not even gonna try

I’m back. I’m not going to waste your time with all the excuses and/or legitimate reasons (there’s been some of both) why I haven’t blogging in months. Nor am I going to try to recap all that’s happened since the last post (which is also a lot).

Instead, I’m going to simply recap a conversation that made me fall a little bit more in love with my husband last night:

Me: “You’d better be careful, or you’ll end up walking like Thomas.” (Ed. note: Thomas is a friend of Super Bro-in-Law who hiked so far over the weekend he could barely walk. Much teasing ensued.)
Clayton: “Wait, what? Commas?”
Me: *blanks stare* “What are you talking about?”
Clayton: “Repeat what you just said.” *I repeat* “OH. I thought you said ‘…walking like commas’.”
Me: *blinks at him* “But that makes absolutely no sense.”
Clayton: “That’s what I figured. I was like, ‘How does someone even DO that? I guess I would pause a lot.”

This is one of the reasons I married him.

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This is what they don’t tell you about pregnancy

I’m 6 and a half months pregnant.  I eat a normal-sized meal and end up feeling like a tick that attached itself to an artery.  I have the coordination of a drunk hippo and a butt that seems to be expanding to about the same size.  I get to have sexy, profound conversations with my husband like,
 
Me: “Does this look like a stretch mark to you?”
Clayton: “That purple mark?”
Me: “Yeah, the one that looks like a stretch mark.  THAT mark.”
Clayton: “Actually looks a little more like Nanny Smurf.”
Me: “Don’t you mean Smurfette?”
Clayton: “No, Nanny Smurf.  She came later in the series.”
Me: “Yeah, but she doesn’t count.  We knew practically NOTHING about her character.  There’s a fair amount of speculation over whether or not she was even a natural-born Smurf.”
Clayton: “Natural-born?  What else would she be?  A Smurf immigrant that happens to look just like the rest of them?  And what kind of forum is conducting this ‘speculation’?”
Me: “My point is she’s practically an unknown.”
Clayton: “But she still counts.”
Me: “Barely!”
Clayton: “But barely still counts.”
Me: “So….that’s a yes on the stretch mark?”
Clayton: “Brownie points if I say a bear in a tutu..?”
 
Don’t you wish this were your life?  What makes all of this funny is that I did it to myself, and have nobody to blame other than Clayton.  Who I regularly blame for just about everything I don’t wish to take responsibility for.  (And that list grows to “epic” proportions daily.)  And incidentally, Nanny Smurf is entirely why I heart that man.

My point is, that pregnancy brings about a number of changes.  Duh.  But it also brings about a ton of questions, too.  Here are a list of the questions that have come up for me (and some of which have been answered) in the course of this pregnancy:

• How exactly does the dr. have to tie off the umbilical cord to make an innie and not an outie?  B/c that’s what we’d like to order. 
• What is the specific chemical interaction that causes pregnancy hormones to make donuts taste better?
• Would it be possible for the dr. to remove the umbilical cord from the placenta and reattach it to me somehow (like, I dunno, roll it up by hand like a fruit rollup and clothespin it back in) somewhere safe?  If nature’s given me a natural leash, I don’t see the need to waste it.  I figure it’ll save me the trouble of registering for a toddler bungee leash for the baby shower.
• Why didn’t God decide to let babies develop on womens’ backs instead of our stomachs?  I’ve carried a backpack for 19 yrs. of school.  I’ve got THAT balancing act down pretty well already–this front-of-the-stomach thing, though?  Faceplant waiting to happen…again.
• When you’re pregant you forget things, become ridiculously scatterbrained, forget how to complete a sentence…  So which pregnancy hormone is it that’s causing my brain to shrink?
• Is pregnancy gas biologically related to the Zyklon B they used in the Nazi gas chambers?  Because I’m pretty sure I gassed a stink bug to death by accident yesterday afternoon.

These questions plague me.  That’s all I’ve gotten so far.  I’m sure more will crop up.  

