butter wouldn't melt...

should harvesting a new life ever become something for my uterus to while away the time with, then any finished product would be better off coming out, and remain looking like, one of the residents of fraggle rock. clearly anything cute and fuzzy wuzzy stands absolutely no chance of not being raised under the tenets of a 'getting away with murder' school of parenting.

it would appear that axel is the neighborhood's very own count of monte cristo. apparently the little fellow has been working on a fence demolition project, between taking naps and chasing the other dog around the back garden. this weekend a phone call came from the after hours answering service. typically these are of the "my tooth hurts, it's been that way for three weeks, but now it really hurts" to "i was flossing and got a really bad smell and taste in my mouth- like dog shit" variety. this most recent 'emergency' fell into the "your dog is on the neighbour's porch" category.

axel has a thing for the crazy cat lady, more so, because she has a thing for cats; all of them. this is evidenced by a 24 hour stray kittie kibble buffet on her back deck, which just happens to be diagonally opposite a couple of loose, corner fence posts and a ravenous labrador.

lessons learned in purgatory (sounds more poncey than: "so i painted my first ceiling and realized i don't actually know what the hell i'm doing")

ceiling paint is thicker than the regular stuff, comparable to a gallon of whale's semen in semi-gloss; its also pretty stinky. and it dries funny (funny like michael jackson's face after the thriller years, not funny like jacko thinking we all believed his facial fairytale after he moonwalked with other corpsey looking characters).

ceiling paint dries patchy, and it leaves shadows. this activates the lady macbeth reflex, leading to obsessive rolling of additional tacky layers, spawning more patchy clusters.

and so it goes on.

i am a home improvement sisyphus, except instead of rolling a gargantuan rock up a hill, the "must not exceed 250lbs" podium is my purgatory, rolling shamu's special brand with lactic saturated arms.