Horrors and hells
Many wretched things have occurred to me of late, and I am certain that Lump, that hairy, foul-breathed beast, is behind all this.
First, I received a penal pedicure following my ‘assault’ on Weeza. Seriously, all kinds of uproarious outcry over a few teensy scratches on her head… I don’t get these humans. Lump gets away with murder, and I was only trying to entice the Weeza to play. At any rate, Lump mocked me shamelessly whilst I was incarcerated in a towel having my fingernails cut to mere nubbins. She is vile.
Also this week: my food molded (probably due to some toxic compound in The Beast’s saliva). The bathtub drain regurgitates filthy water, which then fails to drain, rendering the Two-Leggeds and Lump unable to bathe and thus stinging my nostrils with their wretched stink. The Speeding Oven had a dead battery, which meant that the Two-Leggeds failed to take The Beast to the dog park for several days running. And finally, the Two-Leggeds created human-size possum replicas to wear for Halloween, triggering flashbacks of the invasion and leading to my diagnosis of PTSD.
I just couldn’t take it anymore. I bided my time and looked for an opportunity. I seized the chance this weekend, when Mama left the front door ajar a moment longer than was wise. I looked left, then right… Then in a flash I darted through the narrow opening to the beckoning bliss of the outdoors. Alas, I was so overcome by the joyous sensations of my first freedom in six weeks – the brilliance of the sunshine, the crisp scent of fall, the gentle breeze upon my whiskers – that I tarried a moment too long. I was, without ceremony, snatched up from behind and thrown with all the care one might give a sack of garbage, back into the house, where I managed a halfhearted swipe at The Beast before skulking off beneath the bed.
Those humans best keep an eye on that dog, though. I’ve shown merely a taste of my vast repertoire of capabilities.
-d
Dmitri: the last laugh is mine
My humans have been woefully, if characteristically, remiss in updating this blog. Using my claws powers of persuasion and my computer hacking skills, I have convinced them to relinquish primary authorship to me until further notice. So, although I know you’ve all enjoyed reading Mama and Weeza’s pitifully mundane reports of life as we know it, prepare yourself for a paradigm shift. No longer shall we discuss this family in self-deprecating white-trash vernacular. Get ready for life through the lens of Dmitri Vladimir’s 100 Digits of Doom!
– dmi
Colorado, night 1
Three state park policy violations in less than 5 hours- according to the park ranger who woke us up…. What were they? Oh, the usual: car parked on grass, not actually camping on our designated camp site, and ignoring the prohibition of hanging anything from trees. Apparently we were still breaking code even though the hammock had fallen twice with us in it and we finally just slept on the ground where we landed. Where I had just peed, no less. Evidently our still slightly suspended feet were enough to cause concern and warrant our further disturbance. If she bothered to snap a picture before rousing us, it should be titled EPIC FAIL.
Let’s Get the Hell Out of Kansas
Having just abruptly ended a very cheap game of pool at a place called Jeremiah Bullfrog’s in Topeka, we are now back on I-70 headed West. Although we still had two full games left on our dollar, (4 games for $1, WHAT???) we felt the overall skeeziness of the establishment in addition to some general and perhaps unwarranted uneasiness about the welfare of the pets, was reason enough to walk out and head to what we hope will be a much more enjoyable experience further West.
Thus far the trip has been quite smooth. The weather is apparently significantly cooler traveling this more northern route than it was on the East-bound leg of the odyssey. The pets are awesome. Lump is a natural camping dog- she hasn’t made a peep the whole time and absolutely loves exploring the camp sites. The cats seem relatively content. They’ve found a little cubby just behind the front seats and have been nestled there for the majority of the trip. Plus people keep stopping us to pet Lump, which I’m afraid is only making her ego grow. But whatever, she might just be awesome enough to deserve a big ego.
The only truly bad experience so far happened a full 20 minutes into the trip, when Dmitri decided to make a point and shit heroically in Lump’s bed. But I guess he felt sufficiently satisfied after that because he’s been mostly out of sight the rest of the ride.
St. Louis was nice as far as the weather goes, but it’s much hotter here in Kansas. Honestly, I’m not really sure why people would live here, but I suppose I’m simply unaware of the state’s bounteous assets. It doesn’t really matter though, because I think all five of us have unanimously agreed we don’t ever want to live here, so there.
All the gear is staying really well on top of the car. As Mel’s mama pointed out, we’re but one rocking chair shy of having the complete Beverly Hillbillies look. Ah, but don’t think that that’s in any way spared us from our share of gawking and laughing. It took us until somewhere near Chattanooga to realize our cheap tarp had been completely shredded by the wind and had begun sailing above the car while casting an ominous shark shadow across the road. Once we ditched that, though, we not only suffered less humiliation but we also made much better time on the drive.