Additionally, I had a crazy dream a few nights ago, where I dreamed that I had given birth to a baby boy named Victor.  And, at the time the dream took place, we’d been enjoying taking care of the new baby for a few months without noticing anything was wrong.  But while I was changing his diaper (yeah, I apparently dream about diaper changing in a non-nightmare scenario….how effed up is that?), I turned to Clayton and was like, “Wait a minute….weren’t we supposed to have a baby girl?”  And Clayton was all like, “Uh…what now?”  And I was like, “Yeah.  Yeah, I think we were.  I thought that science was fairly accurate.  So how did we end up with a boy when the doctors kept saying it was a girl?  And where did the name ‘Victor’ come from?  That wasn’t even on the list of Boy Names we picked out.”  And Clayton was like, “I don’t know, but I’m certainly not going to rock the boat about it.  This is the kid you gave birth to, and I’m not returning it now just because you have buyer’s remorse!”  And then I had to explain to him that “Silly boy, of course I don’t want to return the kid–he works just fine.  It’s just that I didn’t know how the doctors could’ve screwed up a penis on the ultrasound.  And how the heck did this kid get born with a name that we didn’t give him?”  And Clayton was like, “I have no clue about the name, but I kind of like it.  Victor.  Sounds mighty.”  And I was all, ” ‘It sounds mighty’…?  Our kid has a name that we didn’t give him!  And he’s the wrong gender.  VICTOR WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A GIRL!”  I spent the rest of the dream preparing legal action against the doctors, since they not only got the gender wrong, but they also gave me a baby that had named itself.  All. Their. Fault. 

This dream was very strange to me because I happen to hold the opinion that all instigators of frivolous, stupid lawsuits should be summarily shot in the ankle for wasting time.  You ordered hot coffee, lady–DON’T GET PISSED AT THE FAST FOOD COMPANY WHEN YOU SPILL ON YOURSELF AND IT BURNS YOU.

So yeah, this is what they don’t tell you about pregnancy: it is the weirdest haunted house you will ever walk through, people.  And I use the haunted house analogy becuase even as you’re going through, occasionally peeing yourself because some psycho jumps out from the shadows and swings a chainsaw at your head, you still find yourself happy that you paid the $10 and admiring the level of detail on the floating skulls in that fat witch’s cauldron.  JUST like that.

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Revenge: a dish best served at night.

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately, which blows, but I don’t feel as bad about it as I should.  We’ve been REALLY busy lately and it will get busier still.  But the zombie experiment that we originally had started, the one where we watch zombie movies before bed and then I write down my nightmares in an attempt to purge, hasn’t been going as expected. 

I haven’t been having the nightmares.  The movies are really scary (at least to me—Clayton just laughs anytime a zombie looks at the camera all dramatic-like and screams, while I quietly pee myself in terror on my side of the couch), but I’m just not having the dreams for some reason.  And I made the mistake of telling Clayton this.  So he decided the reason was, I’m just not scared enough.

Cue last night, after we finished watching 28 Weeks Later, a movie that has a lot of downtime horror-wise, but which does have 3 very intense scenes that make me fear this movie much more than its zombie-action-laden prequel, 28 Days Later.  And because this movie absolutely roundhouse kicks me in the face with fear, I was scared to the point that once a door was closed in the house, nobody was going back through it until morning. 

For example, the door to the garage:

• Me: “Did we bring in everything we bought at the store today?”
  Clayton: “No, I think the toilet paper’s still out in the truck.  I’ll go get it.”
  Me: “No, you won’t.  We already closed the door.”
  Clayton: ”So?”
  Me: ”Nobody’s going out after we closed the door.”
  Clayton: “Do you not want me to go out because you’re worried the zombies will get me, or because you’re afraid the door will be unlocked and so the zombies would come in and get you?”
  Me: “I don’t see why that’s an ‘or’ question because they’re really the same answer.”

So, Clayton decided this button was just too fun not to push.  I’ve been dreading the day he finally figured that out.

When we go to bed, around 11p, he waits until it’s dark and we’re starting to drift off to sleep.  Then, “so you don’t want us opening doors at night once they’re closed, huh?”  I affirm.  And he goes, “even Zack’s room?”  (This is because Zack is in California for the summer, and he left his door closed so the cat wouldn’t go in and pee on something.)  I ask why Zack’s room is so important.  “Oh,” he responds casually in the dark, “because that’s where I keep the zombies.” 

Be so proud, Most Highly Respected Anonymous Readers.  I didn’t kill him then.

