietly for a couple minutes, then shook his head and told me that he was pretty sure it wasn’t his legs but rather his spine that was causing the problem. Tight-lipped, the vet referred us to a doggie neurologist and told us to get there as soon as possible.

The next day, the neurologist looked him all over, did some x-rays, and determined that it was either granulomatous meningoencephalitis (GME for short), or lymphoma. The treatment would be the same either way: steroids and chemo. In order to confirm it was one of these things and not a brain tumor, Junior needed an MRI. In order to have the MRI, he needed to be put under anesthesia. In order to have the anesthesia, he needed to have an ultrasound to make sure it was safe, because he has a congenital heart defect that has been getting progressively worse. Junior just turned eight at the end of August, by the way. He’s not an old dog by any means.

We brought him back to the specialist the next day for the ultrasound. They cleared him for the MRI, with the caveat that we sign a waiver saying we understood that there was up to a 20% chance that the anesthesia may kill him. We signed the waiver and sent him off with the doctors to be prepped for the MRI. Mark and I then proceeded to spend the rest of the day floating in our own private banks of fog. We went to get food, we went for a scenic drive, we went to see Wonder Woman…all so that we could try and distract ourselves from the very real chance that we might get a call saying our dog had died. Not our most enjoyable day ever.

We were at McDonalds forcing ourselves to eat when Mark’s phone finally rang. He stood up and walked away from the table to answer it, and I had to sit on my hands to keep them from shaking while I strained to hear any words at all from the other end of the call. I distinctly remember thinking, “well he hasn’t burst into tears yet, so hopefully things aren’t TOO bad”.

And they weren’t, at least not entirely. Junior had survived the MRI and there was no brain tumor, but there was a lesion or tumor on his spinal cord. Now he needed a spinal tap to try and determine whether it was GME or lymphoma we were dealing with. The spinal tap ended up being inconclusive, but the doctor was leaning toward lymphoma over GME. We got sent home with a whole bunch of meds and a boatload of anxiety.

The problem, you see, is that it doesn’t actually matter if it’s GME or lymphoma, because neither one is curable. If it was lymphoma in some of his actual lymph nodes, it may have been possible to do an operation to remove them or radiation to shrink them. But the lymphoma is in / on his spinal cord…it’s called CNS (central nervous system) lymphoma. We can’t even do a biopsy of the lesion because it would probably kill him or paralyze him. Also, while the steroids have helped him to be able to walk again, they’re very hard on his already faulty heart. And the chemo that we have to give him every 3 weeks to try and shrink the lesion? Very hard on the heart. As if this all wasn’t enough, we also found out from some tests last week that it’s very possible Junior also has a liver shunt. Quick physiology lesson: your liver cleans your blood, and metabolizes many of the medications you may take. A liver shunt is where some or all of the arteries that are supposed to feed your blood into your liver for cleaning aren’t actually in the right place and are instead diverting some or all of your blood around your liver rather than through it. When stuff doesn’t get cleaned out of your blood by your liver, it just keeps recirculating through your body and eventually build up to toxic levels. So it’s possible (and currently looking probable) that all the heavy duty steroids and chemo Junior has been getting are building up in his system rather than getting cleaned out of his blood. This even further limits our treatment options. Best case scenario, the remission we hope for is being measured in weeks at this point, not months or years.

Rather than dwell on feeling sad and angry and guilty and who knows what else, I’m trying like hell to find ways to learn from this experience. I’m getting a crash course in sitting with my own discomfort, for one. My M.O. is to fix things but there is no fix to this thing, and that makes me very uncomfortable. I don’t know how to accept helplessness as a valid state of being. I’m also getting a refresher on the fundamental impermanence of life. Just because you’re not old and frail doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a lot more time. To paraphrase Xzibit: yo dawg, I heard you like feeling helpless so I put some more helpless in your pile of helplessness. And lastly, I’m finding a whole new motivation for trying to be more present, for acknowledging and appreciating what each moment holds, rather than dwelling on the inevitable.

My mom’s doing well now, by the way. She’s got quite a lot of use of her hand back, her speech is much better and she’s having a much easier time swallowing. She still has a lot of serious health issues but if I let myself start to worry about those on top of everything else going on, I’m pretty much guaranteed to go the way of Artax and get sucked down into the Swamp of Sorrows…and that doesn’t do me or anyone I love a bit of good.

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“I got 99 problems and you not rubbing my belly is relatively high on the list.”

creature of habit

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Rhubarb Swank

The bathroom door isn’t allowed to be closed in our home. Not because there’s anything wrong with the door that prevents it from closing. Not because either of us harbor some kind of potty fetish. No, the bathroom door actually gets shut every time one of us goes in there…but then Junior comes along and kicks it open.

Why? Because he doesn’t want it closed. Plain and simple.

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“Mahm, do you ever feel, you know, not-so-fresh?”

