Spouse was half-watching tv last night, as he always does each evening while writing emails, surfing the web, or playing Candy Crush or sudoku.  Having emptied the internet of unread content myself, and unlikely to get anything useful done because I’d burned myself cooking lunch and my hand hurt like hell, I wandered over and sat down on the sofa.  First we watched a couple of tv shows about meat-fixated Germans going (mostly) vegan and were inspired to further cut back our consumption of animal products (Spouse) and added sugar (me) because we wouldn’t eat the dog, so why would we eat a pig and because we’re getting old enough to feel like crap for a couple of days after eating too much crappy, inflammation causing foodstuffs like sugar.  But, oh, is giving up candy going to be hard.  As my dad said of himself when I talked to him on Skype yesterday (because he’s discovered the gastric reflux he’s endured for the last 50 years just goes away if he doesn’t eat dairy products or sugar), I was born with a sugar spoon in my mouth (or at least that was probably the first thing I managed to get my grubby little hands on as soon as I’d learned to crawl (and then climb up the counters and open jars)).

Later, when we were well into What Happened to Monday, Big Kitty left the sofa, scratched around in the cat litter in the bathroom, and then wanted to be let out of the house.  Two minutes later, Rudolph disappeared for 30 seconds and then came back to sit next to me.  And then I thought… did the dog just fart?  What is that smell?  GAG.

Meanwhile the dog was smacking and chewing happily.  And the smell was just not going away.

Well, you see where this is going, don’t you?

“ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I screeched and Spouse, looking over from his easy chair, just started laughing when the situation was explained to him.

Which brings me to the list of things I’ve looked down at Rudolph when he has been sitting next to me and realized he is chewing on:

1. Yes, cat poo.  Swallowed it even.  Ugh.

2. Spouse’s brand new smart phone, which now needs a new brand new cover.

3. Rudolph’s own collar.

4.  Dirty socks off the laundry pile.

5. Clean socks off the drying rack.

6. Seat cushions dragged off the kitchen table chairs.

7. The doormat.

8. My running shoes.

9. My wood + leather garden clogs.

10. My plastic garden clogs.

11. My slippers.

12. Spouse’s slippers.

13. My knitted winter hat.

14. Spouse’s knitted winter hat.

12. My gloves.

13. The car keys.

14. A small rock out of the garden.

15. A raw potato.

16. My sweater (while I was wearing it).

17. The quillow on the sofa.

18. The vain attempt to save the sofa from animal hair that is the blanket we have over it.

 

And that was just yesterday.  At least Rudolph didn’t succeed in bringing the giant self-mummified rat inside.

I stayed up late to finish watching the movie because I was enjoying it although it wasn’t exactly an original plot, I have no idea why this day in age there are still people who think the future looks like 80’s minivans, and it was dubbed into German which sucks, period, but also means I don’t always understand everything that’s going on.   But then, ugh, the end.  It just turned into an ultra-conservative propaganda movie against the horrible, liberal idea that we should stop overpopulating the world.  And that just drove me crazy, because, jeepers, you know, it is possible not to want to overpopulate the world without thinking that it would be a great to execute children.  I don’t know why sometimes the otherwise imaginative people writing sci-fi have such failures of imagination.  And I say that as someone who has spent a lot of time trying to write sci-fi but feels like they don’t really have the imagination for it, and yet I can see there is a whole lot of grey in between the ends of the spectrum that are go forth and heedlessly multiple and kill all the superfluous children.