Arr! Ack! No! Part 2: The Return...

Why is Johnny never here when these things happen?

And oh holy shit, by the way, are those eyeballs on the top there? Or grabby jaws? Or little fists? Whatever they are, I didn't notice them until I saw this picture. Which is a good thing. Because otherwise I would never have found the gumption to do this:

Well, what? You didn't think I was going to touch the thing directly, did you? No freakin' way! Not even directly with a wad of toilet paper, and especially not wedged into that crack the way it was. What if it jumped, for god's sake? I could have broken my neck! (You know, with the twitching and the screaming and the slipping and the falling?). In fact, I did briefly consider leaving it like this:

But then I remembered that that's the shower there, and it gets wet, and if there's one thing I remember from my years at summer camp, it's that wadded-up balls of wetted toilet paper stick like glue. Forever. So I screwed up all my courage and did this:

Ha! Ya bastard! Now who'll have the nerve to tell me I need to clean the crack around my shower? Seriously, if anyone out there could tell me how to clean that crack, I'd love to do it. In the meantime, you should all just count your blessings that I managed to crop the following pictures carefully enough so as to hide the ring of crud I somehow failed to notice accumulating around the edges of my toilet bowl:

Ha ha, I say again! Look at him, bleeding all over the place. Hm, though, do you think I might have used a bit more toilet paper?

Ha ha ha! Uh oh...

How did that happen? Oh no!

That's it. From here on out I'm peeing with my pants on. At least until the snow falls, anyway.

And even that I'm only doing when Johnny is freakin' home.


Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to twitch, scream and fall down...

Not Even He That Hath Her

He did it. I nagged and shrieked and generally shrewed myself into a Katharina frenzy until he had to do it just to shut me up.

I’m talking about the caulk.

He said the stuff we had was probably not good enough. I said “Is there silicone in it? Then it’s fine!”

He said the marine caulk he was talking about was specially made for just this sort of thing. I said “I don’t believe there’s any such thing as marine caulk!”

He said John B. told him that some showers aren’t designed to be caulked, and that we’d best be sure that this one was or else it might just wind up trapping moisture. I said “Oh yeah? You think there’s meant to be booger-strings of mold creeping down from behind the plastic when I’m in the shower?”

He said – oh my god – he said I should remember that I also had to clean the shower, that maybe the mold I was talking about could have been prevented with a little, you know, elbow grease. I said “I only didn’t clean the shower because I was waiting for you!”

And then I said:

“If you’d done what you were supposed to instead of pissing around and talking to everyone about it, it would be done by now and we wouldn’t have all these asshole opinions to consider!”

He said fine, he’d do it. But if it turned out, next week or next year or later, to have been a bad idea, then I should take note of this moment and remember: Whatever damage happened after this would be entirely my fault.

That gave me pause. For a moment. Then I remembered Kate and shouted “No! You’re the one who told me that it should have been done in the first place! Two years ago! And you’re the one who said we had to do it now! You’re the one who said you would do it – on Saturday! All I’m responsible for is trying to make you keep your word!”

Well, you don’t impugn Johnny’s word-keeping integrity and get away with it, so at this point he shut up and caulked the shower. And while he did, Muskego Jeff left a comment here telling me that there was, in fact, such thing as marine caulk, and that he’d heard it was particularly good for use on shower pans – by which I assume he means (although I haven’t looked it up) the floor part of an insert, standing shower.

The job took Johnny all of twenty minutes, and when he came out the fight was over. Not only had I won, but I’d also eaten a bowl of his homemade turkey soup while he was in there (I’d been hungry when I shrewed him – is anyone surprised?), and I had been proven ever so very slightly wrong. He didn’t know this yet, and with any luck he never would, but the combination humbled me enough to hug him and thank him and tell him I was sorry, that I loved him, and his soup was really good.

He said he'd put another coat on it tomorrow morning (which is now, although technically right now he’s still asleep) and then it would have to cure three days before I could start to use it. And then he sighed and, when gently prompted, confessed his fear that when I did start to use it – as soon as I should set foot in the shower – the floor part would separate instantly from the wall.