At first we thought it was a separation thing. Like, “aww, Junie missed me so he came running into the bathroom to see me”. Except, he usually doesn’t. He’ll just come up the stairs, cuff the bathroom door until it swings open, and then walk away. He’ll do it to guests with an equal measure of nonchalance. He gives no fucks who’s IN there. He just doesn’t want that door closed.

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“HEY. HEY DO MY PARENTS KNOW YOU’RE IN HERE? DO YOU HAVE A PERMIT TO USE OUR TERLIT? I NEED TO SEE YOUR PAPERS RIGHT NOW MISTER.”

The bedroom door gets much the same treatment. If I go to bed earlier than Mark does, I’ll often shut the bedroom door like 90% so that I can’t see the light from the TV reflecting out in the hallway (it’s a small apartment and I’m a special snowflake when it comes to sleeping conditions). I always try to get Junior to come in and get on the bed while I’m changing into my pajamas or whatever, but he’ll often just mill around in the hallway or the spare bedroom looking offended. After a few minutes I give up, shutting the curtain and turning on the white noise machine, then crawling into bed. Just about the time my head hits the pillow, BAM. Junior cuffs the door and it swings open wide. He stands there in the doorway, a tiny white tyrant bathed in the somewhat eerie glow of the orange bulb in our bedside lamp, triumphant and unyielding. I can almost hear him declaring, Gandalf-like, “YOU. SHALL. NOT. CLOSE”. Then I have to get back out of bed, go over to the door and try to find a balance between closing it enough that the light doesn’t bother me, but having it open enough to avoid further insult to His Royal Highness. While I’m doing this, by the way, that little fucker will sashay in, jump up on the bed and nest down in the covers I’ve thrown off while getting up. This in turn causes at least one round of tense blanket negotiations, several canine sighs that drip with disappointment, and the eventual Great Resettling, before I can shut the light off.

Closing the doors all the way (as in, until they latch) doesn’t do any good either, because when Junior can’t cuff a door open, he gets upset. “Let him fuss, he’ll eventually self-soothe and calm down”, you say, rolling your eyes. Oh no, dear reader. This dog does not self-soothe and calm down. THIS dog will whine, and when whining doesn’t work, he’ll bark. When barking at the problem door doesn’t work, he’ll go downstairs and start barking by the living room windows or the kitchen door, both of which are adjacent to close neighbors. He knows we’ll do just about anything to shut him up from barking where it’s going to bother the neighbors, so that’s his trump card, and he’s not afraid to play it.

“She’s made of lies, everyone. I am a sweet tiny unicorn angel who does no wrong. Leave me now and let me rest. I must prepare for a long night of guarding my beloved parents from the terrors of the dark.”

your Danzig is drooping…

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Rhubarb Swank

Walking the dog is usually a business-like affair for me. I want to get it done and over with as quickly as possible so that I can get back to whatever it was I was doing (aka: sitting on the couch). Preparation is minimal: I put Junior’s harness on him, I step into whatever shoes require the least amount of effort to wear, and if it’s especially cold I’ll put a coat on. We probably average about 90 seconds between “come on, it’s walkies time” to stepping out the door, and a good 45 of that is trying to get Junie to hold still so that I can harness him up.

My husband, on the other hand, has a rather involved process which centers chiefly on picking what music he’s going to listen to. He’ll tell the dog it’s time to go out, then pick up his phone and spend five minutes scrolling through Pandora looking for inspiration. The funny part is that he almost invariably ends up picking one of like five songs. I know this because he always starts singing along as soon as the music starts. He walks around singing while he’s looking for his hat, gloves, coat, boots, harness. He then finds the dog, puts the harness on him and away they go, singing all the while.

Last night’s walkies selection happened to be ‘Mother’ by Danzig. Mark started out humming the opening guitar riff, then broke into the first verse:

“Mother…Tell your children not to walk my way / Tell your children not to hear my words/ What they mean / What they say / Mother…”

I tend to sing along to whatever he’s singing, except that I sing along in my default silly voice, which is an exaggerated version of Droopy Dog. Junior happened to be on my lap when this whole thing started, so I grabbed his front legs and started waving them around, forcing him to do interpretive dance accompaniment to my Droopy Dog cover of Danzig. Mark was around the corner in the kitchen and couldn’t see or hear any of this, mind you. Junior eventually got fed up of my puppet-master act and broke free. He ran out to the kitchen to be harnessed and walked while I was reduced to a helpless giggle fit over the Droopy Dog version of “…and if you wanna find hell with me / I can show you what it’s like / til you’re bleeding”.

I’m pretty sure Glenn Danzig would NOT approve.

Also, side-note: I totally thought Glenn Danzig was dead until this morning when I Googled him. That is in fact WHY I Googled him. I was like “how long has he been dead, anyway?” TRICK QUESTION, apparently. Sorry, Glenn Danzig! For…well, everything really.