Then he snickers evilly when he feels my mounting nervous twitches as my imagination takes this cruel nugget and runs with it.  None of the other bedroom doors are closed, just Zack’s.  It’s not real.  And it has the bigger closet—the PERFECT place to hide more zombies! That’s not possible; it’s not real.  And if they got out, they’d only have to go about ten feet and they’d be at OUR door.  NOTREALNOTREALNOTREAL!  Which isn’t locked.  Should I lock it?  Would that make him pick on me more?  Probably.  But what’s more important: surviving the zombie apocalypse or not getting laughed at?  In the end, I decided on not getting laughed at and tried to pretend I didn’t care so I he’d go to sleep.  And for a while that worked—he was quiet, I was quiet.  Sleep started being a possibility.

Then, a sneaky whispering voice really close to my ear: “Ever notice how the sound of the cat scratching at the door sounds like shuffling feet?  Maybe she’s communicating with them.”  And, because I must’ve mass-murdered puppies in a past life, the cat chose that very moment to LOUDLY claw at the door and yowl like she was being mass-murdered.  I bolted upright in bed, Clayton started cackling so hard I thought he’d herniate himself, and it took another hour and half before I could get to sleep. 

But during that hour and a half, while trying to go to sleep, I did what most terrified wives would do.  I smoldered and planned my revenge.  It’s hard to top a zombie phobia for irrational fears to exploit, so I knew I couldn’t just poke at one of his own phobias–that wouldn’t work out in my favor.  So I figured I’d hit him where it hurt him most—by being disturbed.  My husband, like others of his ilk, is a strong creature of habit and a lover of schedules.  Once he’s decided he’s going to do something, he loathes being disturbed from it.  Whether it’s deciding to go somewhere, or deciding to eat some salsa, or deciding to go to sleep now. 

So every time I got up to pee in the middle of the night—four times b/c I drank a sip of water every time I got anxious during the zombie movie and so went through 3 liters of water in 2 hours, not that you would ever want to know—I pushed him out of bed and made him accompany me to the bathroom.  The first two times, he laughed.  Not so much after that.  And when he tried to resist my attempts to push him out of bed, I used my feet and butt-shoved him out. 

No, I didn’t really think there were zombies there.  Not this time anyway.  But it did serve my purpose, which was to teach him a lesson: feed the phobia, pay the price of zombie protection.  You push my buttons, and you’re walking me to the bathroom to keep the zombies away. 

Forget love, respect, and compromise.  Proper revenge tactics are the key to a good marriage, folks.  And yes, you can quote me on that.

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Why I rock as a dogsitter

When I adopted Sam, I managed to keep somewhat close contact with her foster “daddy,” M the Beastmaster.  This has worked out super well for everybody involved for a number of reasons, some being because:

1. Sam gets to still see her favorite person in the world (and I don’t hold it against her that that person isn’t me b/c she is SO a man’s dog), and since M the Beastmaster seriously considered adopting Sam himself before I came along, so he still gets to see one of his favorite beasties;
2. M the Beastmaster is easy to get along with and has been a wealth of help with finding other dog-resources;
3. M the Beastmaster is a part-time Animal Behaviorist, which has helped me out with a number of dog-related issues (esp. with Nell); and
4. M the Beastmaster is willing to dogsit the girls for free when we go out of town.

Upon listing these things, I realize that M the Beastmaster is definitely getting fewer good things out of our “relationship” than I am, so I’m now suddenly hoping that he doesn’t read this blog where these facts are so conveniently pointed out for him.  

*cue awkward gaze that breaks the fourth wall*

M the Beastmaster claims that he watches my girls for free because he’s simply storing up favors, usually in the form of reciprocated dogsitting, for unknown future trips.  This weekend he called in one of those favors, so yesterday I tottered off to pick up his two beasties, Maynard and Jaden.  And let me tell you, these dogs both rock.

Maynard is a huge, dopey black Lab, the sort of happy-go-lucky fellow that makes you smile the instant you see him waddle towards you.  And when I say “waddle,” I don’t mean to imply that he’s fat b/c he’s certainly not.  But he waddles much in the same way heavily muscled men do, where they are simply so tank-like that their bodies have to move in a more exaggerated way to accommodate the bulk.  I adore this dog.

Jaden, on the other hand, is a black and tan German Shepherd.  One of the most gorgeous shepherds I’ve seen.  She’s really tall, consisting mostly of legs and snout, and her movement reminds me of nothing more strongly than a Mako shark.  This girl is fast, and even when she walks, she’s got a ground-eating stride that makes her look like she’s just gliding along.  This  movement, coupled with her size, makes for an intimidating picture.  She’s very much a tribute to the breed: attractive, smart, and stubborn.

