While it is 75 degrees and breathtaking beautiful outside, I am huddled in my office chair, clutching a huge cashmere sweater around me, shivering my ass off.  Because its 66 degrees in my office.  I know this because, to bolster my constant complaints to the building management company about the temperature in my office (or perhaps to prove that I’m not just an unreasonable whiny pain in the ass) my boss bought me a pencil holder with a digital thermometer display.  So now I can tell exactly how fucking freezing it is in here, as if the fact that my fingers go numb whenever I have to pull them out of my sweater sleeves to type wasn’t sufficient.

So since the weather is supposed to be beautiful all weekend, I can’t justify putting this off any longer…I will have to interrupt my regularly scheduled weekend programming of drinking too much, eating things that are bad for me, and sleeping off the hangover until mid-afternoon to begin Operation Backyard Cleanup.  HD and I have been talking forever about ripping out the shoddy hippie landscaping (i.e.put in by the previous owners so that we can start fresh.  We’re finally ready to do it, and have even recruited a couple of his friends to help with the tearing-up process, and purchased sufficient quantities of beer and munchies to get us through it.  There is just one not-so-minor obstacle.  The dog poo.  About nine months worth of it, to be specific.

HD has never been very good about cleaning up after his dog, choosing instead to let him run loose in the wooded area behind our old duplex just so he wouldn’t have to pick up the big, steaming piles of crap that his 65-lb poop machine leaves scattered in his wake.  When we moved into our house, we started with the best of intentions, alternating poop cleanup duty every Saturday morning.  But as the yard got more and more overgrown and out of control, we stopped going out there so we wouldn’t have to look at it.  Since we weren’t going out there anymore, we got kind of …lazy…about the dog poop issue.  As far as I can recall, the last time we bothered to clean up the dog poop in our large, fenced in and totally overgrown back yard was sometime last summer.  ish.  I’m not sure how much poop two dogs (1 65-lb mutt and 1 8-lb minpin) can generate in nine months, but I’m not looking forward to finding out.

Although…this may be a good excuse to go buy some cute Wellingtons.

***Alright, folks, you know the rules. Join us all in humiliating the crap out of yourself every Thursday by sharing some completely tasteless, wholly unclassy, “how many readers can I estrange THIS week??” TMI story about your life. Or hell, about someone else’s!

 Steal this button and put it in your post just by copying and pasting the html code in the box below, or just link back to the hub with this link, so your readers can read ALLLLLLL the TMI glory, and I’ll make sure to link to you.***

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Now get ready, my darlings, for the ever popular, yet gravely feared, TMI THURSDAYS…

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Shocking as it may be to those who have only observed our recent marital bliss, HD and I weren’t always so sure that we were meant to be.  When he graduated college and moved to Austin to take his dream job, we’d been dating on and off for a year and a half, and since the off parts were so frequent, I didn’t really feel that we had enough of a future to justify moving my ass halfway across the country.  So we broke up.  Again.  Determined to make it stick this time, we managed to go about 6 weeks without speaking to each other.

During that time, alone in a new city and understandably heartbroken over the loss of me, HD decided that he’d get a puppy to keep him company.  He went down to the humane society and picked out an adorable German Shepard/God-only-knows-what mix who we’ll call Max.   Two months later, I joined HD in Austin.  I’ve never been a dog person, considering them to be sort of needy and annoying, so I was less than thrilled about sharing an apartment with a puppy.  Max greeted me at the door, promptly sticking his head up my miniskirt.  After a rocky start when he chewed the heel off one of my absolute-favoritest, limited-edition (and therefore, irreplaceable) Steve Madden platform sandals and (in retaliation after I spanked him for that) ate one of my $54 Victoria’s Secret push-up bras, Max and I eventually bonded.

Max grew up to be a sweetie, but he’s dumb as a rock, and incredibly neurotic.  This wouldn’t be such a problem, except that when he gets nervous or upset (which is constantly), his anxiety manifests itself in the form of explosive, foul-smelling doggy diarrhea.   As a puppy, when he still spent the days locked in his kennel while we were at work, this meant HD frequently came home to a very unhappy poop-covered pooch.  I will never forget laughing hysterically on the couch with HD’s roomate as we watched him haul the entire kennel out to the backyard to hose down both crate and dog for the third time in one week, cursing furiously and gagging all the way.

