One of Those Days

I am not having a good day. Young M missed the schoolbus for the second day in a row and I did not take it well. When young M misses the bus, one of us is going to be 45 minutes late and we take it in turns. Today was his day to be on time, since yesterday was mine. No, there is nothing that can be done about this equation unless somebody wants to buy us a helicopter, which would come in handy for a whole bunch of stuff, actually, so yeah, go ahead and add the helicopter to the Amazon wishlist. Then at work I had scanner troubles and then, when I got home, I discovered that Django, who is in his second day (he got back into the palm tree yesterday) of another outburst of total destruction had pretty much finished off the couch. He completely destroyed one of the cushions. I just got finished gathering up all the bits of foam and stuffing, stuffing it all into a roughly cushion shaped pile, digging out some fabric I had stashed away, wrapping it around the pile of foam like a fucking Christmas present from a demented crackhead North Pole elf and then duct taping the whole shebang into something that, apologies to Douglas Adams, is almost but not quite entirely unlike a couch cushion.

I know, I should either get rid of the fucking dog or stop whining about him, one or the other - but jesus. And meanwhile, the Christmas tree would look a whole lot better if it wasn't being displayed in a partially disassembled lawnmower box, which I have rigged so that it can be reassembled into a tall and, one hopes, daunting tree obstacle. I mean it's attractive, you know, and it will only get better when I go berserk and wrap the box in Christmas paper which will take Django about 30 seconds to demolish.

Not only that, but the damn duct tape was soaked with cough syrup. I discovered that the other day when I was fortunately in a much better mood than I am right now and it made me laugh helplessly. When we were all sick I put all the sick supplies - three or four kinds of cough syrup, ibuprofen, sudafed, lozenges, kleenex, vicks - onto a plastic tray on top of the refrigerator. Naturally the duct tape went there too. Anyway, what I failed to notice is that one of the cough syrup bottles' lid was loose and then, of course, the inevitable had happened. No one had noticed it until I tried to pick up the duct tape and it came away from the tray slowly, trailing streamers of half solidified and highly medicinal smelling red goo. M was on the phone with me at the time and he tried to reassure me that that kind of thing would soon no longer be a part of my life. I felt bad but I had to be honest. "That's sweet," I said, "But I'm afraid there's nothing you can do. My life went to entropy long ago and there will always, always be cough syrup on the duct tape. I am the chosen avatar of chaos in West Asheville." There was a moment of silence and I thought, drat, that will scare him off. But M, thank the gods, is made of sterner stuff and he doesn't frighten easily. "Well," he said, "We'll deal with it then." Thank the gods that I have finally found a man who says cheerfully, "We just won't buy any furniture until the dogs are grown up!" It is a miracle.

And so we will deal with it, because I have come up with this plan where all we need to do is construct large plywood and/or plexiglass boxes to fit every single thing in the house. They will hang from the ceiling when we're home and when we leave we will flick a switch and and they will descend (creating a very interesting design statement) and everything in the house will be crated, safe from the dog of doom until we get back. M thinks that maybe we can get grant money for this and he swears that Django will be better when he's 2 and a half, which is about a year or a little more away. And I think he's right, although as S points out, Django is the only thing on this earth that I feel optimistic about, right in the pointed teeth of the evidence. Except now I feel optimistic about M too and that's excellent.