Part 2

My hopes of tranquility were shattered, almost literally when I arrived home,  went to get a glass of water, and the ceiling started shaking. I ran upstairs to find three boys playing nerf basketball and beating the crap out of each other ( but not necessarily in that order).  I chased them into the basement where they continued to beat the crap out of each other, this time while playing pool, but at least I didn't have plaster in my drink.

Along the way I passed the girls in standard formation....braiding each others hair, listening to base laden music on a devise with no base, and compulsively pouring over facebook making duckfaces.

I headed back downstairs and cooked myself up a California kitchen frozen pizza.  It's the spiciest, toppings laden, cardboard crust frozen pizza, completely devoid of all nutritional value but heavy with carcinogens.  It's delicious.


My wife and her mother sat in from of the TV which was turned up to ear shattering levels, projecting the insights and emotions of one home makeover show or another.  The programming was periodically interrupted by commercials for other home makeover shows, estrogen replacement therapy products, and some god awful Seth Rogan/Barbara Streisand movie.  These ads are all implausibly louder than the program, but since the women only talk to each other during the breaks, they're forced to scream at each other at the top of their lungs.






I moved onto eating little tiny cheese cakes with cherry topping that I hid  way back in the fridge so no one else would eat them. Then I found where someone else had hidden some whipped topping and stole just enough that they might not notice that any was taken.

I yelled  at the women to turn the T.V. down during the commercials and get yelled at back for being unreasonable.

Then I ate the rest of the whipped topping and buried the evidence deep in the trash.

At some point during all of this my third daughter facetimed ( if that's even a verb) in from my parent's house.   The girls came down and the boys came up and a fight broke out over the iPad as everyone tried to talk to Sophie, who was thoroughly excited to be the center of chaos and attention. When it was finally my turn she makes it a point to tell me that I still l look like I'm losing my hair and I have a unibrow "even on the Internet".  I faked outrage and she laughed uncontrollably then told me she loved me before she was snatched away by the girls who took over the iPad as the boys wandered off to the kitchen.

I became concerned that someone would start looking for the whipped toppling.


That's when total pandemonium hit,  " A mouse, a mouse, we're all going to get the plague.....ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. "  Kids started screaming and running in place and a little mouse scampered across the kitchen floor and up under the cupboard.

Four goddamn cats....I'm halfway to being a shut in, with all these stupid cats... and we have a mouse.



I chased everyone off and went out to the garage to find a mouse trap. After 20 minutes I found 3 hidden keys I'd forgotten, an almost empty bottle of sambuka from 2004, and a Polaroid from a friend's bachelor party that might have gotten him divorced if he wasn't divorced already.

By the time I admitted defeat and came in, the ladies had shuffled off to bed and I laid on the coach alone.  I watched one of the cats repeatedly try to climb the Christmas tree only to come cartwheeling back down in a rain of ornaments and fall into the tree stand moat.

As I sipped my vintage sambuka and drifted off to sleep, I mumbled to myself, "They're never going to get respect from the mice at this rate."