When we moved out of HD’s apartment into a duplex, for days, Max nervously leaked puddles of liquid feces all over the house.  Since I have a sensitive stomach and vomit at the slightest glimpse, sound or smell of even normal dog shit, if I was unlucky enough to arrive home first, I would simply put a bucket face down over the spots and wait for HD to come home and deal with it. 

Then one night, just moments after HD had left the house for a poker tournament with the boys, I walked into our bathroom to find a clearly mortified Max crouched miserably in the middle of what I can only describe as a shit explosion.  There was poo EVERYWHERE…smudged all over our cream colored rugs, spattered across the white tiles, splashed all along one wall and across the front of the toilet bowl, and even, inexplicably, a huge smear on the back of the door, a good four feet from the floor.   Seriously, how he got his ass up there, I’ll never know…apparently Max can projectile-poop, or stand on his head.

Panicked, I called HD, who of course, found the whole thing hysterical.  I demanded that he turn right around and deal with his dog’s mess, but he smugly advised me that he wasn’t driving, and that they had just enough people to play, so he couldn’t possibly bail, or they’d have to cancel the whole tournament. 

Fuming, I contemplated my options.  We only had one bathroom, but nevertheless, for a good thirty minutes I seriously considered simply closing the door and peeing outside for the rest of the night, but it was February, and we had neighbors.   Finally, I realized that I would just have to put on my big girl panties and a pair of rubber gloves and clean it up.

Needless to say, I was absolutely LIVID with HD for leaving me alone with his incontinent asshole of a dog.  When he got home that night, I pretended to be asleep, since I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for sexy time after my revolting ordeal. 

I’d finally drifted off to sleep for real, only to be awakened by the sound of Lamaze-style panting and Max pacing nervously around our bed…a sure sign that another explosion was impending.  Fortunately HD, who is usually a very sound sleeper, heard the warning signs too and jumped out of bed.  I could hear him whispering frantically to Max as he felt his way towards the top of the stairs in the dark  “hold on buddy…just give me a minute, we’ll get you outside…” not wanting to further enrage me by flipping on the  bedroom light. 

The next thing I heard was a soft, squelching sound, followed by:

“FUCK!!!!  WHAT THE…FUCK…IS THAT??? OH MY GOD…SHIT!”

A loud thud.

Another squishy sound.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK!!!” — at a level that can only be described as shrieking. 

I bolted upright in bed and switched on the lamp. 

HD was sprawled awkwardly across the doorway of our bedroom, clinging to the doorframe, in the middle of what was literally a MINEFIELD of shit.  Each of his BARE feet was squarely in the midst of a nice, big pile (which really was unavoidable, since the landing at the top of the stairs was literally covered in it).  When he stepped in the second pile, he slipped.  He caught himself by holding onto the doorframe, but came close enough to the ground to smear poo up the back of one calf and across the hip of his boxers.

I’ve never seen him so angry, not before or since, but being the vindictive bitch that I am, I laughed my ass off as he hurled poor Max bodily out the back door and got in the shower, boxers and all.  I smothered my helpless giggles in the pillow for the next hour as I listened to him scrub the carpet, swearing and muttering under his breath the whole time.   When Max was finally allowed back in the house, I whispered in his ear that we could call it even for that pair of shoes.

One night, Little Johnny heard strange noises coming from his parent’s bedroom.  Frightened, he crept down the hall and cautiously eased open the door to see his mother, butt-naked and bent over the dresser, with his father behind her, holding onto her hips and thrusting away like a jackhammer.  When his father caught sight of Little Johnny peeping in, he gave him a little smile and a wink.

After he finished, his father went to check on Little Johnny to make sure that the child wasn’t too traumatized by what he’d seen.  When he opened the door to Little Johnny’s room, he saw Grandma, butt-naked and bent over the dresser, with Little Johnny behind her, holding onto her hips and thrusting away like a jackhammer.

“Little Johnny, what the hell are you doing???” his father hollered.

Little Johnny smirked, still thrusting away.

“Yeah, it’s not so fucking funny when its your mother, is it?”