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Delivery Day

Posted on August 19, 2016 by Rhubarb Swank

Yesterday I worked from home because I had to be around to sign for the new washing machine that was being delivered.

As an aside, my old washing machine committed one of the ultimate washing machine sins: it died during a load of post-vacation laundry. At the time, I may have actually kicked it and yelled, “YOUR TIMING COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE WORSE, YOU BIG METAL ASSHOLE“. I’ll give credit where it’s due, though: it at least had the good grace to finish the cycle and drain all the water out of the tub first. It’s not like I was left having to bail water out of the washer with a coffee cup. I would have yelled something a lot fucking worse if that had happened, trust me.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, working from home.

When I work from home, I usually sit at the kitchen table with the laptop. It’s near a window, it’s near the fridge, I can see out the front living room windows and hide in plenty of time before anyone gets to the front door…it’s an all-around good locale. The only downside to working at the kitchen table is that it’s about the farthest point away from the bathroom in our entire apartment. Which, granted, it’s a pretty small apartment so it’s not like it’s THAT far away…but still. Sometimes seconds count, especially when you have to traverse a staircase.

The delivery guys were supposed to show up sometime between 10:30 and 12:30. I wanted to be super extra adulty and ready to meet them out front so that I could direct them where to park the truck, so I tried to make sure I had everything personal done and squared away by 10:30. The creepy cobwebs around the laundry room door had been knocked down (which was a traumatic fucking experience in and of itself because you know how I feel about spiders), I had consolidated all the empty wine and beer bottles (aka: ‘the recycling’, but let’s be real. It’s all bottles.) into a plastic bag, and I walked Junior not once but TWICE just to make sure I wasn’t halfway across the lawn watching him do his patented ‘four crab-walk circles of varying widths before I finally shit’ dance when the truck showed up.

I was totally prepared.

10:30 came and went. No truck. Unperturbed, I drank my coffee and dug in to my computer work.

11:30 – still no truck. ‘That’s fine‘, I thought magnanimously, ‘I’m surely not the only delivery they’ve got scheduled today. Besides, I have plenty here to keep me busy‘. I drank a bunch of water (I believe in aggressive hydration, partially to make up for my converse habit of occasional aggressive inebriation), ate a big apple, and did some more work.

Noon – no truck. Again, not that big of a deal. Except…

…coffee makes me need to poop. Apples also make me need to poop. Drinking a liter of water doesn’t specifically make me need to poop, but what goes in must come out, and…yeah.

My guts gurgled somewhat forlornly.

I looked at the clock.

I looked out the front windows for any sign of a truck coming down our road.

I looked at Junior.

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“I’m so disappointed in you, Mahm.” – Junior, every day of his life for the last 6.5 years

His beady little eyes seemed to be saying to me, “Just go. You’ve got plenty of time. Plus, you know I’ll bark like the world is ending as soon as I hear anyone pull up. Go on, you got this.”

With as close to a blessing as I’m ever likely to get from the dog, I made my way upstairs to the bathroom to care of business. I won’t get into the graphic details, but suffice to say it was not merely a tinkle-and-dash situation. It took a few minutes.

Roughly four minutes into the proceedings, the worst case scenario became real: the dog started barking his fool head off.

“Of COURSE the delivery truck is here. OF FUCKING COURSE IT IS,” I muttered to myself, finishing up as quickly as I could.

I got downstairs and looked out the front window. No truck. ‘Balls, that means they’re already backed up to the breezeway, unloading the washer! They probably knocked and I didn’t even hear them! UGH. I AM A FAILURE AS AN ADULT. ‘

The dog kept barking and barking, jumping against my leg so I couldn’t move quickly lest I kick him. It took me a full minute to get from the bottom of the stairs out to the kitchen where I could look out the front door to see…

…nothing. No truck, no delivery men. Nada. There wasn’t even a god damned neighbor cat around that would have set the dog off. I’M PRETTY SURE HE WAS JUST BARKING TO GET ME TO COME BACK DOWNSTAIRS, YOU GUYS.

We had a quiet discussion after that.

Phrases like “poopus interruptus” and “payback’s a bitch” may have been bandied about. We eventually came to the understanding that I as the human, provider of kibble and meat, purveyor of walkies and scritches, actually had zero rights in the household and that if he, as the dog wanted to bark bloody murder until I came running to see what the matter was, that was entirely his prerogative. Further to that, I should probably be thanking him for the privilege.

At least we’re all on the same page now.

Epilogue:

The delivery truck showed up at 12:15, at which point Junior had an even MORE frenzied barking fit. They took away the traitorous old washer, hooked up the shiny mystical new one, and were gone by 12:30. Junior was the beneficiary of several more walks after that, during NONE of which did I interrupt his crapping in any way. Because some of us have MANNERS.