Foreshadowing: It’s Not Just for Literature!

On Friday I was reclining on my couch during a rare “Nap Overlap.” I had approximately 15 minutes to get some much needed shut-eye; much needed because of all the usual reasons plus we were expecting house guests for the weekend.

As I reclined, enjoying the fresh breeze wafting through the my newly clean window (I even took off the screen and washed it, holy cow) I became aware of another smell. A musty, musky, ugly smell. The smell of shit.

I got up and looked around. There was no cat shit. There was no baby shit. There was no dog shit. I had not shit myself. While each of these realizations was a relief, obviously I was still curious as to the source of the smell. The shit source, if you will. (We’re The Shit Source: playing all weekend at the Roxy!)

If you guessed that Friday afternoon on the brink of a very sunny and warm weekend was when our strata decided to hire a manure company to douse our townhouse complex in fertilizer, well, you win an all-expenses paid trip to my house which still, three days later, smells like shit.

Trombone woke up crying from his nap. He had just come down with a cold.

The house guests, my dear old American friend and her boyfriend, arrived intact and were delighted that we didn’t assume they were the source of the smell, because they are from Wisconsin, you see. How we did laugh.

The rest of the weekend featured:

– toddler cold
– infant sleep strike (partly our own fault for moving his crib up to our room so we could accommodate our guests)
– despite this, (and the resulting lack of sleep for the rest of us) staying up way too late talking about politics, elections, regional differences and dogs. Because you have to.
– where way too late in our world means 10 pm
– and getting up at the crack of ass with two squealing children to discover that our coffee pot had exactly one pot of coffee left in its life (a 7 year life!) and now, on Saturday morning, at 9 am, it was done.
– a flood in SA’s work’s server room, resulting in an emergency 5 hours at work for him on Saturday afternoon, leaving me with the runny nosed, whiny toddler, the underslept, whiny infant and, of course, our guests, who made us dinner and bought us beer despite us being smelly, noisy and completely unprepared for their visit (except for the clean window and the fresh manure – hey, what can I say, I roll out the red carpet for my American friends)
– despite all this, having a great time and seeing them off at 6 am Sunday
– and then noticing my own inevitable sore throat and that of SA
– and the equally inevitable congestion in the infant
– and then spending Sunday night, when I really could have used, say, 4 hours of sleep in a row, nursing every hour and putting Fresco to sleep in the car seat because he can’t breathe
– but I do still have my la-z-boy recliner and man am I glad
– and through it all, every time I open the window, shit.

On the plus side, Trombone is much improved and Fresco is battling on using his SuperImmunityPowers and SA and I are just fine, really. Nobody we know died. (Except David Foster Wallace. Dammit.) Some friends of ours had a new baby on the weekend. Some other friends have an OMG PUPPY!!!!! Shit makes the flowers grow, after all.

At least it had better.