The Drunks Were At It Again. Oy!

Susan was up very late last night reading.
She read without a care for the hour, or her bladder or what she would wear in the morning to her recently acquired job. She was happy to have only the quiet of a Tuesday night to keep her company.

Susan was comfortably situated near an open window in her living room when she became aware that Mrs. Drunk was out in the street. Mrs. Drunk sounded sloppy and stupid, which means she was speaking in her normal conversational tone.

Since Susan was not being directly addressed she was able to put aside the moderate disturbance caused by Mrs. Drunk and continue reading. Susan is able to tune out all sorts of background noises thanks to training provided by her children. Anything really loud like the sustained shrieks of a toddler or something heavy crashing down the stairs or a car alarm will be impossible to ignore and demand investigation. So, one can imagine how much attention two car alarms going off in the wee hours of a Wednesday morning would require.
Lots.

The first alarm went off directly in front of Susan's house. She expected the car's owner to fly on winged feet to quiet the ear splitting racket, but this didn't happen. Instead, the alarm of a second car began to clang and crash and roar. This made Susan hop up and walk outside where she observed someone resembling Mr. Drunk, illuminated by flashing headlights, dancing to the monstrous beat of the dual alarms.

Susan was joined outside by her husband. The two watched in quiet unison as each car was eventually rendered silent with the turn of a key. A 'sorry' was tossed in their direction and once again the street became just what it should be, quiet and dark.

Susan and the husband went inside, shut the door and went to bed.

It's A Motion Sensor For Crissakes!

Susan takes the expressway when she drives home from work. Every day she encounters a line of cars backed up at the entrance ramp. They're all waiting for the traffic light thing to turn green. Susan is sure you've seen one, it has a red light which remains illuminated, and a green light. As each car rolls up to the traffic light thing it will turn from red to green allowing the car to proceed and Susan to inch a little closer to home. However, if the car does not roll far enough to trip the motion sensor the driver will just sit there staring at the red light while the top of Susan's head explodes.

Susan gets all twitchy just anticipating the entrance ramp, she doesn't need to wait until she gets there. She finds it difficult to believe that people don't understand that the traffic light thing employs a motion sensor.
Even after they sit there for forty or fifty minutes.
Her only hope is that their foot falls asleep and slips off the brake so they roll forward unintentionally.

Why is it even necessary to interfere with people merging onto the expressway? Merging is easy, just drive fast.
People need help backing up. Susan has a terrific and smart girlfriend who won't back up at all. Ever.
Help Susan's friend and stop screwing with Susan's drive home!

Lovely Spring

Susan lives with seasons.
Real seasons where everything is either blooming or dying or covered in snow waiting to bloom again. Sometimes a season comes early, or stays late, or seems to forget to come at all.

Currently, Susan's immediate area of the universe is experiencing the first warm weekend of spring.
Susan hasn't had to wear her winter coat for a while but neither has she been able to leave the house without some sort of protective outerwear. And maybe a scarf, which is mostly for decoration, but one does not wear scarves in warm weather is her point.

However, this weekend everything was transformed.

Windows were opened, wind chimes were hung, elderly mongrels were shampooed, patio furniture was scrubbed clean, sunscreen was busted out and the yard was turned from a giant toilet back to a restful retreat.

Oh, and a tick was removed from a middle school baseball player.

Susan had never seen a tick before because she doesn't go places where ticks are. And she doesn't check her children for them either. This particular tick was red and looked like a teeny little boiled crab.

The baseball player was a friend of Susan's son who showed up with the thing already embedded in him. He was very casual about the situation impressing Susan who was busy coordinating the tick extraction while trying not to hyperventilate.

Susan has read that ticks burrow into the skin and if one just yanks them out they will leave the submerged portion of themselves behind. That's no good. She has also read that if one places a heat source, such as a lighted cigarette, up to the tick it will reverse course and back the hell out of Dodge.

Susan has not had a pack of cigarettes in her house since that long ago day when she peed on a test strip and it made her pregnant. However, she and the husband like to smoke cigars periodically and he usually has one or two in the house.

