Currently This

I am so mad. I am too mad to think of intelligent, erudite ways to say I AM SO FUCKING MAD!

I'm sitting around, trying to think of something to do for my husband for V Day (that rat trap holiday). We're broke, so my options are few. I think and I think and it comes to me: I'll do all the chores I HATE to do, the ones he normally does because I hate them so much.

This means cleaning the litter boxes and bird cages. Two litter boxes, four bird cages. Now, I know going in this will be hard. I hate doing these chores - it's stupid for a woman with the zoo I have, but I hate cleaning animal waste. I can clean a toilet with the best of them in my pearls and high heels and with a smile on my face, but something about animal waste sets me off badly enough that I end up crying. It goes back to being raised in my mother's house with forty cats and NO ONE cleaning up after them except when she yelled at one of us to do it, but with that many cats, it was never really clean and the smell was in everything and I was ashamed and embarrassed and . . . well. These days, I am pretty picky that, if we are to have a zoo, it be a clean zoo. So this is a BIG deal present for me to give him.

I gird my loins and stuff toilet paper up my nose to keep from getting the sneezes and off I go. I take apart the cages (ignoring the now loose birds who have made their last ditch, ill fated attempt at freedom), thinking it isn't fair that I never do this for him, only to find that rather than really cleaning the fucking things, he tosses out the old bird littler and puts fresh paper ON TOP OF THE OLD, CLINGING BIRDSHIT, ETC. This shit is caked to the plastic - nuclear weapons couldn't get this shit off this plastic.

And I am suddenly FURIOUS! Fair enough, maybe we should share this chore, but this is bullshit. How can he have just left those cages like that?? The cat litter boxes? Same thing - oh, he'll scoop with the best of them, but he won't clean off the old stuff caked to the boxes.

That, you see, in his lovingly passive-aggressive manner, is his way of leaving the worst of it to me without telling me outright he is doing it. This is his way of trying to do the job so badly I'll do it myself. And I almost did - I almost did it all. But in the end, I did a marginally better job for him than he does for me. I will sweetly present this offering to him - then tell him that what I want for V Day is for him to really take the cages apart and hose them off.

I'm just supremely pissed that I was sitting here thinking of something I could do to show him how much I love him, I come up with this great idea, and just end up shit on. LITERALLY. Covered in old shit dust. So I immediately cleaned the carpets and wiped off everything in the surrounding areas with bleach. AND had to catch the fucking birds.

Whose idea were birds, anyway?

Growl. Snarl. Rip tear maim.