Black Doggerel

so I am drinking my coffee and I knock my ergonomic wrist-rest* off the desktop.

I bent down to pick it up and knocked the coffee mug over.

I cursed, fetched a sponge and then knocked my ashtray over mopping up the coffee.

I'm too fucking stubborn to go back to bed yet. Bring it the fuck on, day!


*OK, it's a pair of rolled-up socks I keep on my mousemat but you get the point.

Arrrgh fuckbugger wankmonkey fucking bastard collie, he just nearly put my fucking eye out. Ow ow ow fucking OWWWW.

It's 4pm and the piss is still in the hallway. I've had a moderately satisfying rant with three of the neighbours though, so I feel a bit better about it. I'm still not fucking cleaning it up.

A weird thing: On the way out, we went through the back door to avoid the piss. On the way back in, Spike dug his heels in and refused to walk past it. It's hard to be certain - it's such an unfamiliar look for Captain Sharkface - but I think he actually looked scared. When I got him he was ten months old and he's never made a housetraining error in the whole time I've known him (except once when a strange dog came to visit one of the neighbours and marked in the stairwell, and then he only leaked two drops) It makes me wonder if he has some deeply-buried memories of housetraining angst he hasn't told me about. I do think some of his initial training was done the, er, old-fashioned way. He gets quite upset at rolled-up newspapers as well.

And - because I really needed one more thing to make my life annoying today - my Internet connection keeps randomly cutting out. Very Very Annoying.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I took the dogs out and discovered piss all over the floor in the downstairs stairwell. What the everloving fuck?

I don't know if it was Sloppy Drunk Guy in the flat next door but one, the GSD puppy having a bad housetraining day or what, but I do know it was semi-dried, which means whoever was responsible had left it there at least an hour or so without any attempt at cleaning up.

Rang the Council's "Antisocial Behaviour Officer" (we actually have one of those!) and left a grumpy message on their answerphone, more to forestall anyone thinking it might have been my dogs than in the belief they can actually do anything about it. I've no fucking intention of cleaning that up myself.

In other news, the futon collapsed for good when I lay on it last night - the heavy mesh panel that goes under the cushion part detached completely from the frame and basically dumped me and Squish on the floor. Buggerfuckpisswank. Luckily, I had a moment of inspiration and remembered the stack of carpet tiles someone gave me when I first moved in. They're scratchy, bile-coloured and nasty and the only use I've had for them so far has been to put them underneath things like dogcrates to avoid buggering the lino, but a stack of them underneath the futon proved to be the absolute perfect solution. I R SMRT!

...and I am fully aware that this is the second time in less than a month I've used that line for a title, but it's so appropriate for so many situations.

Today, though it's a reference to the beginning of Project Black Dog HQ Is Not Going To End Up Like Grimmauld Place, Damn It!

These last few months, betweeen my mother being ill, the kittens, the heat, the lack of visitors and me being less than 100% myself, my normally lackadaisical housekeeping efforts have tipped over into the utterly non-existent. And there are eight animals living here: seven of them shed hair, five of them eat day-old chicks on the floor, two of them leave muddy pawmarks, one of them pukes yellow bile when he eats grass and one of them is a bone-lazy pack rat with a long-standing pathological aversion to cleaning. Recipe for disaster, no?

It had gotten to the point where I'm getting reluctant to post animal photographs because of the disgustingness of the backdrop. It had to stop. The stopping starts here.

The bedroom (aka cat room) is trashed. I'm putting that off till the kittens leave; just keeping the litter trays fresh, wiping the eating area floor and checking daily for stashed uneaten food is as much as I can cope with for now. But if I don't get some sort of handle on the rest of the flat before that happens I'm just going to get overwhelmed and go into avoidance mode on the whole thing until I end up living in the sort of squalor that gets flats repossessed and tenants committed. Not. Going. To. Happen.

So I've started by sweeping the floor (too much hair!!) and scrubbing the kitchen floor and the fronts of the kitchen cupboards. Next job is the crap piled on and around the coffee table, windowsill and the windowside dog cage.

