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We head into national holiday observances with a bit of trepidation. Over the years, we've wound up in an emergency room, a not-quite-emergency veterinarian, calling a plumber to bail out a stink-flooded cellar, having an irreparable flat tire while house-hunting on Memorial Day weekend 1994 where the only place to replace it was Sears (good luck with THAT these days:P), having a visit from a friendly local police officer last Christmas Eve about a parking lot fender bender-and that's not even getting into the wonderful family dramas that holidays, especially the big ones, are famous for and not just for us.
So we approached the Fourth this year with a modest agenda and kept to it. No further demo in furtherance of the reno. No moving of furniture or sick or injured pets. We're even lucky these days because neither the dog, nor any of the cats, seem particularly bothered by fireworks going off, and although the big nearby town pyrotechnics were called off again this year, there was plenty of amateur late hour out there well past midnight. It kept the humans awake at times, but the aminals seemed totally oblivious.
Still, because of the late-night boombooms all through Mister Rocket's Neighborhood, both of the bipeds here got shit sleep during the night, and I was the first one up at 6 a.m. for a change. I started down the hallway to the kitchen to begin the feeding, and noticed a patina of powder all across the hall. A patina with pawprints. At first, I thought it was because we'd left the bathroom door open- we've been closing it to keep the dust from the demolition out of air circulation- but that didn't make sense. We didn't kick up any new dust in there the entire day, and I cleaned it pretty throughly when we finished on Saturday.
Then I looked behind me into the unoccupied room which, among other things, stores material for the project we haven't gotten to using just yet. The room in which, at some point last week, I noticed a big foil bag of tile grout. A foil bag which I briefly mistook for the boys' kitten chow, since the bag was made of the same material and was about the same size. I thought about stowing it, but said, Nah, the boys won’t smell anything they like in there.
Somewhere in the wee smalls, the boys proceeded to prove me wrong:
That's after I managed to haul the remains of the grout back into a garbage bag to stop further leakage. Note the pawprints running in all different directions from it. We know it was the two little delinquents, since Zoey and Pepper had been safely stowed behind another door at the time of the crime:
The good news is, it all cleaned up pretty easily with a shopvac, and we're pretty sure the two little idiots didn't try eating much if any of it, since they spent most of the morning running round as usual. They've since settled into their afternoon nappage, no doubt tired from all their grout work:
----
I couldn't get much if any sleep after that, so after the cleanup job, I just got going and had a fairly productive morning:
- walked and snacked the dog;
- went into work for the better part of two hours, on account of a client who could only see me and the referring attorney today;
- weedwhacked a new location for our patio table while its permanent home remains under construction;
- replaced the reel on said weedwhacker, which we couldn’t find the exact replacement for the last time it ran out and I’ve been manually winding it on to the previous empty reel (and, amazingly for me, I got it to work on the first try);
- filled the grocery order, including finding the perfect card (and a gift card) for our newspaper carrier, who’s leaving this week after bringing our paper for nine years.
That's enough for a regular workday, so we've decided to let the holiday (observed) finally commence. Not sure what's on tap for entertainment tonight, but we will likely turn in early and hope the idjits in the neighborhood don't take the occasion of the "Monday off" to set off the rest of their fireworks. I ended my holiday poem to them last night like this, and it goes double tonight:
And they heard me exclaim to those M-80 jerks:
"Happy Fourth of July, but fuck your fireworks!"
So we approached the Fourth this year with a modest agenda and kept to it. No further demo in furtherance of the reno. No moving of furniture or sick or injured pets. We're even lucky these days because neither the dog, nor any of the cats, seem particularly bothered by fireworks going off, and although the big nearby town pyrotechnics were called off again this year, there was plenty of amateur late hour out there well past midnight. It kept the humans awake at times, but the aminals seemed totally oblivious.
Still, because of the late-night boombooms all through Mister Rocket's Neighborhood, both of the bipeds here got shit sleep during the night, and I was the first one up at 6 a.m. for a change. I started down the hallway to the kitchen to begin the feeding, and noticed a patina of powder all across the hall. A patina with pawprints. At first, I thought it was because we'd left the bathroom door open- we've been closing it to keep the dust from the demolition out of air circulation- but that didn't make sense. We didn't kick up any new dust in there the entire day, and I cleaned it pretty throughly when we finished on Saturday.
Then I looked behind me into the unoccupied room which, among other things, stores material for the project we haven't gotten to using just yet. The room in which, at some point last week, I noticed a big foil bag of tile grout. A foil bag which I briefly mistook for the boys' kitten chow, since the bag was made of the same material and was about the same size. I thought about stowing it, but said, Nah, the boys won’t smell anything they like in there.
Somewhere in the wee smalls, the boys proceeded to prove me wrong:
That's after I managed to haul the remains of the grout back into a garbage bag to stop further leakage. Note the pawprints running in all different directions from it. We know it was the two little delinquents, since Zoey and Pepper had been safely stowed behind another door at the time of the crime:
The good news is, it all cleaned up pretty easily with a shopvac, and we're pretty sure the two little idiots didn't try eating much if any of it, since they spent most of the morning running round as usual. They've since settled into their afternoon nappage, no doubt tired from all their grout work:
----
I couldn't get much if any sleep after that, so after the cleanup job, I just got going and had a fairly productive morning:
- walked and snacked the dog;
- went into work for the better part of two hours, on account of a client who could only see me and the referring attorney today;
- weedwhacked a new location for our patio table while its permanent home remains under construction;
- replaced the reel on said weedwhacker, which we couldn’t find the exact replacement for the last time it ran out and I’ve been manually winding it on to the previous empty reel (and, amazingly for me, I got it to work on the first try);
- filled the grocery order, including finding the perfect card (and a gift card) for our newspaper carrier, who’s leaving this week after bringing our paper for nine years.
That's enough for a regular workday, so we've decided to let the holiday (observed) finally commence. Not sure what's on tap for entertainment tonight, but we will likely turn in early and hope the idjits in the neighborhood don't take the occasion of the "Monday off" to set off the rest of their fireworks. I ended my holiday poem to them last night like this, and it goes double tonight:
And they heard me exclaim to those M-80 jerks:
"Happy Fourth of July, but fuck your fireworks!"