I really shouldn’t have said it.
When I woke up this morning it was to an empty bed. At first I was afraid that HoBiscuit had left me for less garlic-y pastures, but after a quick breath check I realized that aside from a minor case of morning breath I was fine. Rolling over, I checked the alarm clock to see if I was late for work, and nearly burst a blood vessel when I realized how early it was.
5:45am?! Son of a…
Lying back down, I closed my eyes and tried to will myself back to sleep. Unfortunately, I found that to be impossible. I didn’t know what it was, but something was nipping away at my subconscious like a starving, rabid, miniature llama with no teeth on the bloated corpse of a dead elephant and it just wouldn’t let me get back to sleep until I figured out what it was.
Heh. A toothless, mini-llama. I should put that in my Blog.
Anywaste, it was 5:45am and something I couldn’t quite put my finger on was pecking on my id like Woody Woodpecker on an anatomically correct wooden model of Britney Spears. I needed to get back to sleep because I had to get up in an hour to get to work, so I rolled over again and tried to think of what it could be that was nagging me at such an ungodly hour.
Rubbing away some eye-crust I stifled a yawn and pondered my predicament.
Was it the fact that HoBiscuit was mysteriously missing from the bedroom? Nah, she might have just gone to the bathroom or something. Was it to hot to sleep? Too cold? No, and no. Dammit, if only that moron outside with the jackhammer would stop for a minute, I just know I would figure out what was keeping me awake.
Wait a second…
Jumping up, I ran to the window and looked outside. Right across the street from us was a store that was being remodeled, and apparently no one over there thought that there was anything wrong with getting an early start on the day’s activities. A very early start. With the loudest, most obnoxious power tool they could possibly get their worthless, rude and thoughtless hands on. Mumbling some obscenities under my breath, and shouting a few choice phrases out the window, I resigned myself to my fate and went to the bathroom to wash up.
And discovered HoBiscuit asleep on the couch in the back room.
Apparently, the idiot with no sense of self preservation outside had been working for half an hour before I woke up, during which time HoBiscuit had gotten up, cursed the bastard and his entire ancestral line going back to the primordial spooge from which his particular strain of DNA is descended, and moved to the relative quite serenity of the room furthest from his offensive noise pollution. Why she didn’t simply go outside and remove his nuts with our vacuum cleaner, I’ll never know.
Hey, it could happen. We have a Dirt Devil.
Knowing that there was no possible way I could go back to sleep, I went to the bathroom and started my morning cleanup ritual. Looking around the sink area, I saw my little, morning friend; Ducky. My mind briefly recounted how happy HoBiscuit had been when we decided that the silly looking porcelain duck would become our official toothbrush holder. She had fallen in love with it on first sight and, truth be told, it had grown on me too.
However, I still think the ducky towels are going too far.
Hoping that Ducky would bestow upon me better luck than I had been subject to so far, I wished him a good morning as I pulled my brush from his anus. Deftly pushing down on the paste-pump to apply the Mentadent toothpaste, and barely pausing to get the brush wet, I began brushing vigorously in a circular motion just the way my satanic, fascist, Nazi dentist ordered me to on my last visit.
Then I remembered we had switched to Colgate. In a tube.
Spiting out the sanitizing hand soap I had mistaken for toothpaste I rinsed my mouth out and began again, this time making sure to apply the correct cleansing solution to my toothbrush. After finishing that chore I proceeded to gargle, first double checking to make sure it was mouthwash and not Drain-o I was using, and turned on the water in the tub to take a shower.
You can see it coming, can’t you?
From the kind of day I was having you’d think I would’ve checked the water temperature before I got in the tub. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. Because not only did I NOT check, I even failed to notice the thin layer of frost on the showerhead. My first clue that something was amiss was when I jumped underneath the full spray of water and upon contact my gonads shrank to the size of grape seeds and shot into my body cavity with enough force to puncture 3 inches of steel. If you’re female, imagine giving birth to a large Christmas tree.
With ornaments. Backwards.
30 seconds later, after the fastest and most curse-filled shower in the history of mankind, I reached for the shower curtain to get out of the tub. You can well imagine that by this time I should have known that something was going to go bad for me. For example, you’d think that I would have remembered that the bathtub is very close to the bathroom sink. And perhaps if I had simply slowed down a moment and thought about it, I would have recalled that Ducky just happened to sit on the side of the sink that’s closest to the shower curtain. And quite possibly I would have then noticed that a small portion of the shower curtain had gotten bunched up behind Ducky’s porcelain behind.
But I didn’t.
And so, to the nice receptionist at the office I’m doing some work for, I hope that you’ll now understand why, when you asked me how I was doing on this fine and beautiful day, I used my most venomous and sarcastic tone of voice to say,
“I’m just frickin Ducky. Now shut up and leave me alone.”