Saturday, December 22, 2007

Dinner and Feces and Formal Dates and Nepotism

I do love to fix a big company dinner, and tonight I get to do that. Belle and some of her friends are coming down to feast on pork tenderloin, old rotten au gratin potatoes, green beans, corn, and homemade bread. I'm not fixing any dessert because I figure we'll all get enough dessert in a few days anyway. Besides, my oven is full of things I have to hide from the cats.

This being Saturday, Hub and I filled the van with big black bags and made our weekly jaunt to the dump, after which we had our weekly date for lunch, even though it was mid-afternoon.

What makes this weekly lunch a date? We go INSIDE, that's why. If you just go through the drive-through, it's not a date. And, if you go to a restaurant that doesn't even have a drive-through window, it's a formal date.

Why did we have lunch at 3 in the afternoon? Because we're on break right now, and 6 a.m. has been replaced by 11 a.m. And when you skip breakfast, you're ready for lunch at 3 p.m.

Never try to argue or out-rationalize 'food' with a fat chick. We'll win every time.

Dinner's at seven. Come on over. We've got enough food for all of you. You don't even have to bring ice now; we finally got the icemaker fixed. It broke seven years ago and flooded half the upstairs and all of the downstairs, but I think I waited long enough to have that tubing replaced; I wanted ice and I wanted it NOW. And now I have it.

Next up on the "to do" list: stairs for the deck. 25 years is long enough. And no, leaning a ladder against the deck isn't good enough. Although, it does work.

On a tangent, the janitor at my former middle school was so lousy, my students once conducted an experiment using him as its base. One of the kids found an absolutely humongous dead bug of some kind and brought it in. The bug (fresh, intact, but definitely dead) was strategically placed on the carpet in the front of the room, directly underneath the pencil sharpener, in plain sight. Then, the kids made a mark on the board and took a picture for each day the bug remained on the carpet.

The bug was never removed; the kids took pictures and marked time until there was nothing left but a little pile of black and red dust, and then the dust blew away. The carpet was NEVER SWEPT. I reported this but was told that the janitor had definitely vacuumed my classroom daily; it was checked off on his report. I offered to produce my evidence but was told it was a non-issue. I know the janitor was busy, shooting baskets in the gym for hours at a time cleaning and emptying wastebaskets and refusing to touch vomit and all, but I think falsifying his report should have been a kick-out-the-door. He was our secretary's son but that just couldn't have had anything to do with it.

The kids offered to conduct this same experiment with feces but one must draw the line somewhere.

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination what one would call a fastidious housekeeper, but when the dust on the carpet is so thick people are leaving footprints in it, and giant insects are left to turn to dust, I'd say it needed to be dealt with.

But oh well.

"For peace of mind, resign as General Manager of the Universe." I need to do that.

Now to peel some potatoes for tonight.

Sure you don't want to come over? I'm going to run the sweeper in a few minutes. . . .

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly