What A Ridiculous Thing To Have To Hear!

Stay tuned at the bottom of this post for a special announcement, but please bear with me while I ramble on a little while first. I know that isn’t like me, usually I’m so succinct and to-the-point. But it’s going to be hard to concentrate this morning, because Johnny’s watching TV at maximum volume in the other room.

See, when I woke up it was freezing in here – that’s what I get for thinking I can actually sleep with the windows open in New England in practically-June – although I don’t know what the exact temperature was because the battery on the thermostat died and I haven’t quite gotten around to figuring out where to open the thing to replace it. So let’s just say it was cold enough that I could see my breath. Because, in my mind, I really could.

Anyway, my choices were to a.) type with mittens on and with my figurative breath fogging the monitor – in which case Johnny would most certainly want to crank the heat when he woke up, in which case (never mind that it’s practically-June and that is patently absurd) I would have to explain to him about the thermostat, in which case he would want to know why, if I’ve known about this for a week, I haven’t done anything about it yet, in which case I would have to kill him – or b.) bang all the windows closed and wake him up, an hour and a half before he had to rise for work.

He was surprisingly calm about the noise, considering.

I mean, considering that these old double-hung windows aren’t all weighted exactly right (this is still the AssVac, after all), so that sometimes they fall like guillotines with just a touch, and sometimes you have to pound them up and down the same two inches with the heels of your hands before they’ll finally fall. Like guillotines. I can’t tell you how many windowsill plants I’ve killed that were nonchalantly basking in the warm but setting sun. I kill plants anyway, though. It’s like I have an inner hostility towards them that I can’t control. But that’s a story for another day.

So I went around bang-bang-crashing all, let’s see, fifteen windows (there actually are seventeen, but one of them has no screen in it and one just plain won’t open), and all he said was “Shut my alarm off for me, love, would you please?” Because, see, it lives across the room from him, so that he has to actually get up. Sometimes there are mornings when he doesn’t – when it goes off for twenty minutes until I finally walk in – and sometimes I see him lying there, awake, having decided to listen to the beeping rather than get out of bed. And so sometimes I kill him.

Not today, though. Today I shut it off for him, fully expecting to have to come back later on and wake him, but as I went about making my coffee this god-awful singing started up, loud enough to beat the proverbial band into submission.

“What are you watching?” I asked him, nonchalantly. Trying to determine if the volume was a.) an accident, or b.) a delayed-reaction, passive-aggressive statement about the window-noise.

“Duck Soup!” he said.

Oh crap, I thought. There's a third option that had not occurred to me above:

c.) Honest-to-god, childlike enthusiasm.

So now he’s out there on the couch, rapt and grinning like a kid watching Saturday cartoons, and I’m in here explaining why I can’t write for poop with bombs and chorus girls going off around me. But hey, at least we aren’t the ones doing the fighting. Or the singing. Or, apparently, the jokes.

Ah. It just ended. But of course now it’s time for us to go.


Special Announcement: I’d like to thank you all for playing my finish-the-joke game last week when I was out licking my wounds. Although really most of you were expressing solidarity and sympathy, while only three of you actually submitted possible punchlines:

Su, who admitted that hers was not original, so it doesn’t count (otherwise my integrity would be shattered into a million little pieces).

LadyCiani, who already got a pig rat from me in an earlier contest and I think it’s only right to share the wealth. I’ve only got two left, after all (and there is a weekend coming up).

And Choosy Mothers Choose Jeff, who therefore wins!

So, CMCJ, send me your address (my email’s in my profile) and I will send you a lovable pig rat of your very own. Plus some other silly things that I find twitching by the side of the road.