***Alright, folks, you know the rules. Join us all in humiliating the crap out of yourself every Thursday by sharing some completely tasteless, wholly unclassy, “how many readers can I estrange THIS week??” TMI story about your life. Or hell, about someone else’s!

 Steal this button and put it in your post just by copying and pasting the html code in the box below, or just link back to the hub with this link, so your readers can read ALLLLLLL the TMI glory, and I’ll make sure to link to you.***

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Now get ready, my darlings, for the ever popular, yet gravely feared, TMI THURSDAYS…

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Normally I only embarass myself with these blogs, but this story was just too priceless to resist retelling.  I have changed the names of the parties involved to protect their privacy…and so Child Services doesn’t come and confiscate their child.

We have a couple of friends who live about 4 hours away.  Not only do they live four hours away, but they have a child, so we don’t get to see them that often.  When we do all get the chance to get together, madness ensues and we do our best to party like (aging) rock stars. 

One weekend when they were in town, we had returned from a long night at the bars and were lounging around their swanky hotel room downtown. I overheard my friend B say this: “…the vibrator story.”  This of course piqued my interest — I’m pervy like that – and I immediately inserted myself into the conversation and demanded to know what she was talking about.

“I’ve never told you the vibrator story???” she asked, incredulous.  “You most certainly have not, that sounds like the sort of thing that I would remember!” I insisted indignantly. I dragged HD over so he wouldn’t miss any of the dirty details.  I was not remotely sober at the time, so this isn’t verbatim, but the story went something like this:

“Well, when little Timmy was about 18 months old, we used to sleep with our bedroom door open so we could hear him if he woke up.  He’d never climbed out of his crib or anything, so we didn’t think it was a big deal.  One night we decided to bust out my vibrator, which was bright orange and glew (that part…”glew”…is verbatim…and she’s a highschool teacher) in the dark.  I usually put it away right after we’re done, but I was really tired, so I just set it on the nightstand so I’d remember to put it away in the morning.  I was awakened the next morning by a shrill toddler yell and a hard blow to the face.  Our son had climbed out of his crib, come into our room, picked up the vibrator and bashed me in the eye with it.  I had a huge shiner under my right eye for days.”

HD and I stared at her with our mouths hanging open unattractively, shocked speechless.  “That may be the best story I have ever heard in my entire life,” I told her after I regained the power of speech.  “But how did you explain the shiner to people?  Did you tell them D was slappin’ you around again?” I asked, grinning at her husband.

“I told them that my son hit me in the face with a toy.  Which wasn’t really a lie.”

“Technically, that’s true,” I agreed, “you just didn’t specify whose.”

I called the courthouse to find out how they would notify the public if they were closed.  They told me that they would make that decision at 6 am, and that it would be posted in a runner along the bottom of the screen on all the local tv stations.  So I got up early this morning and checked the news.  No courthouse closing, but since traffic here slows to a crawl if it so much as sprinkles, I decided to leave early, just to be on the safe side.  No traffic at all.  Arrived an hour early for my hearing (which meant I got to sit in Starbucks for an hour savoring a peppermint white chocolate mocha, which left me feeling quite festive, if over-caffeinated).

I met HD for lunch afterward at the Domain, a clump of upscale shops and trendy restaurants that is usually insanely packed.  The place was deserted, all of the warm-blooded Texas weenies no doubt busy filling their garages with bottled water and putting chains on their tires.  Just as we were finishing eating, HD blurted “See!  Its snowing!”

I looked outside.  A few flakes were gusting lazily around in the wind, but hardly what I would call snow.  I drove back to work without even turning my windshield wipers on, slamming on my brakes at the last possible second, as is my habit, without the slightest hint of a slip or skid.  By the time I was back at my desk seven minutes later, the “snow” had stopped, and the sun came out.  Nevertheless, in the interim, one of my coworkers called to say that he couldn’t make it back to work “because the roads were just too bad.”

Seriously??? Really, people?  When I was 16, my best friend and I drove from our home town to Chicago to catch our flight to Florida for spring break in the middle of the night in a blizzard so bad I literally couldn’t see more than five feet in front of the car, and my mother, who to this day makes me call her every time I get off an airplane, despite the fact that I fly several times per week for work, let us.  I remember having to dig our way out of the house one morning when the snow had drifted all the way up past the top of the front door…to walk to school.  You Texans, for all your unneceesarily-large-truck-driving, gun-loving, bull-riding, and wife-beating sure are a bunch of god damn sissies when it comes to a little winter weather.