The husband lit his cigar, took a few draws and held it close to the baseball player's skin, burning it ever so slightly. The tick began to move but met an untimely end when it succumbed to heat stroke. Susan removed it with a pair of needle nosed pliers. Even in death he hung on like a sonofab*tch.

Susan would like to say a few things about her son's friends;
That she has yet to meet one she hasn't liked. Well, there was one a few years ago that she wasn't too crazy about but he moved away.
That the son's friends are polite, helpful and very boyish. Susan has listened undetected while they've interacted and has always been happy with what she heard. Fortunately for them she doesn't care too much about conversational cursing.

Boys and warm breezes and lilacs just beginning to bloom,
is there anything better?

Bleach

The other evening Susan's daughter showed up for her goodnight kiss wearing bleach stained flannel pajama bottoms.
Susan is directly responsible for most of the laundry done in the house and the last time she saw those pajama bottoms they were fine.
The husband pitches in with laundry duties but that's usually when there are no more clean towels.
And the kids are complaining that they have no pants.
Or underwear.

Based on a series of previous laundry related episodes
the husband knows to remove Susan's clothing from anything he puts into the washing machine.
That was a hard won battle for Susan.
If you think she goes crazy when he hand washes the glassware, you can't imagine the level of hysteria unleashed in the house when she finds that he's washed, or dried, any of her clothing.

Mercy! It used to drain Susan of all her energy.

Susan takes great care with her clothing because most of it is either moderately expensive or very cheap and can't just be tossed into the machine all willy-nilly. Back during the dark days of the husband's laundry involvement Susan was able to open the dryer door and know immediately that it contained something it shouldn't.

Back to the pajama bottoms.

Susan pondered the bleach stain but decided to let it remain a household mystery because she was working on the computer and didn't have any mental space available at that moment.

The next day Susan was taking laundry out of the dryer.
A load of purple and red laundry, similar to the color of the pajama bottoms. She pulled out her daughter's purple shirt and found it had a large bleach stain.
Then a red shirt. Bleach.
Then two more purple shirts. Bleach, bleach.
She was getting woozy.
Susan removed one bleach stained carcass after another until she got to the thing she dreaded most; her own shirt.
Bleach.

Susan steadied herself as she surveyed the destruction lying at her feet. Not one item spared.

The husband was sitting quietly at the table watching the scene unfold and offered the following explanation;

That he undertook the consolidation of two open containers of bleach into one
directly over an open washing machine
which had recently completed it's cycle.

Susan maintained her composure. Her shirt had been destined for the Goodwill bag after one last washing,
there was no need to over react. Most of the other clothes belonged to her daughter and could be discarded quietly, a cover-up if you will.
Susan set upon this task quickly then moved on as if nothing had ever happened.

Getting Ready For Menstruation

Susan has a deliciously sweet and delightful daughter, sometimes known as The Crybaby, who is going to get ambushed with a talk about menstruation.
Soon.

Susan took a run at this topic already & was met with a profound lack of enthusiasm. It's as if the daughter unplugged herself. All interaction stopped, the eyes dimmed, the body slumped slightly and then she started to drool. But, once the subject was changed she became reanimated; lights back on, motor humming, all functions restored.

Susan's own mother left her under-prepared for maturity.
A few pamphlets about menstruation were flung at her, then nothing else ever again.
No conversation about tampons, birth control, sex. Nothing. The End. Thanks for coming!
That's why Susan stayed a virgin till after menopause,
she didn't know what to do.
There was also a period of time when Susan thought she had to remover her tampon to pee.
How sad.

Anyway, Susan does not fear the embarrassing talk with her daughter. Susan does research. She confers with social workers. She makes an outline.
She knows that brevity is essential.
And a relaxed attitude.

Everything's good, it's only menstruation.
It's natural.
And beautiful.
Oy. Susan's already shovelling the propaganda.

Susan Worked On Saturday

Say what?
She fell down and hit her head and said 'I'll work Saturday'
It was purely a one-time only, freak episode,
never to be repeated.

She wasn't even aware it was Saturday while she was at work. It was just another day until she got home
and then where the bloody hell did her Saturday go?
Everything got all lopsided; up was down, black was white,
left was right and Friday toppled over on to Sunday.

