Galloping goosebumps, I'm soooo tired! We got back from Corpus today, having spent the weekend there with Joedy's family, and right after we walked into the house and spent forty-five minutes deodorizing it--it smelled, Lula said, "like a pet shop"--we (I) had to turn right back around and get right back in the car, which we'd already been in for 4.5 hours, and drive Malko to the doctor for not just two, as I'd expected, but THREE SHOTS! Wooeee, what fun--I love clamping fat little limbs down so they can get stabbed with needles!
Why did the house smell like a pet shop, you ask? I have no friggin' idea. The dogs were at Joedy's cousin's house, and Lapis was locked outside, poor neurotic overly-meowing kitty, so what was it that created the stink of unwashed bodies and unchanged litter boxes? Maybe the couch "ripened" with the AC turned off--I don't know. Anyway, it smelled funky in here. It helped us get on the ball with the dirty dishes in the sink, left over from my cookiebaking extravaganza Saturday morning, and we actually got a lot done during the rest of the day, which was nice. Something about banging an empty water bottle on your head (to keep someone from screaming during the remaining forty minutes of a long drive) makes you feel so...underproductive! Like your "higher skills" are seriously underused! Although your "lower skills" come in handy again, later, at the doctor's office, when you find yourself tearing up the paper sheet covering the examining table, rolling the pieces into balls, putting the balls in your mouth, and blowing them, with a loud, satisfying whoosh, across the room to--again--keep someone from screaming while waiting...
When we got home from the doctor's Joedy and Lula went to do some grocery shopping and pick up the dogs, and for a while Malko and I were alone in the house. Since I'm a freakomaniac I got nervous when two young men stopped to sit on the bridge below the house; I thought they were very probably pretending to be all casual and nonchalant when IN FACT they were going to sneak under the bridge, sneak up around the other side of the house, and break the back door down with machetes!
A little aside here, so I don't seem like a total cuckoo bird: we don't live in a very good neighborhood. The street was known for its prostitutes until a few years ago, and there are some very shabby buildings and very shady people very close by. Two weeks ago, Joedy was woken up (I had my earplugs in) by a SWAT team surrounding the house two doors down; we still don't know what they were after. Meth? A human smuggling ring? Black-market maple syrup? It's ANYONE'S guess!
So anyway, I was nervous, and I lowered the blinds, checked that the windows and doors were locked, and ran upstairs (with my phone, in case I needed to call 911) and unlocked the sliding glass door in our bedroom in case I needed to jump out (holding Malko). I figured by the time I jumped and was running into the street screaming, the guys with the machetes would just be coming up the stairs. It was a fail-proof plan! I peeked out the curtain, but couldn't see the guys anymore, so I went to the back window; all I saw was a work truck taking some stuff to the buildings behind our house and our neighbor sitting in his back yard, talking to someone.
Wait a minute--our neighbor? Sitting in his back yard? Talking to someone? Like, everything was happy-dandy? Like, it was just a normal early summer evening and, in fact, a pretty nice evening at that? Perfect for sitting outside and not worrying about fictitious attackers and their fictitious machetes? He was just sitting there, a little hunched over, partly obscured by the potted roses in the yard. He had a blue shirt on, and he looked so normal--the whole scene looked so normal--that I immediately felt relieved and stupid. What a dork I am, I thought. Who the hell is going to machete down our door in broad daylight? I kept going to the kitchen window and looking at our neighbor, and I felt so damn grateful, I wanted to give him a big FAT HUG!
Or a beer. I thought I could at least give him a beer--he might find me more normal if I gave him a beer instead of a teary, grateful hug--but while debating the judiciousness of opening the door I took a sip of the beer and then decided to just finish it, and then Malko woke up and Joedy and Lula and the dogs came home, and then the normal early summer evening merged into the normal early summer night.
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