 Steal this button and put it in your post just by copying and pasting the html code in the box below, or just link back to the hub with this link, so your readers can read ALLLLLLL the TMI glory, and I’ll make sure to link to you.***

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This year, we had Thanksgiving with HD’s friends.  HD is an engineer.  He works at a tech company, and all of his friends are engineers.  Which means that they are all guys, and not the most, shall we say, socially adept group.  With the exception of one (who, in typical engineer fashion, married the first girl who ever agreed to go out with him and is now stuck in a miserable, loveless union to a raging harpy who has put on at least 50 lbs in the last three months and barely permits him to leave the house) the boys are all painfully single.  None of them have had a girlfriend, or even, to my knowledge, a date in the six years that HD’s been hanging out with them.   They’re not awful looking, just a little pasty and out of shape, but the problem is simply that they spend so much time together at work (where there are no women) and outside of work (at their favorite dive bar or in front of the Xbox, where there are no women) that they’ve completely forgotten how to interact with the fairer sex.

Like most men who get drunk a lot and smoke a lot of weed, they love to eat.  Since none of them has any realistic hope of finding a woman that will cook for them at any point in the foreseeable future, they’ve been forced to learn to feed themselves.   Even the most dedicated bachelor gets sick of frozen pizza and extra value meals eventually, and they’ve all become obsessed with watching the Food Network and trying out the recipes.

For Thanksgiving, they pulled out all the stops…one guy made dinner rolls from scratch, another brined a turkey, made gravy from the drippings, and mashed red potatoes with buttermilk, rosemary and garlic.  There was apricot, sage and bacon stuffing, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes with brown sugar and pecans, cranberry sauce, and three kinds of pie.  HD made his famous harvest potatoes…his mother’s recipe, which involve baking a bag of frozen hash browns with chopped onions and peppers, cream of chicken soup, sour cream, about 20 sticks of butter and at least 5 lbs of shredded cheese…mmmmmmm.   

Last year, no one thought to bring appetizers, and eight hours of drinking with no food, tortured by the incredible smells wafting from the kitchen was not an experience I wanted to repeat,  so I volunteered to bring snacks.  (This had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I don’t cook, and everyone is well enough aware of that not to eat anything I made even if I were so inclined.)  Since I’m used to shopping for HD and myself, I didn’t really know how much food you’d need for 10 people.  I may have gone slightly overboard (two boxes of crackers, five gourmet cheeses, a loaf of rosemary sourdough, tortilla chips, green chile dip, spinach artichoke dip, hummus and fresh rasberries), and long before dinner, I began to suspect that I was going to have a tough time saving room for turkey.

The dinner spread was truly awe-inspiring.  We sat down to dinner after six hours of cooking, and demolished everything on our plates in 3 minutes flat.  I’d put only one tiny bite of everything on  my plate, aware that my stomach was too stuffed with brie and spinach dip to accomodate much more, but unwilling to miss out on a single delicious-looking dish.  I’d saved the harvest potatoes…one of my favorite foods in the world…for last, but I couldn’t even eat it.  I broke out in a full-body sweat, and had to excuse myself from the table and sit outside on the back porch in the hopes that the crisp, November air would help.  I didn’t feel like I was going to puke — I felt like my stomach was literally going to explode.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one.  There were three bathrooms at the host’s house, and all three were occupied for the next several hours.  All of the boys looked sweaty and pale, and the drinking pace slowed significantly.  We ate at 5:00 p.m.  By 7:00, the living room was noticeably warmer.  And…smellier. 

I’m used to breathing through my mouth — HD is one GASSY mofo, and his farts STINK.  I’m talking, eye-watering, make-you-gag, burn-the-hair-inside-your-nostrils stink.  And he doesn’t even have enough manners to warn you when he does it, just waits until you inhale and, gagging uncontrollably, cry “Oh MY GOD, what is that fucking SMELL?”  Then he smiles proudly.  The only warning you ever get is when it’s so bad that he actually has to get up and move himself.