And she lusts for my cat.

She’d shown some interest in Muse, that alert gaze and pricked ears that say, “Ooh, SHIIINNNYYYY…”  And Muse, either unaware or unconcerned about her threat, preened and mewed and bathed herself with a complete air of nonchalance, as if she were alone in the room.  Today, after last night’s incident, she is much more contained in her movement and makes sure to always travel around the room with a solid surface to one side of her, to avoid a sneak attack from above. 

And before last night’s incident took place, I handled Jaden’s overly-alert interest the same way as all my other dogs before when they first meet a cat: you dump ‘em in a room together and see exactly how interested the dog is in the cat, and when the dog shows too much interest and moves aggressively towards the cat, you reprimand the dog enough times and they get the hint that the cat’s off limits.  Eventually, you reprimand even the slightest intense look and they finally realize they should at least wait until you’re gone before they try to eat the cat.  Easy as cake.  Except with Jaden, this apparently backfired so that with every reprimand, her interest in Muse’s capacity as an hors d’oeuvre just intensified.  My bad.

So Jaden, smart beast that she is, waited until the cover of nightfall to make her move. 

In the middle of the night, all of us sound asleep, I’m awakened to a jingling bell.  I think, ‘That sounds like the cat’s bell,’ and I hear a slight shuffle, as if a dog perhaps had risen quickly off her bed.  Having gone through a few similar scenarios earlier in the evening, as Jaden always went towards Muse whenever she hopped off the bed, I said Jaden’s name in a warning tone.  I hear something move towards the footboard of the bed (which is distinctly NOT coming towards me after I called her name). 

“Jaden!  Cut it out!”

A frantic jingle of the bell (as Muse jumps off Clayton’s side of the bed), followed by the scratching noise of claws on carpet (as Jaden dug in to pursue). 

I jump to the foot of the bed in time to see a huge black shape streak (with no details, because I wasn’t wearing my glasses and was therefore nearly blind) towards the other side of the bed, which is where the jingling is as the cat lands on the ground and starts to make a break for it.  So, I reacted as any sleep-deprived, sane person would react in such a situation where a dog is ignoring you in favor of committing felinicide.

I full-body tackled the dog, from my awkward hands-and-knees position at the foot of the bed.  This involved me diving like a linebacker in a nightslip, arms splayed straight out in front of me, over the wooden footboard onto the dog who immediately—because like I said, she’s a smart one—offered zero resistance as I collided with her and proceeded to roll the both of us over in a somersault.

I ended up on my knees on the other side of her, with one hand pining her shoulder to the floor, while she lay on her back, all 4 legs giving the French salute, and looking at me like I’d just…well, just flew off the bed and tackled her without warning. 

“This is why that was a bad idea,” I growl at her.

Needless to say, she was a bit confused, having one minute been on her feet and gleefully anticipating kitty paté, and the next, being tackled, flipped, and pinned with me growling like a rabid wombat over the top of her.

And at this point in the incident, I woke up completely and realized what I’d just done.  My thoughts were something like this:

• M the Beastmaster’s gonna kill me.  He’s never going to let me watch his dogs again.
• Well, maybe Maynard.  He might trust me with Maynard but only because Maynard’s too indestructible to hurt.
• Am I a bad person if I consider not telling him about this?
• I wonder if Jaden’ll pay more attention to me now.
• HOLY CRAP!  I JUST DIVEBOMBED A DOG IN MY NIGHTGOWN AFTER LEAPING OVER THE BEDFRAME!

So I look up at Clayton, expecting to see his oblong blob shape with his jaw dropped in amazement.  “Did you see that?  THAT WAS AWESOME!” I declare to him.

He’s still asleep.  And not only did he sleep through my Fantastical Leap of Domination, he had the nerve to wake up after I said “THAT WAS AWESOME!” to growl at me to go back to sleep and quit playing with the damn dogs. 

