Conniving, murdalating mice
Last week Sarah tried to gently nudge me to write a blog post, but I’m going to level with you guys, I just didn’t have it in me to bring the quality snark and general weirdness that has come to be the bedrock of the Kristen Writes Things experience. I was tired… and as I told Sarah bluntly, grumpy. Probably because I was rocking a ruthless string of 6am starts and was trying to be next-level cheerful as I played sherpa, microwave food chef, and generally obnoxious housecleaner for my newly bionic mom. Being cheerful is TIRING.
(My mom replaced her inferior failing hip with a shiny new one. The hip is new, not her being my mom. As far as I know, she hasn’t been replaced by an alternate Debbie… yet.)
Oh, and I was probably grumpy because of dead cats who spent their last waking moments hissing at me before hiding their mewling, starving, three-day-old offspring in the wheel well of my stepdad’s car.
Blurry Other Cat eating a freaking mouse. You’re welcome.
And maybe because of Other Cat (proper noun) who brought a goddamned dead mouse into the house right after I had mopped the floor. Asshole. And he couldn’t just leave it at my feet, let me acknowledge it, and then take it back outside where that kind of nastiness belongs. NOOOOO…. he proceeded to throw it around, touching EVERYTHING that I had just lovingly sanitized with almost decapitated mouse mung.
And did I mention that my parents are delta country adjacent? Which means that there were live mice also making appearances?!
So yeah, I was saving my pleasantness for my parents, and definitely too grumpilated by all of the little weird bullshit that kept popping up to write a blog. But I did write a number of varmint-related text and Slack messages that you might find amusing. Now that I’ve had a little space, I can see the sense in sharing a short, visual recap of actual messages so you can live this experience yourself.
This is not a dramatic re-enactment. This is REAL LIFE that I’m sharing with you!
And then, because I clearly collect friends who watched a lot of cartoons back in the day, David independently comes to the same conclusion, but with that added panache of adding extra syllables to words. Oh, and paranoia.
And then a soundtrack was provided for me to commit violence against the four-legged ones infiltrating my personal space.
By this point I had already lost said furry disease carriers, but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless. Sure, I could have torn the place apart. I briefly thought about burning my parents place down, but I had questions about whether I’d be able to get my mom out of the house before fire consumed her hospital bed and impressive collection of canes and walkers.
Since killing everything with fire was off the table, I decided that transporting myself to Patrick Rothfus’ fantasy world, muttering under my breath about the futility of sheltering useless cats, and drinking lots of questionable wine was a superior strategy to attempting to playing exterminator. {shudder}
Seriously cats, get some self respect. You’re gonna let those mice come into your house like that? Damn. You have some soul searching to do.
Because I clearly needed moral support, Sarah was a real pal and made a quick overnight trip up to assess my rapidly devolving sanity and, I hoped, to protect me bodily from the meeces. As always, she cheered me up by partaking in deep conversations about how Mr. Darcy could possibly own Pemberly and have 10,000 a year without also being a peer, and by bringing it with irreverent art history-related scrotum trivia.
Sarah’s wondering if Brian reads my blog, so let’s find out. Shall we?
Brian, hope you had a rad time in Florence and took Sarah’s advice. Anyone can say they saw all three of the famous David statues… only the real badasses come back with detailed feedback on how realistic all three of their scrotums looked.
Now that I’m back to the real world, and my mom is well on the way to recovery (her hip is a marvel of modern science), I can get back to the real-real: prepping for conferences, learning that certain colleagues of mine can figure out who likes to sniff their own farts from their conference bio pictures, discussing latent serial killer tendencies in the technical writer pool, and writing blog posts for tomorrow with titles like “Book 3 better be SEXY”.
Yeah, all of that.