And so, we are now hoping to spend a couple of relaxing days in Colorado just roaming about and potentially camping in much more interesting places. One can only hope.
But I would be remiss to neglect reporting that some really awesome accidents have already taken place. First, we found a great shuffleboard table at Hair of the Dog Pub in St. Louis. I won’t bother with who won or by how much, but I will happily report that Mel’s ass was thoroughly kicked. Last night we stumbled upon a rather lovely campsite just West of St. Louis. We happened to park (in the dark) at a campsite with 136 steps leading down to a lake. Lump had to be carried down the steps, but happily galloped up the entire way back. Mel and I were definitely proud. At any rate we tried out our new camping hammock and have officially been converted. God, it was the best sleep ever. We both highly recommend trying this out if you get a chance.
– Apryl
and the journey is soon to recommence.
At long last, The Lump slumbers quietly in her crate. I think that perhaps she got into my coffee this morning when I wasn’t looking, and aliens have almost certainly swapped her brain with that of some utterly ill-behaved dog. Probably one who only understands Swahili. Or perhaps Martian. She’s been a hyperactive basketcase all day, in a way that far surpasses anything we’d seen to date. I know she’s a puppy, but this puppyness has come about all of a sudden. I’m thrilled she finally feels better, having recovered from her parasites and whatnot, but can’t she see that I do NOT have time to play?!?
Just kidding. Of COURSE we have time to play with our adorable puppy, and train her and work on making her a good canine citizen. But we are quite busy. Plans have changed yet again, and so Apryl and I are gearing up to make the trek back to California a bit sooner than originally planned. We’ll be leaving sometime next week (Wednesday, perhaps?) on our cross-country drive (though Apryl will return to Alabama for a few more weeks after this trip to spend some time with friends and family before she really moves out there). As a result, we’ve both been packing/cleaning/sorting/plotting with gusto, and today has seen me frantically trying to make sense of the odds and ends that remain loose in the house. And Lump has been decidedly unhelpful, gnashing her little needle-teeth into boxes and attempting to remove anything that has been safeguarded against its own fragility to determine whether my packing skills were sufficient.
The car will be a bit more crowded this time around; in addition to the fact that the Summer of Sloth and Gluttony and Papa Jacques have done their damnedest to expand the girths of both humans and felines respectively, we will obviously be in the company of a third four-legged child. And a mere fraction of Apryl’s worldly goods.
Ah, but we are sincerely excited for another long, hot, crowded ride in the Speeding Oven. At least, we bipeds are. I feel like I haven’t had enough time with my family, but I’m planning to fill the next several days with them. We’ll be returning to better weather and a wealth of good people. And we’ll be returning via a different route than the one I took heading east. We’re leaving out of Peachtree City, Georgia, and driving by way of Nashville, TN; St. Louis, MO; across the corn-laden abyss of Kansas; through Denver/Boulder, CO; across Utah; through Nevada; stopping to ride an evidently epic roller coaster in Las Vegas; and skirting around Mojave National Park to arrive in San Diego just in time to move into our new digs with Matt and Maya.
We welcome suggestions of places to eat, camp, play, and relax along our route. We are totally game for detours that would lead us to gorgeous or otherwise worthwhile environs. Let us know if you have any thoughts for us, and San Diego, we’ll see you in September!
– melanie
And Apryl Finally Just Updates In Melanie’s Stead Since It Obviously Wasn’t Happening Any Other Way….
WELL,
A lot has happened since the tall one last posted. For starters, as any devout Facebooker would know, we have jointly acquired a puppy to whom we have assigned the moniker “Lump,” short for Little Ukrainian Mutt Puppy. Lump has seen some hard times, which means primarily that we can do no wrong in her eyes for she has seen far worse. It’s the best way to do things -set the bar low at the outset. Lump is currently devouring a baked potato and a scrambled egg from a tupperware bowl that simply MUST be constantly moved from one spot to the next across the kitchen to be eaten properly. It would be the essence of bad manners to give thought to the spilled portions upon the floor. The art of eating while moving has been masterfully accomplished by our pup at tender age of 9ish weeks old. Aw.
In other news, there have been no homicides. Yet. All seems to be well. A little too well perhaps? Probably not.
