There's No "P" in "Shower"!

All right, so the goddamn foil that we hung up to scare the asshole woodpeckers is all fucked up. Surprise. It was a stellar idea on paper but it really sucked donkeys' in execution. The foil's all tangled up in the fishing line, and some of it tore off and is sitting on our neighbors' lawn.

Which brings me to this -- our new neighbor just moved in the other day. Some young dude who's going to be a prof at MSU -- moving up here from Florida, or something. So, the day he gets here, I'm out in the yard, cutting the grass like an asshole with the manual mower ("The grASS Ripper"... remember?). Then the next day, I'm up on the ladder, stringing foil up on the side of the house -- the side that faces his house, of course. We exchanged pleasantries, and I tried to downplay our nuttiness with a little, "Well, we have a bit of a woodpecker problem over here. Heh, heh... I know it looks a little crazy, but... we're really pretty normal people... really... heh... er...."

I might as well have just run over to his front porch naked and taken a steaming shit on his welcome mat. Poor fucker -- just wait until he meets the spawn. WACKY NEIGHBOR ALERT -- CUCKOO, CUCKOO!!!

For example, he probably heard Miss O tonight, screaming bloody murder from the shower. It was too late to give the kidlets baths, but we needed to hose off the gallons of bug spray we dumped onto them this morning before camp, so showers it had to be. Of course, the minute Miss O stepped in, she had to take a fucking whiz. The old lady was not up for drying her off, so she told her to just whiz in the tub. No problem. What's better than pissing in the shower? Pretty much nothing.

But for some reason, Miss O flipped her fucking lid. She started alternating between screams that A) she would NEVER piss in the shower and 2) she REALLY had to pee. Now, if it were me in that situation, I would've pulled her out of the shower, sat her on the pot and then plopped her back in the shower. Of course, this would only reinforce the "if-you-scream-you-will-get-whatever-the-fuck-you-want" dynamic, but it would also result in the short-term gain of stopping the screaming at that given moment. Go for the small gain now, worry about the strongly reinforced fucked up dynamic later.

Of course, the old lady is not me, and she chose to keep insisting that Miss O just drain it in the shower. Talk about a dynamic -- woo HOO! Those two! Miss O is bawling her ass off, the old lady is washing her hair while trying to convince her to "just pee already!" It was quite the battle royale. Finally, the old lady got all the soap rinsed off, turned off the water and sat the girl on the shitter. Miss O stopped crying immediately, paused for about 20 seconds, and then announced:

MISS O: I don't have to pee anymore.

I don't know if the human ear can actually hear the sound of an ulcer forming in someone else's stomach, but I'm pretty sure that's what I was picking up. Mr. Z and I played it safe and steered clear of that area of the house for the rest of the bedtime ritual.

I don't know how it ended up, but I'm pretty sure the two of them resolved their differences on this matter pee-sfully.