Susan doesn't work on Saturdays, she gets up when she wants because her alarm isn't even set. She enjoys a leisurely cup of coffee with the husband and reads the paper and goes to yard sales with her daughter then stops at the library before making pizza rolls for a bunch of her son's friends or cleaning up her yard or sitting in the sunshine or going to her little sister's house for dinner.

That's what Susan does on Saturdays, not drive to work under the ridiculous and fallacious idea that Saturday is just like any other day.

TWISTED Over Some Pajama Bottoms

Susan was sitting in a parking lot talking on the phone with her little sister when a van pulled into the spot next to hers. Out spilled three medium sized children and their mother, who appeared to be in the same age range as Susan, meaning not too young & not too old.

Mom was walking around in a condition similar to many other women observed by Susan. Beyond sloppy.

Starting at the top, Mom's hair was held back by a scrunchie. Not a crime, but it should be.
She was wearing what appeared to be her husband's sweat shirt. It was husband-shaped and husband-colored without an ounce of anything feminine discernible beneath. It made Mom square.
However, the next item was so offensive it made Susan have to write 300 bloody words about it just for some relief.
Pajama bottoms.

Susan understands that she can't go crazy over pajama bottoms and can live quite comfortably knowing they're contained to high schoolers or neighbors walking within the perimeter of their own yard. Susan doesn't understand how the high schoolers stay warm wearing pajama bottoms throughout the winter, but she's not their mother and they can do what they want.

However, when a grown woman appears in public with thread bare, faded, shrunken to the ankles, raggedy ass pajama bottoms Susan must speak up.
Not to the offending party of course, but in secret,
at home, to her modest fan base.

It was as if Mom had come directly from the sty,
clad in the clothes she fed the pigs in.
The condition of Mom's pajama bottoms were so deplorable they yelled, I don't care how I look anymore,
I really don't.
Susan doesn't understand this phenomenon prevalent among her forty-something suburban sisters.
Ladies, what up?

Post Vomit

Susan has already established just how awful a night of wretched vomiting, followed by 24 hours of intermittent unconsciousness can be.

However, there are a few perks of the extreme upchuck, such as;

The middle of the night old movie.
When one has vomited all night, then slept all day,
one is bound to be up at odd hours the following night. And, if one is lucky in the way that Susan was, then perhaps a favorite old movie is playing from 2:15 to 4am.
Susan watched the moody and wonderful Rebecca,
Alfred Hitchcock's first Hollywood movie made in 1940.
This is not to be mistaken for his very first movie,
The 39 Steps, made five years earlier in Britain and another of Susan's favorites.
Susan doesn't like just any old thing, when she likes something there's a good reason.

The second perk of the extreme upchuck is;
Ginger Ale.
Lovely, bubbly, barely sweet, gingery ale.
There is nothing more divine to guzzle when one has been
purged of all natural hydration.
It's almost a reason in itself for getting sick.

The final perk is;
weight loss.
There was a ten pound difference between what Susan weighed last week on her doctor's scale and what she weighed on her little sister's bathroom scale the day after her convalescence.
Susan never trusted that bathroom scale, but chooses to believe it at her discretion.

Friday Night

Susan doesn't normally get sick.
She's very lucky.
Maybe she gets a cold, but that's it.

The last thing that kept her out of work was kidney stones
And that was like, six years ago.
And they really hurt.

Susan is not in the habit of taking medications other than Tylenol.
Maybe a Tums or two when she eats too many brownies at her little sister's house.
Even in her wild youth Susan didn't ingest anything that she won't be able to tell her medium sized children about.
When they're very mature.
Years from now.

Anyway.
Everything was perfectly fine up until 10pm on Friday night.
Susan's tummy got a little rumbly.
She took two Tums.
Her symptoms persisted.
She took two more Tums and went to bed not feeling well at all.

Some hours later she was awakened by the sickening realization that she was going to have to throw up.
Oy. Susan does not like to throw up.
Not one little bit.
But, she knows that once she does she'll feel better.
Generally.