The night was pretty anticlimactic after that.  The only interesting thing that’s happened so far today is that while Jaden still has an unholy attraction to my cat, displayed via the fact that she positions herself so that she’s ALWAYS facing the cat directly (so as not to miss a single move), Jaden does respect my small warning noises when she gets too interested, which she barely acknowledged before, and at least pretends to look the other way.  In those moments, you can almost SEE the thoughts as she’s thinking them:

Jaden: *staring intently at the cat* “Sooooo yummmyyyy…..*drools*  I wonder what she’d taste like….maybe like cheesecake…ooh, no!  Cheesecake with RASPBERRY SAUCE!….and angels….”
Me: “JADEN!  Quit drooling at my cat.”
Jaden: *guiltily glances at me and then away* “I really think that wallpaper clashes with the lamp shade…and that shelf is way too dusty…”

And before you ask, yes, I’ve always had this serene, gentle, almost-telepathic way of communicating with animals.  I’m like frikkin’ St. Francis of Assisi.

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Why books are dangerous

Because this post involves an intermission in which you will likely need to go to the bookstore before you can continue, I want to offer you an option to expedite your Thursday reading.  I have thoughtfully offered a Cliff’s Notes version of this post at the bottom, indicated by the double asterisk (**).  If you’re running short on time, feel free to skip ahead.

Last night I had a deeply philosophical conversation with one of my best buddies, Jess, that ran late into the night (or at least, I called her kinda late and so our conversation ran latER into the night).  We discussed a variety of topics, such as which parts of my current story suck (lots of it) and which parts don’t (a lesser amount) and the parts that made her go “WTF? Cinnamon?” (more frequent than you might expect).  We also discussed Matters of Great Import, such as the acquiring and properties of boob bruises and the butchering of myth in Clash of the Titans. 

And then we wandered around to my favorite/most-terrifying subject: zombies.  Specifically the latest book we both happened to be reading (unbeknownst to each other), World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  If you haven’t heard of/heard about/read/thrown-across-the-room-after-three-straight-days-of-zombie-nightmares yet, go out and get it because it’s one of the coolest books on the market right now.  No, really—go get it now.  Don’t worry, I’ll wait…..

….so, now that you’ve got it and started reading it, I have no doubt that you will come to agree that the book, while presented in a fairly innocuous manner, is pretty damn freaky.  Brooks presents this “oral history” in an amazing manner, switching smoothly (and in a manner that inspires much jealousy in yours truly) from voice to voice as he recounts “interviews” with a multitude of survivors of the zombie war.  Each voice is unique and the persons “interviewed” range from a variety of ages, professions, backgrounds, cultures. 

One of the scariest parts of this book, to me, is how down-to-earth all of the stories are presented.  While maintaining a healthy respect/fear for the subject–rampant zombie infection and the attempts to survive it–the entire tone of the “interviews” is, if you take out the subject, one of having lived through an event that happened in the past, simple as that, like any other historical account ever written.  And that positively freaks me out because my imagination then completely overhauls my logic and says, in a calm voice, “This is entirely possible.  It could be just that easy.  You need to take the necessary precautions.” 

The only problem is that I don’t know what those precautions are in full.  Knowing that I am unaware of such things, Jess attempted, last July, to help me out and sent me Brook’s previous book, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead.  But I haven’t yet read it all the way through because, like an autistic, ADD chimpanzee, I am unable to concentrate on things for a long while.  Yeah, I know.  Shock.

So, this all leads up to this morning when I woke up to the sound of shuffling, light clinking (which my brain interpreted as chains of some kind or a swinging metal weapon), a pause, and then more shuffling.   So my brain went into hyperdrive and I began to hyperventilate and die.  Or just freeze in terror.

These were not my first thoughts, because these would have been logical:

• “What’s that noise?”
• “Did Clayton get up early?”
• “Do the dogs need to go out?”
• “Did I not hear the alarm clock, and Clayton did and just didn’t wake me up?”

No.  My first thoughts, moving at the speed of terror, were more like this:

• “ZOMBIES! I’mgoingtodieI’mgoingtodieI’mgoingtodie—”
• “Jess was right!  I should’ve read the Zombie Survival Guide!”
• “It’s going to eat my arm first because that’s the only part of me not buried underneath the covers!”
• *the only perfectly calm thought* “My dogs are useless.  They didn’t bark once…”
• “How fast can I get to the samurai sword next to the bed?”

Because, yes, we have a samurai sword next to our bed.  Why? For cases just like this, of course, when zombies shuffle into our bedroom to kill us in the night.  Duh.  (I brought it in one night while I was stupidly watching “28 Days Later” by myself in an empty house on a windy night, and Zack’s gun was out of bullets and therefore useless in case of zombie-mergency.  And because everyone knows that bullets are only the preferred weapon of zombie defense from a distance.)

