My Tub Runneth Over

          

            On Tuesday morning I got my place ready for the exterminator. I washed my bedding in the bathtub. On spray days I usually put the cats out at 8:30, but since Jonquil was still in heat, I put her outside earlier. It’s weird how they know beforehand that I’m going to make them leave the apartment. I don’t think they’re psychic, but I do think they are very sensitive to subtle changes in my behaviour that trigger for them that there’s a reason to hide. To be fair, they are not that smart. Sometimes they hide when I’m not planning on putting them out, but they see me walking back and forth carrying things like I do on those days.

            I vacuumed the couch futon, which was brand new a month ago but sure doesn’t look it now. One of the problems is that my cats all have white bellies and this is a black futon.  Although they haven’t been using it for a scratching post, sometimes when they are sleeping, they reach out and grip the fabric with their claws. There is one small hole so far.

            I drained the bathtub and started filling it up again to rinse my bedding. I had decided to post my essay about poetry slams on my blog, but I needed to make adjustments in the HTML language so that the online version would match the original text. I was working on that when suddenly there was a hard knock on my door. I thought that the Orkin guy had finally arrived. I went out in the hall and it was the manager from the donut shop downstairs. He asked angrily, “What are you doing, Buddy?” Suddenly I realized that I’d forgotten to turn off the faucet in the tub. He said, “You flooded us downstairs!” I rushed to turn it off. He asked again, “What are you doing?” I said, “Sorry!” He responded, “Sorry?” I didn’t know what else I could say. I guess I could have offered to mop up downstairs but I focused on sponging up all the water that had flooded my bathroom. I felt pretty stupid and worse, since it’s not the first time this has happened in the eighteen years I’ve lived there. I think that the last time was about five years ago, and the problem was again, getting involved with something unusual on the computer and then forgetting the water. I think that when my daughter was living with me she also overflowed the tub at least once. Fortunately the Coffeetime has different owners now than it did then, otherwise they’d see me as a serial offender. I guess the landlord already does see me that way though, since he’s owned the building for about fifteen years.

            To make a shitty day even worse Orkin didn’t come to treat the place after all. So I had wet bedding to hang out on a sometimes-wet day and no reason to have washed the stuff in the first place. The superintendent told me that they were definitely going to come next Monday and he also booked them for two weeks after that.

            I took a siesta with no bedding and no pillows. I didn’t go for a bike ride in the evening because the timing was awkward once I dealt with moving furniture back into place and putting drawers away.

            My cat Daffodil didn’t come home that night, which was generally uncharacteristic of her, but in her life I think she has stayed away a few times, so I wasn’t too worried.

            That night I watched an episode of Bonanza about a family of crazy Kentucky hillbillies who were travelling across the Ponderosa. The show started with two members of the family, a father and daughter, who were travelling ahead. The father had the crazy idea that he was going to take a large portion of the property as his own and so started a fire with the intention of burning the forest down so it would become pasture. The fire would have burned 20,000 acres of forest but Little Joe happened to be riding by and put the fire out. The father said he would shoot Joe if he tried to put out the fire and indeed, tried to shoot him in the back with his shotgun. Little Joe had no choice but to draw his gun and kill him in self-defence. Then he had to figure out what to do with the young woman who was bent on killing him out of revenge. Since he couldn’t just leave her there he had to tie her up and take her home. They hired a woman to come and bathe her and Hoss designed a restraining implement to keep her in the tub, because it seemed that she had never had a bath before and didn’t want to start. They bought her clothes and the woman dressed her but they still had to tie her to a chair as Little Joe tried to take the kinks out of her hair, until she bit him. Then Hoss took over, since he’s the brother who does the best job at taking the kinks out of the horses’ tails. The rest of the family arrive, getting word that a Cartwright has killed one of there’n. They are led by a mean, whip cracking grandma who believes in an eye for an eye. Little Joe goes to explain why he had to shoot her son, but he also tries to shoot Joe in the back and gets killed. It looks like it’s going to be war but the family rebels against the grandma because there’s been too much killing. Finally, and unrealistically, she gives in and immediately becomes friends with the Cartwrights.