In the blink of an eye…

I drove home from work today full of energy. The weather was beautiful, and despite not sleeping very well last night, I was wide awake. I was determined that I wouldn’t spend this evening vegging in front of the television (at least not until Hell’s Kitchen came on at 9!), but would in fact get a few things done around the house.

My plan started out pretty well. I came in and immediately opened up all of the windows after changing into shorts and a t-shirt. Next, I convinced my daughter that she really didn’t need to wear a long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved shirt under a long-sleeved hoodie when it was 75 degrees in the house. Apparently she decided that I had a point, because the next time I went into her room she had removed her shoes and all 3 shirts and was lounging on the bed in her jeans and bra. There is no middle ground with my daughter – I should consider myself lucky that I didn’t walk in to find her stark naked.

Next, I decided that my bedroom was in need of vacuuming. I spent a few minutes rearranging furniture and picking up kitty toys from the floor so that I could break out the Roomba. Once my little dust-sucking robot was off and running, I headed to the kitchen to start dinner.

I wanted steak, but Megan didn’t, so I made her the soup and sandwich she requested first. While my steaks were broiling (4 of them – I like to have leftovers to take for lunch!), I sorted some laundry, then got out the stepladder. I have decided that I’m not happy unless I have a major project in the works, so I am now in the process of painting my kitchen cabinets and replacing all of the hardware. Over the weekend I removed all of the cabinet doors and drilled pilot holes for the new hardware, but had left all of the out-of-reach hinges attached to the cabinets. I now removed all of the remaining hinges, then made a salad to go with my steak.

Once my dinner was ready I went to my bedroom to get the tape from the VCR so that I could watch last night’s episode of Medium while I ate. As I returned to the kitchen with the video, I saw the brown blur of Dinah jumping/falling off of the breakfast bar, heard a tremendous crash, and all hell broke loose…

We used to have a very large bowl in the shape of a wineglass that served as home to our pretty, blue male beta, Cosmo:

The bowl sat on the breakfast bar, and surprisingly, the cats never bother the fish – they just drink his water all the time, so that I have to add more water every few days. Because of this, I keep a gallon of suitable fish-water in the pantry at all times.

Now, I say we ‘used to have’ a large fish bowl because the tremendous crash I heard was the fish bowl tipping over, shattering, and spewing water, fish, glass, and rocks all over the breakfast bar and halfway across the living room. I stopped dead in my tracks, thought, “Oh $h!t!” (oh, who am I kidding, I probably said it out loud, along with a few other choice words) and then tried to figure out quickly what to do. At the *exact same moment* that I realized what had just happened, I got cramps in the bottoms of *both* of my feet. You know, those cramps you get that only go away when you grab your toes and pull them straight up to stretch out the muscle? Well, I didn’t have time for that…

So I immediately grab a plastic bowl from the dish drainer and run to the pantry (well, more like hobble, because both of my feet hurt like hell!) to grab the water jug. I splash some water in to the bowl and then run to the other side of the breakfast bar to try and save Cosmo. He wasn’t moving as I crouched down beside him, but when I touched him with one finger (ewww!), he started to flop around. Before I had time to really think about it, I scooped him up with both hands and tossed him in the bowl. He swam around crazily for a minute, and then calmed down. So far he seems to be ok.

Next, I went looking for the cat to make sure she hadn’t cut herself. I finally caught her after chasing her around the house 3 times and tracking even more water everywhere. She, too, appeared to be ok, but the entire back half of her was sopping wet. I tossed her in my bathroom, closed my bedroom door so the other two cats wouldn’t get in my way, then went back out to survey the damage.

OMG….there was glass, fish gravel, and water everywhere. It was on the breakfast bar, in my laundry piles that were on the floor underneath the breakfast bar, on, around, and under the antique trunk that was sitting against the wall to one side of the breakfast bar, all over the laminate living room floor – even extending under the loveseat. I didn’t know where to start.

I got towels, paper towels, a mop, a bucket, a broom, a dustpan, and a large plastic bowl (I couldn’t find an empty box anywhere to put the glass in) and got to work. Eventually I worked my way over to the antique trunk. I wanted to move the trunk, but it’s really heavy, so I can’t lift it completely off of the floor by myself. I was trying to lift one side at a time and turn it without scratching the floor since there was still glass everywhere. Thankfully, my feet had finally stopped cramping, and I was able to get a towel under one side of the trunk so that I could lift the other side and not worry to much about scratching the floor. So then what do I do instead?  Well, I set the (very heavy) trunk down on my middle toe! More cursing ensued.

At this point, I had just about had it…of course, with half an inch of standing water on laminate flooring, there wasn’t much I could do except suck it up and keep working until I’d cleaned it all up. Every once in awhile I would glance over at my dinner congealing on the counter and think, “Why me???” Once I pretty much had the floor mopped up and had turned my attention to cleaning up the breakfast bar, Megan comes out and says, “Hey Mom, do you want to go to Michael’s and see if they have another fish bowl?”

“Uh, no, Megan, not really.”

“Awww, but why???”

I’m still cleaning up *this* fish bowl, and she asks why I don’t want to rush right out to buy another one. Gee, I dunno, let me think about that one…

So now it’s a couple of hours later. I ate my cold steak and salad, but the wind had pretty much gone out of my sails for the evening. I had taken this picture with my cell phone and sent it to my sister, who immediately realized what it was and called me for the story.


All I want to know now is, what is it that someone is trying to tell me? Is it that I need to clean my floors, or that I need to clean the fish bowl? And why, oh why couldn’t they find a better (and less messy) way to deliver the message???


10 thoughts on “In the blink of an eye…”

  1. I think the message is that you should keep the water in the fish bowl higher, so idiotic cats don't have to put their front paws on the edge to steady themselves while they stick their heads in for fish-poopy water to drink and thus topple the fish bowl. Or Velcro, like Dave suggests. Don't you ever water your poor thirsty kitties??
    Poor Cosmo…

  2. Those poor thirsty kitties have their own water fountain. AND I refill the water (correction: refilled) in that bowl daily to replace what my two little idiots drank. Actually what Dinah was trying to do was stand on top of the bowl.

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