But this wasn’t just one smelly guy…it was NINE.  Nine dudes, who’d been drinking beer all day and stuffing their faces with well-aged gourmet cheeses, and then gorging on a huge Thanksgiving feast.  All sitting…and farting ….and belching…. clouds of steamy, noxious gas…in one living room.

K, the host of this party, is notorious for farting at work.  They have an open-cubicle  style office, with no actual walls, so the stench drifts to everyone in the cubes around him, making him very unpopular.  His new house has beautiful bamboo floors.  Since he doesn’t have enough furniture to accomodate 10 people, he’d hauled his desk chair into the livingroom and was sitting in it, politely letting his guests have his comfy leather couches.  Everytime he let a smelly one rip, he would roll his chair away.  Pretty soon he was zipping back and forth across the room every few minutes.  “This is awesome!” he declared.  “I wish we had hardwood floors at work.  It’s like crop-dusting.”

By the time the UT game started, the room was like a gas chamber.  Unbelievably, you’d become sort of immune to it after awhile…except that we kept going outside periodically to smoke.  Every time you’d walk back into the house, it was like getting hit in the face with a wall of the foulest stench imaginable…you could actually pick out the odors of  cheese, onions, turkey, stuffing, and beer…all nicely mixed with overpowering hot, rotten egg.  

A few more guys showed up to watch the game, and the first words uttered by each one of them when they walked in was some variation of  ”Oh my god, it smells like shit in here!”  Eventually, despite the fact that it was now freezing outside, we locked up K’s cat, threw on sweatshirts and left the back door open to air the place out. 

For the first time in all of recorded history, no one was in the mood to go back for a plate of  leftovers a few hours later.

Now that I’ve gotten warmed up, I’m ready to share one of the single most embarassing things that has ever happened to me…it happened almost two years ago, and I still blush just thinking about it…

A few years ago, HD and I met this couple, B & B.  They were highschool sweethearts that got married right after graduation, and were now in their early 40′s, so they’d been married FOREVER, but were still obnoxiously in love with each other.  The first time I visited their house, B was giving me the tour.

“And this is the costume room,” she announced, as we walked into a small room off the master bedroom, with heaps of clothes, wigs, hats, pom poms, shoes and other assorted props piled on the bed and along the walls.

“The costume room?” I asked, puzzled.  “You have an entire room just for Halloween costumes?”

“Honey, these aren’t for Halloween,” she laughed.  “They’re for…you know…role playing.”

I was speechless.  I’m no prude, but it had never occurred to me to spice up our sex life by dressing up as a librarian or a cheerleader.  B laughed at my wide-eyed expression, as I gingerly examined a pair of thigh-high leather boots and a riding crop propped in the corner.

“Don’t look so shocked,” she said.  “Just wait until you’ve been married for 20 years.  You’d be surprised at what you’ll try to keep things interesting.”

A few months later, we were hanging out with them at our place one night when the subject of porn came up.  HD and I voiced our newfound enthusiasm for watching it together (don’t judge, porn can be very…inspirational). 

“Oh good,” B squealed,” then we’ll have to add you to our Christmas porn swap list.”

“Christmas porn swap??” I inquired.

“Well, we buy a ton of DVDs, but you get sick of watching the same ones over and over, so at Christmas we all exchange videos so that everyone has some new ones to watch.”

“We don’t really own any of our own yet…we mostly find stuff on the internet,” I explained.

“Ok, I’ll make sure we give you guys a big stack of them this year to get your collection started,” she promised.  “What kind of stuff do you like?”

Since this was fairly early in my porn-watching days, I didn’t really know how to respond.  “That’s ok, we’ll just give you a variety.  But I’ll warn you, we like our porn really dirty,” she said. 

“Dirty is good.” I grinned.

They made good on their promise.  That New Years Eve, B presented me with a festive holiday gift bag chock-full of DVDs.  We took them home, and after some embarassed laughter at the cheesy titles printed on the covers (think “Butt Sluts IV,” “Hot Horny Teens Get Gangbanged” etc.) we decided that we weren’t quite bold enough to display these movies on the rack in our living room with the rest of our more family-friendly DVDs, so I shoved them under the bed.  Where they remained, forgotten, for the next year and a half.