Susan made the dreaded trek to her bathroom
and did a quick wipe-down of the toilet with disinfectant
before she began what she went there for.
Oy.
She knew she was not finished.

She went back to bed, hunched over and miserable,
to wait.

Sometime later she was awakened a second time by her stomach.
Only, there was very little to purge.
Her stomach didn't care.
A new symptom was added, one which Susan will not mention.

Susan endured this angry, painful process three more times until it seemed that she was throwing up her own organs.
She also had to clean up the bathroom each time.
Susan was truly alone in the universe.

Susan eventually collapsed in a shaking, sweaty heap and passed out.

The first thing she did went she crawled out of bed 24 hours later
was scrub her bathroom to within an inch of it's life.
With her green-cleaning cocktail of course.

(Susan would like the reader to know that previous post
occurred last year and represents an anomaly, not a standard)

Lax Posting

Please forgive Susan's relaxed posting schedule.
You see, she's back to figuring out which shoes go with what outfit and does she own any stocking without holes?
Susan will get up to speed I'm sure, she just needs to fill a tupperware with leftovers for lunch,
charge her phone and, where is her name tag?
She's back to being organized and on time.
She keeps her car filled up with gasoline.
She has to hide her work snacks so the kids don't find them.
She makes her dental appointments for Saturdays now.
And, regardless of what's going on in her house,
she drives away from it at 8:20 every weekday morning.

The Day Of Rest

Susan spent most of the day not speaking with the husband. Unfortunately, she couldn't entirely un-manacle herself from his company. But, not talking to him was satisfying enough.

The morning started out as every Sunday morning does, with the promise of reading the papers over coffee.
Is there no greater joy than that?
Of course there isn't.

Susan made the coffee and while it brewed a combination of factors sent her into a TWISTED spiral of angry frustration. It began with the dishwasher not effectively cleaning the dishes. Susan muttered to herself as she discovered that dish after cup after spoon needed to be rinsed off. Susan should not be rinsing anything, that's what the dishwasher is for. She began re-loading the machine and intercepted a wine glass that the husband had hand washed & left to dry.

Let's stop right here.
Susan and the husband have a history involving his hand washing of glassware.
The husband has been instructed repeatedly not to engage in any hand washing of any glassware because he consistently leaves behind any or all of the following;
fingerprints, grease smudges, soap residue, dried food and Chapstick lips.
Susan no longer delivers this request in a civilized manner, she goes immediately to berserk.

Susan picked the wine glass up and held it to the light,
as she does with all the glassware, and saw the telltale remnants of the husband's handiwork.

By this time the husband had entered the kitchen.
Susan pointed out, for the millionth time, that another wine glass had been washed dirty by himself.

Susan was hungry. Susan had dishes in her hands.
There were words coming out of the husband's mouth but who really gives a sh*t and just stop washing the f*cking glasses!

Susan made this request several times in close succession and increasing shrillness because the husband was trying to put forth his convoluted nonsense. However, when she heard him threaten to throw her wine glasses into the garbage her frustration reached critical mass.
Susan suggested that they can start throwing everything out right now and made her point by throwing a cereal bowl at him.
She didn't throw it at his stupid face, she threw it at his feet.

The rest of the morning & most of the afternoon was spent in arctic silence, even during their time as dinner guests in his sister's house.

Susan's Mongrel Dog Is Sick: An Update

Most of the symptoms of the mongrel dog's digestive ailment have come & gone, save one;
her extreme flatulence.

Boxers are an eruptive breed to begin with. Imagine the aroma of burning rubber & dog poop dispersed as a gas in the middle of your living room.

The flatulent boxer often provides and audible warning,
a gentle hissing not unlike air escaping from a punctured bicycle tire. However, the last few days there is nothing gentle about the sound she emits.
It's loud, like a whoopee cushion.
Susan is not exaggerating, it sounds like a whoopee cushion.

Moments ago, sleeping soundly in her dog bed, she passed gas through her whoopee cushion.
And woke herself up.

Your Invited To Look Stupid

Susan gets TWISTED in the worst way when she encounters poor punctuation. I mean, she gets totally f*cking crazy about this sh*t. Crazy!