Well, I'm going to watch another episode of ER first. But that gets tackled before I go to sleep.

me vs. the Grimmauld Place fridge: death cage grudge match, this afternoon.

I won. But not easily and not without a price.

I don't think I'll ever be able to look a prawn in the face again as long as I live.

*shudder*

You scored as General Jeb Stuart. One of the poster boys of the Civil War, you're almost like a son to General Lee. Then you screw up at Gettysburg and eventually die in battle. Easy come, easy go... </td> William T. Sherman 85% General Nathan Bedford Forrest 85% General Jeb Stuart 85% General James Longstreet 70% U.S. Grant 65% General Ambrose Burnside 65% Robert E. Lee 60% General George McClellan 40% Stonewall Jackson 30% General Phillip Sheridan 25% Which American Civil War General are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Nicked from zogblog. Seems obscurely appropriate. I've never really heard of him. Maybe I'll look it up when I'm feeling less apathetic.

Made some good progress on the kitchen. I've filled two bin bags with ancient bottles of herbs and spices, ten year old bottles of vitamins, old wine-bottle corks, seasoning sachets from long-eaten ramen noodles, yellowed, brittle shopping lists and the like. Everything has a half-inch crust of sticky dust on it. What's hardest to shift are the fossilised splatters of ancient, sticky cooking oil that have hardened into something resembling smelly amber, but, like everything else, there's a secret - start by rubbing on some Cillit Bang (lifesaving stuff, that, even though you don't want to get it on your skin), leave to marinate for ten or so minutes and then scrub off with a Brillo pad.

Spike and Squish are being characteristically unhelpful. The hole in the middle of the lawn is bigger than ever, one of them keeps removing all the sheets from Mum's bed (how? why? who? No idea), and yesterday Spike trod in something foul and tracked it all up the stairs and onto Mum's underblanket (since the sheets had been removed) - so I had to wash both the underblanket and his feet, which he really didn't appreciate.

Cleaning usually makes me feel better. There's a grim satisfaction in defeating the hordes of filth minions, in drawing the line in the dirt and then wiping the dirt out.

Maybe I need to try harder.

So, I'm back at Grimmauld Place.

Mum's away for a week, and I'm here catsitting. Maisie usually leaves the house in a raging sulk when Mum's away, but it's been pissing with rain here so she's lurking malevolently in her little den in Mum's wardrobe on the sock shelf, muttering rude remarks about me and the dogs and ungratefully eating everything I put in front of her. I'm also supposed to be cleaning. I haven't got very far yet, because the whole place is so crusty, disgusting and stuffed to the gills with crap and shite that I just don't know where to start.

Honestly, you wouldn't believe it if you didn't see it. It doesn't need a cleaner, it needs a fucking blowtorch and a wrecking ball. It's scary. I spent nine months living in an abandoned, burnt-out hotel once, with an itinerant collection of homeless junkies, whores, alkies and four dogs, and I swear to Dog even that wasn't as bad.

Well, maybe it was. But still. I had to clean the bathroom a little yesterday before I could bear to have a piss or a shower, then I had to throw away four bottles of body lotion (which I think used to belong to Auntie Sue, now dead these ten years) before I found one that wasn't too rancid to moisturise with.

How long do you have to keep Vaseline before it turns brown with age and smells funny? And wouldn't any normal person throw it away when it reached that point? There are tubes of stuff in the medicine cupboard that used to live in my grandmother's medicine cupboard, and she died seven-odd years ago... some of that shit is older than I am. I sympathise a little, because I inherited those pack rat genes myself - but this is bad even by my standards.

If I don't make any more entries after this, you'll know that the clotted hair in the bathroom sink was galvanised into life by the chemicals in the drain cleaner and crawled out and ate me. Either that, or Lord Lucan knocked me on the head when I surprised him hiding in the cupboard where the cleaning supplies live... because that sure as shit hasn't been opened for a while...