I said “Oh.”

I said “I think it’s called a ‘shower pan.’”

And I said “If that happens, we’ll get the Special Marine Caulking that you wanted.

“Okay, hon?”

Isn’t Katharina just the best wife in the world?

Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

Okay now finally it’s time for me to write about the shower. Again.

If you remember – which there’s no reason you should because I’ve changed the subject like twelve times since I mentioned it, but – this is the shower in my bathroom. And when I say “my bathroom,” I mean the master bathroom which, except in an emergency, I am the only one to use. As opposed to when I say “the bathroom,” by which I mean the public one that's sometimes also known as “Johnny’s.”

Got it?

In other words, this time, I’m talking about my super-duper, en suite, pod-bay shower:

Which never got caulked up completely when it was installed and I didn’t know that when I started using it and Johnny (let’s be honest) didn’t have the sack to tell me. So the water was getting in the cracks between the pieces, and therefore in the wall behind the pieces, making all this yucky mildew slime that would come oozing out the creepy cracks when I was in the shower.

Yum.

So I stopped using it for a week or so. To let the nasty thing dry out a bit. Then Johnny, as he says, “bleached the piss out of it.” And I would like to state for the record that there wasn’t any piss in it. Not when he bleached it, anyway. I’m not going to swear I’ve never.

Oh come on, are you seriously going to claim you’ve never?

Fine.

Neither have I.

Ahem.

Moving on.

Apparently, however, I was wrong to disparage Johnny’s gonadal dimensions. Because when he finished this chlorinated task – and I don’t know the details of how he got Chlorox in all the cracks, but get it there he did – he had the sterile balls to come out and say to me: “You know, Love, you also have to clean the shower sometimes.”

Ahem.

Moving on.

No, you know what? Not moving on. I have to say in my defense, that this bleach job had been imminent for weeks before it happened, and I saw no sense in scrubbing the shower before he climbed all in it with his boots on. Plus he was going to be spraying bleach all over! Why not see what that takes off before I get on my hands and knees?

It’s also true that we were caught in a sort of catch-22. I say “sort of” catch-22 because it’s not really a catch-22, and I hate when people use that phrase for things that just don’t qualify at all. Like, I heard somebody say “I’m hungry but – catch-22 – if I eat now I won’t be hungry at dinnertime.” No, not catch-22 (also not a concept I can understand, by the way: ruining dinner). A catch-22 would be if you don’t eat now you won’t get dinner later. See?

Anyway, we were caught in a sort of conundrum whereby he needed me to stop using my shower for a few days before he’d bleach it, but I needed to know for sure he would bleach it before I’d stop. And since I couldn’t be sure he would until he did, and since he couldn’t do it till I stopped, we sort of circled the wagons round each other for a couple weeks. Hence the soap scum about which Johnny’s sack so prissily complained.

And then the shower broke. So that solved that problem.

The stupid hand-held nozzle for which I never installed the hanger-thing because I didn’t want to put a screw-hole in the wall and risk getting shower-water in there (you decide whether that’s irony or not: no way I’m going there). It had been hanging headfirst by its hose this whole time, occasionally getting dropped and banged around, and this time when I went to turn the jet-adjuster thingy (and I don’t remember why I went to turn the jet-adjuster thingy, but it had nothing to do with Dirty Boy, I swear) it just came off in my hand.

Lookit:

So I started using Johnny’s shower and Johnny, eventually, bleached mine. That, I believe, was this past Tuesday. I’m going to see if I can get him to caulk it up for me today while I spend nine and a half frustrating hours blow-drying plastic wrap onto all the old windows that need replacing.

Then I’ll go buy me a new shower nozzle for my bathroom, and some black curtain rings for Johnny’s. And he wants a black switchplate, too, if I can find one. And bathmat. So it will be full-on, come-up-and-see-me-sometime, bordello décor.

Hey, he's the one who's going to be pissing in there. If he’s got the sack for it, why not?


Anybody out there? Want to explain the title to me for a POEM CONTEST? Don't just google and define it, tell me what stupid pun I'm making...