So I bolt upright in bed and look at Clayton, who was shuffling around the bedroom, half-asleep, getting dressed.  And I have no idea what my face looked like, but it was enough that he froze with a total deer-in-headlights expression.  From one hand dangled a pair of jeans, which he’d frozen in the act of picking them up off the floor, and the other was holding his head, frozen in the act of running his hand through his hair when I sat up.  His eyes were the size of dinner plates.  Very cautiously, he goes, “Honey?” drawing the word out as if he knew exactly what my last thought had been.

I go: “ZOMBIES.”  And then flop back down and go back to sleep. 

This is a strange recollection for me, since I wasn’t aware of it until the alarm actually went off a few minutes later and I woke up.  But I remembered it very clearly (probably because of the terror), and in hindsight, I have no idea how I managed to go back to sleep when I distinctly remember my body being FLOODED with adrenaline from the moment I identified the scuffling noises.  At this point in our marriage, he’s entirely used to these kinds of outbursts on the tail end of sleep, so he didn’t say anything about it, especially since he knew I’d been talking to Jess right before bedtime and knows how our conversations usually work. 

**So, in case you got bored earlier on and decided to skip to the bottom to see if this post managed to salvage itself towards the end, let me help you with a summary of today’s post:

• Conversation with Jess about my story, boobs, latest book
• Read World War Z because it’s awesome
• Samurai swords
• “ZOMBIES.”

Go get the book, and sleep well.

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typing my stubby little fingers off

So yesterday was gorgeous. Like, a male underwear model washing his convertible in a thong Speedo on a summer’s day kind of gorgeous. And did I spend it at the barn, giving my poor neglected pony a workout since he’s pretty much had the entire winter off? No. Did I take my two puppies to the park and wander the wooded trails for an hour so that they could get back to their ground-sniffing roots (see what I did there? that’s why I went to college, right there) and get their daily dose of sunshine? Of course not. Why? Because I don’t like any of my animals and I wish them to live short, unhappy lives.

Well, ok, that’s only part of the truth–Gabe’s getting ridden tomorrow and the girls got an hour of hiking the day before yesterday when it was also beautiful outside. But I still don’t like any of them.

Instead, I sped home—or, if my husband actually reads this, I drove carefully home, obeying every speed law that I conscientiously paid attention to—so that I could get up to our bedroom, sit in what we’ve dubbed the Faux Man Chair, fling open the blinds and the windows (b/c the second-story rooms catch a much better breeze), and write. It was blissful!

In case you’re wondering why we’d name our FMC the way we did, let me briefly explain. When we were moving to VA, my aunt asked us if we wanted a chair and ottoman that she had. Both had big, slouchy tan covers made out of some rough-woven fabric and didn’t fit either of the pieces they covered very well. But when we lifted the cover, we discovered that the chair and ottoman were some crazy red, blue, purple thread creation and decided the slouchy tan cover was the lesser of evils. And you might ask why we even took it in the first place. To which I’d calmly answer that IT IS THE MOST COMFORTABLE CHAIR EVER CREATED BY MAN. Seriously. The chair’s just-right kind of cushy and big enough that I can curl up with my feet under my butt and still have room for a cat and probably Nell if she had the guts to curl up with us on a chair. I love this chair. Loveitloveitloveitloveit. But when I proudly displayed said chair to Clayton and said, “Look, honey! It can be your Man Chair!” he very patiently explained to me that even though it indeed was THE MOST COMFORTABLE CHAIR EVER CREATED BY MAN, it wasn’t a leather rocking chair, and therefore could never be a true Man Chair. Thus, FMC got its name.

So, back to the writing…

I’ve adopted the FMC as my writing chair, partly because it’s just so damn comfy and partly b/c our office downstairs looks like a garbage truck full of papers exploded in there. The girls curled up next to the FMC, the cat ninja-ed her way into my lap and together we all wrote about dragons. It was one of the most productive writing days I’ve had in YEARS.

