The Fabulous Vacation, Part I: Preparation

I'm sorry for the long stretch without an update. There was a lot of work I had to do before I went on my glamorous vacation. It's not all lolling and COPS-watching around the House of Bingo, you know. I didn't have to do all the housework by myself, of course, because I've got these two hardworking kids to help out. (Note to the childfree reader: that is a joke.)

Scott is so dedicated to lightening my workload that he's nearly stopped showering and changing clothes this summer to keep down the volume of the laundry. Still, I had so many dirty clothes piled up in the laundry room that there was more than one load of pink clothes. You've put off the washing way too long when you have to do multiple goddamn pink loads.

God only knows how many towels I washed, too. Anna would have helped with that, but she has an aversion to touching napped fabrics. She really does. If I made a little velvet cosy for my debit card, I'd probably save hundreds of dollars a month, but my local Sonic and Walmart would go under from the abrupt withdrawal of Anna's patronage. Since she couldn't fold clothes, she kindly volunteered to sharpen all the blunted pencils and square up any stacks of paper that weren't precisely aligned.

So far, these kids have been a poor return on my investment.

I didn't kill myself cleaning because this house is so old and ratty that it's pretty much held together by the dirt and cobwebs (or "nature's lace" as Sister 4 calls the spiderwebs in the corners). Everything we own is falling apart. When I finally got the last load in the washing machine, I started scrubbing the kitchen sink. I had to stop when the washer started draining and backing up into the sink. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw something falling from the sky. I thought it was leaves from the tree outside the kitchen window, but more and more were falling, which is strange in the middle of summer. Looking closer, I saw that it was big fluffy clumps of bubbles. Tide detergent bubbles, the same thing filling the sink. I looked out the window, up at the roofline where they were coming from, and wondered how in the hell the washer could be backing up onto the roof. I called the kids in to witness it, and I wondered if I could get the plumber in late on a Friday afternoon, and then I thought, "Eh, that was the last load. Fuck it."

It's exactly this attitude that makes me unfit for home ownership. If I'd known that adulthood meant dealing with this kind of bullshit, I'd have pretended I was retarded at birth and finagled my way into an institution¹ or, I don't know, married for money. When you're poor, it's like the universe conspires against you. A few days ago, for instance, we had a big thunderstorm and lightning struck our cable. Well, I guess that's what happened, but I'm no meteorologist or anything. The televisions in the kids' and Mom's bedrooms that were hooked up to cable were all fried, while the tvs that are hooked up to satellite were spared. It's possible that the kids somehow rigged up this scam to get new flatscreen tvs for their rooms. If so, it worked, because I bought them new tvs rather than get the plumbing fixed. That's the kind of hellish choice the poor face all the time², but you don't see your big-name celebrities hosting telethons for us, do you?³

So you can see why I haven't had any spare time for blogging. Stay tuned for Part II: The Fabulous Vacation.

¹ Yeah, yeah, I'm a cruel insensitive asshole. I blame society and the breakdown of the traditional family, frankly.

² We're victims of American-style poverty -- not the kind where your kids starve while flies crawl around on their eyes, but the kind where they have bulky old televisions without satellite in their rooms.

³ I'll set up a PayPal account, if you'd like to contribute.