Notice
"I can't tell if I'm unusually abrasive today, or if everyone around me is just really touchy."
"Welcome to my world. Now you know what I put up with every day."
--*Andrea/Karen
1)"The other day," Karen says, "a cat was sitting in my chair."
2)"I wanted to sit there, so I moved him."
3)"I didn't throw him across the room, I just put him on the floor."
4)"Immediately my mom was like, 'what did you do that for?'"
5)"I was like, I don't want to sit with a cat."
6)"She said, 'You're just an old curmudgeon!'"
7)"And I was like, okay. That's a new one."
8)"Why do we have to wait till we're old and cranky to do what we want?"
9)"I'm not waiting till I'm crazy to tell people what I think."
10)So later I was clearing shelf space in the laundry room, and Karen began to speculate on what we could do with it.
11)I suggested a nice voodoo diorama. It was a perfectly innocent suggestion; I mean, the holidays are coming up and everyone has relatives.
12)But she laughed and said, "It's nice to have someone else who's angry and bitter at--I don't know what."
13)"I mean, I know what I'm angry and bitter about."
14)"Sometimes people say to me, 'cold enough for you?' and I just want to be like, No. You know what, it's not cold enough for me. But what I'd really like is some help with day care!"
15)"For some reason, that scares them off."
16)At lunch, we were talking about puppies in general and wiemeraners in particular, and how much trouble they get into.
17)Jocelyn has some great stories about her four-month-old weimareiner puppy, Gita, and how she doesn't do confinement well.
18)I can't spell "wiemariner", can you tell?
19)So Gita can bounce her crate (metal, and intended for a 70-pound dog, by the way) all the way across the room, get into the trash through the door, and then move her crate so far from the scene of the devastation that you'd swear demons had been and gone while the puppy slept peacefully in the corner.
20)She can also remove the tray at the bottom of the crate and shove all of her toys out under the door, so that all of her things are strewn on the floor around her crate while she's still inside.
21)This prompted Karen to remark, "That's why my next dog is going to be old with three legs. And blind."
22)"I figure he'll only last six months to a year."
23)"Or maybe I'll get lucky and he'll just die the night I bring him home."
24)"The shelter will love me. 'Does this one have some kind of disease? Less than a year to live? Great, I'll take him.'"
25)"Ideally, I'd like a dog that doesn't outlive my attention span."
26)"I think I might be getting an ulcer."
27)At this point I totally cracked up, and Karen continued deadpan, "I'm glad my pain is so amusing to you."
Run Away