While I was in the Creative Writing program in college, I’d get pelted with story ideas left and right. It felt like my creative faucet had a steady drip that never quite went away and the only way I could keep my brain from flooding with them was to write all the stories down. But after college, for the past three years I’ve been in Virginia, the faucet seemed to have dried up. I poked at it every now and again, when I remembered that “oh, hey, didn’t I get some degree in something creative? Hmm….I should probably take a half-assed swing at something creative…” and I’d wander around the house for a few hours before finally sitting down and vomiting out some half-baked attempt at a short story and go, “See? Still got it!” and would walk away and Live My Life some more. And then gripe about how none of my stories ever got published when I sent them out. 

But lately, since I found out about NaNoWriMo and got the wild hare to try and write a novel, finally feeling like my You’re Ready to Write a Novel certificate had magically appeared in the mail, it’s all coming back. That leaky faucet that barely stops enough for me to get some sleep at night. The ideas that always, without fail, ambush me when I’m trekking down the highway and I frantically pull off at the nearest exit and dash into a gas station parking lot to jot down my idea in my writing notebook because “THAT IDEA IS SO FREAKIN’ COOL!” and I know that if my fingers don’t move at the speed of light with the pen, I won’t get it all down and the world will spontaneously combust and we’ll all die lonely, unimaginative deaths without books or stories about ninja zombies. I know, because it’s happened before.

So I went home and I wrote my dragon story that popped up a few days ago, making promises that I knew were lies to my first story (SciFi Story) about how “I’ll work on you soon, I promise” and “this other story means nothing to me, really!” and “It’s not you, it’s me…”. And it was AWESOME! I wrote about 3,500 words over the course of a few hours, which may be a mere blip on the radar for you steady writers, but since I’d only been averaging about 750 words a day since January, this was a friggin’ writing earthquake for me. And the story didn’t let go, either—by the time Clayton was ready for bed, I couldn’t stop my brain.

Me: “I’m not sleepy. I think I’ll just write a little longer.”
Him: “It’s 11:30. We have work tomorrow. Don’t do it.”
Me: “But it’ll only be for a few minutes. I just need to get this one idea down.”
Him: “You and I both know it won’t be just a few minutes.”
Me: “No, really. Just a few…and then I’ll go right to bed, promise.”
Him: “That’s a lie. Just go to bed NOW.”
Me: “But I can’t sleep.”
Him: *trying a different strategy by appealing to my inherent laziness* “But you’re all the way over here, so it would be more work to get up and go over to the computer, turn it back on, wait for it to start up, open your files, and start writing.  Entirely too much effort, since you’re all snuggled up in the nice, warm bed.”
Me: “That’s ok, I don’t mind.”
Him: “*sigh* Just. Go. To sleep.”
Me: “Fine….But I won’t like it.”
Him: “I can live with that.”
Me: “Why do you hate America?”

Because that’s what it all comes down to, in the end. If your spouse won’t let you write at night, then it’s because they hate America.

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The beginning of the end…

…of my self respect.  I once-upon-a-time had a bloggy-type thingy.  But it was on Myspace and included a wide variety of ridiculosity, anywhere from emo posts like, “Ok, Virginia can officially burn to ashes and rot in hell forever.  The whole state,” to my 8-step lesson in “How to Know if You’re a Douche.” 

But, friends and neighbors, I feel I have grown.  And matured.  And because, in the immortal words of Stuart Smalley, ”Today I celebrate the fact that my underdeveloped sense of identity allows me to fit into a wide range of situations.”  Like jumping on the bandwagon of all others who have started similar exercises in vanity such as this and starting a blog that nobody will read.  But since I enjoy mental masturbation just as much as the next guy, which is essentially all blogging really seems to be, I’m happy to do so.

Clayton’s back after a 5 day trip to LA, where I had to fend for myself, the puppies, and kitties by clubbing an animal every night and dragging it home by myself.  Or by going to a restaurant.  Whichever… Point is: defenseless and alone. 

While part of me is ridiculously, gleefully happy that he’s home again, I couldn’t help but feel bad for him since his first night back, after he arrived home so very tired and jet lagged and ready for HIS. OWN. BED. was filled with all kinds of complications from me and the dogs.  Case in point, a small except from last night, in which I rolled over at some point, whacked myself in the head with my own hand, and proceeded to demand his attention by waking him up:

Me: *half awake* “Did you just jump on my head?”
Him: *snore*
Me: “Hey. You.  With the beard.  Did you jump on my head?”
Him: *snorts, looks around, sees that it’s just me, closes his eyes again* “Huh…? Uh………no.”
Me: “You sure?”
Him: “Pretty sure.”
Me: *glares at him suspiciously*
Him: “Why would I jump on your head?”
Me: *continues to glare at him suspiciously*
Him: “I can feel you staring at me.  Go back to sleep.”

