Why Is Your Belly All Wet?

Back when we first moved in together (1993..holy poop!), The Wiff (although back then she wasn't The Wiff, she was "Amy Davis" ... by the way, her name fits perfectly into "Amadeus" by Falco. Try it! Rock me Amy Davis!) and I sort of split up the household chores without really ever discussing it. She is a much better cook than I am (that may be the biggest understatement ever) and I like to clean (yes, I like to clean) so those two were pretty easy to define. Other chores tend to spawn from those 2 basic ones and we've been ok with that arrangement for years.

Back in the apartment living days we agreed that whomever cooked the meal would be exempt from doing the dishes for said meal. That has since morphed into Amy doing I'd say 97% of the dishes in the house ("But wait," you interject rudely. "Doesn't doing the dishes fall squarely under 'cleaning' as far as chores go?" Yes it does. Shutup. I hate doing dishes. And since we currently do not have a dishwasher thing, I get Dishes Belly every time I do them. What's "Dishes Belly"? DB occurs when I lean too far forward while washing the dishes and I tend to get a portion of my belly very wet in the process. Like, soaked. It's an issue). Where was I going with this? Oh right! I was pointing out how Amy kinda got screwed on the dishes front. Heh.

Amy also does all of the grocery shopping. To me, that is a god-awful chore in and of itself what with the crowds and the overly bright stores and the rows and rows of stuff and I get overwhelmed and I need to leave immediately...pant, pant, pant. But she enjoys it. I know this for a fact because I asked her about it. When we lived in Allston and had to shop at the run-down Purity Supreme (a.k.a. "Poverty Supreme" or "Grubby-stan" do to the large number of surly Russian old ladies who roamed the isles, glaring at people), it was my job to carry all the bags home. One time I tried to "help" by taking her list and ripping it in half so that she could do one half and I could do the other to make things faster. This is efficient yes? No. Did you know that unless you specifically plan your list to be torn in half like that it doesn't make it any faster? In fact, it made her so mad at me that I haven't gone grocery shopping with her since. We're talking 15 years now (plus, we have the ol' Volvo wagon now so I'm only needed to bring in the stuff from the car to the kitchen, not blocks and blocks and then up several flights of stairs. Stupid Allston).

So what do I do? I clean. I sweep, dust, vacuum, mow, shovel, scrub, rinse, wash and a whole host of other synonyms. I do laundry (although Amy will help out on that front too .. wow, she's really getting the short end of the stick here), take the trash out, clean the wood stove thing blah dee blah. Basically we do stuff for the house and each other without much complaint. But I have reached a point with the kitty-poo-poo boxes where I can't take it anymore. We have 4 cats and 6 boxes. Why 6? Well, the idea was so that just in case I didn't scoop for a day or two, there'd be a box that was acceptable to the little fuckers. But now one of them has decided that peeing on the floor is way cooler than doing it in the box. Luckily it's in the basement on the concrete floor but still...it's pretty frickin' gross no matter how you slice it.

I've dealt with the horrible cat box thing since we got our first lil' dude Mugsy (who, while not in the best of health is still with us 15 years later) but the problem isn't with the boxes or the piddling on the floor or the dusty nasty litter. Oh no. The problem is with this evil thing. Warning: Don't click that link unless you wanna skeeve out for at least 15 minutes straight. Gah. I'm freaking out over here. Our house (♪in the middle of our street♪) has these things running around in the basement. I don't want to give the impression that we're infested with them but I'd say in the warmer months I'll see one every third or fourth trip downstairs. They are fast and the word "creepy" does not do them justice. They are evil incarnate. They make my blood run cold. They freak me out just as much as the cockroaches did in the first shitty apartment we had (stupid Allston). I did some rerearch on them and I guess they're harmless but I disagree. Anything that moves that fast and makes me shriek cannot be harmless. Our useless cats are afraid of them too.

So this is the main reason why I don't want to scoop the litter boxes anymore. The cat waste part is bad enough but when there is the potential of a critter running across my foot making me scream like a 12-year-old girl, I think we can all agree that that's asking too much. Now how can I convince Amy that it's perfectly fine for her to go down there and scoop? Hmmm...