Waking up in a puddle of piss February 25, 2007

This morning, I woke up slowly, and was still deciding which way to go from the groggy, dreamy state I was in; should I push towards waking up and go down to the basement with a gigantic cup of coffee and my laptop and get some writing done, or should I squeeze my eyes shut tightly and get another hour or two?

I rolled around a bit, trying to get into a more comfortable position from which to ponder my choices, and in doing so, allowed a little air under the covers. I smelled the piss and felt my damp pajama bottoms clinging to my legs all at the same time.

My first thought was, “Did I drink way more than I remember last night?” My second thought was, “That’s not human piss. That’s animal piss.”

When we remodeled our basement, we added a door into the laundry room, where the catbox is kept, and when the cat can’t get to her catbox in the middle of the night, apparently she pisses on us. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t dog piss. There’s a difference in the smell. Of course, as I pulled all the sheets off the bed (while cursing the cat), I discovered that one of the dogs had pissed on the corner of the bed. Basically, I spent the night sleeping in a bed filled with both dog and cat piss.

The most annoying thing about this is that we put the door on the laundry room so that the dogs can’t get in there and eat cat poo out of the litter box. We also installed a gate at the top of the stairs so the dogs can’t get in the basement unsupervised and piss on things, because they like to do that. So, in order to prevent my dogs from pissing on things in the basement, or from eating cat shit, I have to prevent my cat from reaching her litterbox, and because of that, she pisses on me in my sleep. And, not to be outdone, one of my dogs then pisses on the bed.

There is something very wrong with this situation. Actually, there are four things wrong with this situation, and they are all covered in fur (which sheds, requiring a lot of otherwise unnecessary sweeping and vacuuming).

We are enduring some kind of crazy-ass weather right now. We’d had several days in a row of near 40-degree temperatures, but that all went away, and beginning sometime last night, we’ve received a bizarre mixture of snow and sleet and frozen spit. Now it’s raining.

I have to go downtown today to see August Wilson’s Radio Golf at the Goodman Theater. I’m not much of a theater-goer. I don’t know why. I’m just not. I’m going with my Dialects in Fiction Writing class. And after that is the graduate student reading at Sheffield’s. It’s going to be a loooooong day. I don’t know what I’m going to read yet, although I have an idea, and if I read that, it’s going to require me to rewrite it in order to squeeze it onto two pages, always a worthy exercise as it forces me to get rid of all the extraneous crap.

Have a lovely day, everybody!