Such nuggests of bedtime conversation often come up at the very late hours in Chateau Davis. I feel bad for him, really, but he tolerates this quite well.  Usually I’m pestering him about zombies, though, so last night I felt like he got off easy.    

And then the dog began.   

A little bit of history: every now and then, predictably around 2 or 3 am, Nell will get some random gastrointestinal distress that causes her to wake up in the middle of the night and lick her dogbed and the carpet next to my side of the bed like it’s made out of crack.  Obviously this is her instinctual response to crop grass when her stomach’s upset, but I have had serious talks with her, on more than one occasion, about how she should go puke in the toilet on her own like any wasted adult, and then slink quietly back to her bed so that Mommy and Daddy can have sleepytime.  And does she respect my wishes?  Of course not. She gets the insolence from her father, I think. 

She really gets into it, too, this carpet licking, giving it these long, sweeping wet strokes with that mile-wide hound’s tongue.  Cute dog, but she really loses her elegance when she does that.  She also makes these little snuffling noises as she does it, so what usually wakes me up is the snorting noises of a pig rooting for grubs, right next to my ear. 

And, in the past, this has meant my putting on pants, sliding into a pair of Clayton’s clunky, too-big shoes, and going to our “backyard” to graze the dog in my PJs.  (Yep, you read that right.)  She munches on grass, while I try to not fall asleep standing up,eventually convince myself that a wet butt is worth sitting down in the dew, and then try not to fall asleep sitting on the lawn.  This grazing process on her part continues until her tiny little gut transforms into a firm, round potbelly full of fauna, ensuring that she’ll successfully be able to poop grass balls for about three days.  Her grazing sessions last anywhere from a half hour to an hour and half (that longest one, predictably, being during winter, when there was no grass and Mommy’s buttocks took two hours to thaw themselves from slabs of butt-shaped ice they’d become).  Then we clump back upstairs, where I try to salvage three more hours of sleep.  I tell you all this for a purpose, I promise.  And that purpose is really so that you feel sympathy for me. 

…kidding.  Actually, it’s so that you can imagine how relieved I was when I called my mom for advice on Nell’s bellyaching one evening and she patiently (for a 2am call) informed me that I should give the dog Pepto Bismol, and then asked if she could go to sleep now.  And I was all, “Seriously?” and she was like, “Yup.”  And I was like, “For the dog?”  And she was like, “Yes.  Now HANG UP THE PHONE.”  Turns out that she called her vet for similar advice on one of her dogs some time ago and the vet advised her to give the dog about a capful of the stuff.  And I did a happy dance, at 2am, and was almost sorry when Nell quieted down and went back to sleep before I could try out this new knowledge. 

So, fast forward to last night.  Where my poor husband had to endure not only my Inquisition and the pig snuffling at 3:30am, but also my getting up, turning on the light, and wrestling with my poor sick dog trying to get her to swallow a capful of Pepto.  In hindsight, it’s quite lucky that my dog is as sweet as she is, b/c it occurred to me, as I had her in a very humane headlock that I learned while watching the Ultimate Fighter, trying to pry her jaws open with my fingers, that the teeth of a 40 lb. dog look quite big and pointy when you’re three centimeters from them.  (I imagine this is the same for any dog over 10 lbs., actually.)  I finally pried her mouth open, poured the capful in, and watched in amazement as it all came oozing back out of her mouth like the slime in Ghostbusters.  I caught most of it in my hand, and then spent another 5 min. methodically wiping it on her whiskers while she tried to lick the gooey mess off her face.  Then it occurred to me–now almost fully awake–that I’d opened the jaws, but had forgotten about the tongue, which is what she used to neatly *ptoey* the stuff back out.  Brilliant dog, that one.  It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I realized I could have used an eyedropper.  Typically, this realization came to me much in the same way certain insulting comebacks do from the argument two days prior, like a sudden lightbulb moment first thing in the morning.  Instead, it made sense to try and pour thick liquid down her throat from a plastic cap.  Dog:1, Owner: -2 for stupidity.

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