Aren't the basics of punctuation taught in elementary school?

How is it that grown people who learned to speak and write English as their primary language don't know what apostrophes are used for?
If Susan has one apple and Jane gives her another then would Susan have two apple's?
No, she'd have two bloody apples!
Only if the apple owned something would it need an apostrophe.

Susan's TWISTED state extends to contractions, or the lack thereof, like the one she saw today printed on an invitation.
The very first word was a deplorable abomination, it read;
'Your invited to' blah, blah, blah.

Your.

Not you + are, which = you're.

Your.

Your invited to blah, blah, blah.

Doesn't anybody proof-read anything?
Particularly if they intend to mail it to everyone in their address book?

Holy crap, Batman. Susan needs a cocktail.

Susan's Mongrel Dog Is Sick

Under normal circumstances Susan's mongrel can be expected to be flatulent. This week she can also be expected to poop in the house, vomit and whimper all night long to be let out.
Mercy!

Being a boxer, Susan's mongrel really isn't a mongrel at all, Susan just uses this term to illustrate how ill mannered the boxer is.

The dog sleeps on the couch even though she's got a perfectly nice dog bed close to all the action.
She begs for food which exasperates Susan no end and she blames the husband for this appalling behavior.
No matter how shrill and hysterical Susan's complaints have been, he absolutely will not stop feeding that dog from the table!
She pees in the house whenever there's a lot of company.
She pees in the house even when there's not a lot of company.
She lies down in the middle of everything, blocking traffic patterns.
And she doesn't keep her toenails groomed. The racket that this dog makes walking around the house drowns out the television.
Oy.

The flatulent dog is getting close to the end of her expected lifespan. She limps a little and sits sidesaddle. She's deaf and can't be counted on to get her snout out of the garbage when yelled at.
However, one benefit of her advancing decrepitude is that she can no longer jump on Susan's bed and make holes in the bedding.

For two days the bathroom habits of the flatulent, deaf dog have been unpredictable.
Last night Susan and the husband were repeatedly roused from their beauty sleep in order to let her out to dirty the yard. And while she's out she takes the opportunity to walk the perimeter, smelling everything in sight and barking at nothing in particular.
Susan waits, as trained, at the door in her underwear with a cookie.

Again With The Green Cleaning

Susan is spending her final week of unemployment running a few errands including getting a pre-employment physical while without medical coverage.
However, this morning finds Susan free to do as she pleases.

She began by dyeing her hair back to a close approximation of it's original color.
Then she went into the kitchen to make coffee before sitting down at the computer in blissful solitude. While waiting for the coffee to brew she decided to hand wash the cookie pan that had been sitting in the sink for two days.

If the reader will recall, Susan has experimented with green-cleaning by mixing varying portions of water to vinegar to baking soda & adding a small amount of natural plant-based liquid soap (she likes Seventh Generation which was on sale at the supermarket) and some tea tree oil. Susan likes the smell of tea tree oil and had such great success cleaning her bathroom with this combination that she mixed a green-cleaning cocktail for use in her kitchen.

Please take note that since the baking soda tended to clog up the spraying mechanism in her Home Depot spray bottle she now uses a recycled dish detergent squeeze bottle, which is much more effective.

Susan's cookie sheet was black from years of things spilling on it and burning. Added to that were the dinner remnants from two nights ago. Instead of using regular dish detergent Susan used her green scouring cocktail.

As Susan scrubbed, an unbelievable thing happened,
layer upon blackened layer evaporated.
You know, with some elbow grease.
Now, while Susan acknowledges that blackened cookie sheets pose no threat to anybody and are probably a silly thing to scrub spotlessly clean, Susan was fascinated. And being in the unemployed frame of mind, she saw nothing wrong with obsessively scouring her cookie sheet until her shoulders ached. Just to see how far she could get.

When the results began to slow down Susan threw some salt into the equation. This was only minimally effective and Susan took a break to drink her coffee.
She admired her work but knew she could do better.
She went back to scrubbing, giving up only when she could no longer lift her arms or unclench her fingers from around the sponge.