In March of 2008, HD and I bought a house.  Since HD is a pretty big guy, he gets suckered into helping every friend he has move.  However, this paid off, since when it came time for us to move, he had about 6 of his buddies that owed him, so we had all the manpower we needed.

One of the last things I did as we were packing up was pull out all the shit that had accumulated under our California king bed over the last 18 months.  Its a big bed, and I couldn’t reach the piles of junk that had gotten pushed all the way to the middle, so I laid on my stomach with a broom and used the handle to sweep everything towards me.  Among the debris was the stack of videos from B&B.  HD and I laughed about the fact that we’d never even watched them, and I shoved them in a box under a pile of shoes.

It so happened that on the morning of our moving day, I had a three-hour fitness challenge at my boxing gym that my trainer coerced me into still coming to.  When I arrived at the new house, the truck was backed up the driveway, and the front door was open, but none of the guys were in sight.  When I went inside, all seven of them were seated on the floor in front of the tv, mesmerized by the vagina spread across the 65-inch screen.

“What the hell are you guys watching??”  I asked, exhausted, sweaty, and none too happy that our work crew had apparently decided to take a porn break.

“Stupid Pussy Tricks.” HD’s old roommate J responded.  “This chick can shoot apples out of her cootch.”

“That’s disgusting!  Why would you want to watch that??”  I demanded.

“I don’t know,” J replied, arching his eyebrow at me. “Its your video.”

“It is not! I would never watch, more or less buy, a porn called “Stupid Pussy Tricks!” I insisted indignantly.

“We found it under your bed.”

Oh. 

“That’s not ours, a friend gave us a bunch of movies, it was sort of a joke…” I babbled, turning beet red.

“Suuuuurrrre.  Of course its not yours,” they chorused, rolling their eyes at me.

HD glared at me.  “I thought you pulled everything out from under the bed,” he hissed.  “I thought I did too, apparently I missed one.”

“Of all the ones for you to miss, it had to be ‘Stupid Pussy Tricks’?”

Yep.  Apparently.  His friends will never, never let us live it down. 

Everytime we’re all hanging out and there’s talk of watching a movie, or a discussion of favorite movies, or god forbid a conversation about porn, I get to relive the humiliation of the whole “Stupid Pussy Tricks” debacle all over again.  I think this Christmas I should buy them each their very own copy.  Except that I could never walk into a video store and request that title.

For today’s TMI Thursday, I will share with the world a memory that has haunted me for years…

My sophomore year of highschool, my mother went through an ugly divorce from Stepfather No. 2.  When she pulled herself out of her funk and started dating again during my junior year, my formerly unbearably overprotective, its-five-minutes-past-curfew-she-must-have-been-abducted-therefore-I-will-call-the-police mother seemed to forget she had two teenage daughters, spending most of her weekends at her new boyfriend’s place, and allowing us a previously unimaginable amount of freedom to get drunk, stay out late, make out with boys, eat junk food, and amass knee-high piles of dirty laundry that covered the entire floor of our bedrooms.  It was bliss.

Since I grew up in a small town in the midwest, and its cold as fuck there for 10 months out of the year, leaving teenagers nothing to do but drink, dry hump each other in basement rec rooms, and loiter in the parking lot of the local Hardees, at 17, I was already a seasoned drinker, as were the majority of my friends.  But I had one friend, we’ll call her C, who stubbornly abstained.  Until the evening in question, she’d never touched a drop.

On this particular Friday evening, Moms had already taken off for the boyfriend’s for the weekend, so of course 3.5 minutes later, most of my highschool class arrived to party.  It wasn’t even dark yet, but I was already lit up like a Christmas tree and making sloppy drunk- 17-year-old fuck me eyes at my then-crush when C stormed into the party.  She’d just been dumped, by the nerdy, quiet guy that no one could figure out why she dated in the first place. (C was one of those mythical girls who was gorgeous, but had no clue that she was, and accordingly, no self-esteem).  The details are fuzzy (they probably were then too, given how many Zimas I’d consumed at that point…yeah I said Zima, fuck off, I was 17, and that shit was gooood) but he’d been talking to one of her friends behind her back or something like that, a betrayal of the highest order.  I’d never seen C in such a rage.  She demanded a drink.  Dubiously, I made her a tiny, weak screwdriver, not sure how she would handle it.

