on the 5th of July

We were all hammered. Drank way too much the night before and when we were ready to call it quits ended up going to our neighbor's house for tequila shots around midnight. (God I'm going to miss it here.) My sister and her husband came back to our house and after dancing to the disco ball my sister decides to take a nap on the bathroom floor. She ended up staying there until morning. Her husband went home that night to tend to their menagerie of animals but said he'd be back to pick his wife off the floor in the morning. I didn't get much sleep because I kept popping into the bathroom every hour to make sure she was still breathing. Wrigs slept on her feet for most of the night too. I guess this scene is not unfamiliar to his innocent golden eyes. I'm just glad she didn't get her legs mauled by Chumley. That has happened to me in the past when I've spent the night on the bathroom floor. This doesn't happen much anymore (not because I don't sleep on the bathroom floor, but because Wrigs patrols the floor and Chum usually stays out the way.)

At 10:00am her husband comes over with their little Lhasa Apso, Chloe. Wrigs and Chloe play, pounce and hump and have a grand old time. Tom returns from golf with a smorgasbord of greasy food and we dive in. But we're still somewhat comatose and don't make any sudden movements. I check my cell phone around 10:50 and have a message from our realtor saying she's coming by at 11:30 with a potential buyer. I scan the house and think "No way in HELL can this place be ready to show in 40 minutes!" I announce to the zombies that we need to clean up (thankfully my sister was no longer on the bathroom floor which would have made showing that room interesting) and she and her husband gather their belongings and head home. Tom and I went into serious frantic cleaning mode, it was almost robotic, like something just clicked inside us and off we went each to different rooms and just did whatever needed to be done.

I'm in the kitchen tossing away the 12th beer can when I hear Tom yell from the study while vacuuming, "OH MY GOD!" I'm too weak to scream "What is it?" above the vacuum noise so I just go on about my duties. Then again, "OH MY GOOOODDDD!" I drop the beer can into the sink and head into the study. I am overcome by the smell of shit. I look at the area rug and it is covered in smeared dog crap. And it's also covered the sides and bottom of the vacuum. Did I mention my sister's dog is not 100% house broken?? Tom rushes outside with the shit covered vacuum and then heads back to clean up the mess. I was in FULL ON GAG mode and had to get fresh air into my nasal passage. The room smelled soooooo bad that we used intense heavy duty cleaner to cover it up which made our eyes tear up. All this and our first potential buyer was only minutes away.

I casually asked Tom how this happened and I can say first hand that I understand where the expression, "biting one's head off" comes from. Apparently Chloe's crap blended in with one of the patterns on our area rug so Tom just vacuumed right over it - one or two or three times. I hate to admit it, but in this case, I think the Roomba would have avoided that pile of shit like the plague.