wednesday 3 o'clock: nothing is what it seems to be...

this morning... albeit much later than i wanted it to be, my husband announced two things. the first was that we were out of milk and that he would go get some. so there would be coffee on my horizon. (yay!!!). would i mind waiting until he came home from his tennis game at 6 pm.(GRRRRR!)

the second was that the dog had thrown up on the kitchen floor (sigh...) AND that it was weird looking, so he had saved it for me to examine. so he softened the blow of my not getting coffee simultaneously with letting me know i had already managed to sleep clean through a laboratory kind of hazmat situation.

in that moment i saw hundreds of dollars floating away to unspecified vet bills in my future.

sigh...

naturally, the dog threw something up that was unidentifiable to the male of the species. meaning the dh dared not look at it closely.

i took one look at it and saw clearly that the pattern from this week's roll of paper towels was in the mix. no wonder he did not know what it was. the evidence of shredded saran wrap at the base of the open kitchen trash was not a distinct enough clue. and yes, i buy a different pattern on paper towels to help identify the age of the upchuckage. it is a little bit of domestic CSI. or ambient carbon dating. at least i knew when the offensive paper towel had been used/eaten.

the dh has NO idea that i make dinner here every night, (ok, maybe he has some clue) and that spectacular and delicious rolled tenderloin of pork filled with baby spinach, feta cheese, a pesto of sundried tomatoes, kalamata olives and a little bit of lemon zest served with a raspberry mustard balsamic vinaigrette on raw spinach salad (so it's a theme park here) and a side of white plain unembellished basmati rice (for the picky ass teen and her bff staying over)

did not come out of thin air.

it required that i pat down the pork tenderloin before placing it into a hot cast iron pan before it went into the oven. thus ensuring a surface crust would form. insuring inherent the flavor going over the taste buds would be appropriately intensified.

of course THAT was what the dog ate and threw up.

he would not know that, since he did not participate in anything other than telling me i was grouchy that evening. it was simultaneous to having our 15 yo female house-guest explain the game of football to him.

i hate to say exactly how many times i have done this very same task.

so maybe he is not a guy hardwired with a football comprehension gene.

maybe he thinks we eat takeout from down the street every night

maybe he thinks i enjoy working around all the weirdnesses of people who eat here.

maybe that dog is a cat.

see, if the dog was a real dog, he would have re-eaten the disgusting mess on the floor.

i would not have had to clean it up.

ok, maybe that is only labs and golden retrievers.

i can give him a half pass cause he is only half golden retriever.

maybe the poodle half is what separates him from the disgusting riff raff of doggery?

i just don't know.

so the man is not always manly, he is too sensitive. he has a fake laugh for sharing when he is flirty and trying to get out of doing something like putting the double hung window sashes back into the frames that he took them out of about 15 years ago.

i have carbon dating on this too.

it doesn't matter to me that he bitches so loudly that my ears hurt when Spring rolls around and the gas company comes looking for some payment on a jacked up bill from our non-energy efficient house.

oh the bitching is loud and whiny then.

consistent too. like the sun rising in the east and juliet is the moon...

so let's keep track here.

husband does not understand football.

does not replace windows.

is a carpenter... and a really good one i am told.

the dog is not a retriever.

the dog is a cat.

then there is the teen aged girl.

she thinks she lives in a dorm or something that is not here.

she has had the same water glass in her room for months. not cleaned or used... so that is a wash, pardon that bad pun. also a bowl with the entrails of orange slices. another empty bowl with the entrails of salsa. she will not under virtually any circumstance eat tomato on anything from a hamburger to a salad. however before she can get the jar of a salsa open, she is drooling. lest you suggest it is because the tomato product is cooked in the salsa, i will counter with a claim that she enjoys her pasta sauce on the side. because, it is a tomato product.

and then the general mess of her room...

it is lead off by the extra mattress in the middle of her room. upon which she has no countable number of books and papers in piles. they remain until the dreaded mid-terms have been completed.

while the bff was here for 3 days and nights...

she slept on this disgusting mattress and had her own piles of study materials.

of course the child had not migrated her crap onto the mattress until the bff had vacated.

still there were movable piles of paper, books, and other unknown substances.

i cannot even begin to think of why there are occasional spider or bug bites on the kid.

she has been asked to clean this room unnumbered times.

the thrill of dusting and vacuuming is not one i hold dear, however i do feel it needs to be done every decade or so. if the kid would move some of her crap out of the way, i would do this.

i have done it for her siblings before her.

i also would like to say that she is an enigma wrapped up in a convoluted pretty girl package with some deeply seated guy stuff in the mix.

she belches so loudly, that she has stopped football practice at her school as she has passed the team midway through daily practices. the team members were penalized by the coach for not doing what drill he was barking out one day. the team thought he had said something, which they couldn't understand.

it disrupted the flow of the exercise. t

just the girl

belching.

true story.

never ending, but still true.

i could not be prouder.

i know others have lovely children.

they enjoy sitting at meals on occasions with their families.

i know that some husbands come home and do not groan as they cross the threshold and wonder what happened all day in their absence.

i know all of this.

still i think that my people somehow think i am a magician.

if i poof hard enough, their fantasy or expectation will become real.

a home smelling like snickerdoodles or hermits

and clean as can be.

with fresh linens everywhere they ought to be,

a home with furnishings that looks like a page from architectural digest or something.

(that magazine sucks by the way).

it would all be completely doable, if only a few of the folks here were exactly what they thought they were.

a lot wealthier.

it could happen,

just if i could hire an actual carpenter to show up and replace my fucking air-sucking, wind tunnel in the kitchen, double-hung sashes that let out all the heat on the east side of my house.

yep. nothing gets done here.

and it is because i think in my real life i am a princess.

what i really am is a bad mom.

i just don't care to wear myself out anymore with this crap. i would rather make stuff like this.

a pair of funky floral cuffs from old belts i snagged one of them at the local thrift store.

i made the top cuff from my son's belt and i am keeping it for myself.