Well, she didn’t.  I vaguely remember a brief period of time where she was laughing, sloppy, slobbering drunk before the vomiting started.  Projectile vomiting.  All over my mother’s prized (hideously ugly) antique flowered rug.  Now, I don’t deal well with vomit, to say the least.  I have a touchy stomach, and if I see it, hear it, smell it, or even think about it too much, I’ll do it.  So when C started blowing chunks, I made myself scarce while my other friends hustled her into the bathroom.  Where she remained, alternately passed out, and spewing all over every surface in the bathroom but the toilet.  For the rest of the night.  We only had the one bathroom at the time, so the girls were just stepping over her prone body to get to the toilet, and the guys were just peeing in the backyard all night.

At one point, my sister told me that I should go and check on her.  I remember sighing, and tottering down the hallway towards the bathroom.  I could hear her retching, so I paused just outside the door to gather myself.  When I looked down, I saw a tide of vomit seeping out from under the door.  I grabbed a towel from the linen closet, stuffed it into the crack, and fled.  (I know, I know, I’m a shitty friend).

The rest of the party was a blur.  At some point, I managed to crawl to my bedroom, navigate through the piles of laundry and pass out in my bed.  I was awakened by the sound of my bedroom door opening.  The light was on in the hallway, but I could make no sense of the figure sillouetted in my doorway.  There seemed to be something very wrong with the shape of its head….C shuffled further into the room, and I literally shrieked in horror at the sight of her.

She’d been passed out on the bathroom floor all night in a pool of her own vomit.  The puke had dried in her shoulder length bob to a consistency somewhere between raw eggs and cement. It was sticking straight up, fanned back from her face on the side she’d been laying on in a spiky, off-center mohawk, while the other side was sticking straight out to the side in huge, crusty lumps and tangles.

She blinked at me in confusion.  “What happened last night…did I pass out?”

“You haven’t looked in the mirror yet, have you?”

“No, why?  I’m sure I look awful.  I feel awful.”

“Just don’t.”

I hustled her past the bathroom mirror and shoved her into the shower with all of her clothes still on and a big bottle of shampoo and conditioner.   She was in there for the better apart of an hour, and I could hear her yelping over the sound of the water, no doubt trying to work her fingers through that trainwreck on her head.  To this day, I can still picture the way she looked, framed in my bedroom doorway, with that crazy puke-do…

Last night, we were enjoying our usual Sunday ritual of spending the entire day in our jammies, drinking red wine in a misguided attempt to forget how hung over we are, playing video games and stuffing junk food into our faces.  HD disappeared into the kitchen for a good twenty minutes, and returned proudly bearing what he declared “the most awesome nachos EVER” made from all the leftovers we had from having all the guys over to watch the game on Saturday…blue corn chips piled with grilled jalepeno and cheddar sausages, guacamole, onions, tomatoes, and shredded cheddar, with roasted chipotle salsa for dipping. 

Now, while I have joyfully adapted to most things Tex-Mex since moving to Austin, I bizarrely have never really been a big fan of salsa.  No idea why, I love tomatoes, but salsa just doesn’t excite me much, and HD typically likes the stuff that makes my eyes water and my lips burn for hours.  But he cajoled me into tasting this particular salsa, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was delightful.  We dug in.  A few minutes later, I realized that I’d already consumed half my body weight in nachos, and settled back on the couch, safely out of arm’s reach of the plate. (cuz, you know, if I have to actually lean forward to get at my food, I won’t eat any more.  Laziness trumps gluttony every time.) 

“Awww, god dammit!”  HD was staring down in front of him, where a huge glop of salsa had just landed on the blanket covering our couch (not only good for sex-related stains).  Before I could react, he leaned over and LICKED IT UP!  For a moment, I was rendered speechless. 

“Did you just actually LICK salsa off the couch????”

“It was the last of the salsa.” (slightly defensive, slightly embarassed tone.)

“But…you LICKED salsa off the couch!”

“Either I was gonna do it, or the dogs were, and that salsa was too good to waste on them.”

Thank god the boy’s got mad skills in the bedroom.