There are many stressful things afoot with which we have continuously been dealing (rather than blogging.) Yet somehow we did manage to explore the labyrinthian expanses of the fabled Bass Pro Shop. And Oh Hot Damn. After at least an hour of giddy aisle-wandering we emerged with two pistol bb guns, a sticky target, several hundred extra bb’s, and a hoot owl call. And oh, how our lives have been completely changed! After our purchases at BPS, we subsequently began inviting over several old friends of mine to feed them a hearty meal and challenge them to gun down cans, wasps, and porch roaches. And let me assure you, Mellie Oakley is a force with a bb gun. The reproductive capacity of creepy things being what it is, though, we have plenty of work left to do before my tenancy officially ends at my current residence.
And speaking of residences, we officially have one in San Diego! We have definitely shaved a sizable (why is this the correct spelling of this word? It looks weird and I dislike it) chunk from the upper left side of the stick of stress-butter we have before us. We have merely a number between 8 and 137 highly stressful things left to do before we arrive comfortably in San Diego and I am sipping a mixed drink at La Jolla made just for me by my incredibly well-trained puppy as we both enjoy the crashing of the waves against the seal carcasses lounging upon the rocks therein.
Oh, I turned in my two weeks notice yesterday, and I feel like a bad ass and can’t stop smiling. And then Melanie and I jointly cut my hair in the customary way.
Oh and one last thing- in case anyone ever had the slightest urge to play the word “clit” in Bananagrams, it apparently doesn’t count so don’t bother. It could actually keep you from beating an undefeated champ.
Hopefully we will write again soon.
-Apryl
a scavenger hunt of awkwardness
Apryl and I had a thoroughly full July 4th weekend, splitting time between my family and hers. On Friday, we woke up in a primitive shelter overlooking a waterfall in the Talladega National Forest. We were partially frozen, incredibly stiff, highly under-slept and — horror of horrors! — without caffeine!! Hiking out of the wilderness, I got us lost briefly (we’d hiked in the night before under cover of darkness, with no moon out, so in my defense nothing looked familiar…), but we soon found our way back out to the highway and continued onward to Georgia.
In Peachtree City, we picked up my cousins, aged 8 and 9, to mind them while my auntie went to some appointments and took them to an old mill pond for some swimming and splashing. Annie declined our invitation to join, saying that we needed the children to do a bit of safety testing before she could go to such a place. We stopped to buy junk food, cokes, and noodles for the weaker swimmers in the group. Apryl spent a great deal of time near the point of hyperventilation over the children’s proximity to a rocky precipice overlooking the pool. At a much-needed margarita dinner following this outing, Apryl beat up the 8-year-old and made her cry; my aunt stood by laughing. Following the demolition of her little sister, Taylor was even more enamored of Apryl than before and clung to her legs begging us not to go. It was with great regret [insert sardonic cackle here] that we relinquished the girls to the custody of their mother and went home to pass out in front of a movie.
Saturday, the THIRD of July, marked Peachtree City’s annual 4th of July celebration for, as we all know, the Lord’s day is no day for celebrating. We went rollerskating around town (see Melanie go! go, Melanie go! Melanie go … BOOM!) before heading over to the lake for the fireworks extravaganza. These truly are spectacular fireworks by any standards, and by virtue of relation we were (as always) welcome to sit in the prime seat in town for the show. Given that this side of the family and their friends/business associates are quite caricatured, we set Apryl with the task of an outrageous scavenger hunt. Though the actual sheet of paper was lost somewhere in the drunken mayhem that followed, some of her items included:
- count the flamboyant-yet-insisting-to-be-hetero metrosexuals
- find 10 awkward conversational pauses
- experience or observe an uncomfortable interrogation about your employment
- see at least one forced conversational pairing of two individuals whose only links are a shared foreign language and extreme discomfort at the situation
- overhear at least 5 inappropriate references to an individual’s weight/hair/surgical alterations
Needless to say, it was fun.
We continued the festivities and awkwardness on Sunday with a long drive to the Elk River, where we met most of Apryl’s mom’s side of the family and water-skied, then another long drive back to Birmingham, where we arrived just in time to see fireworks shot off Vulcan. That’s right, folks: Alabama is more progressive than Georgia, insofar as permitting public celebrations to occur on a Sunday if the calendar so dictates. Aaaaaaand, they sell beer on Sundays and fireworks everyday. What do you think of that, Georgia?
m.
other infamous roadtrips
I promise to share more about what’s been going in my world shortly (hopefully later this week). but in the meantime, I’ve been meaning to share this great mental_floss article on cross-country road trips. . Hope you enjoy these slightly more zany pilgrimages 
m.
(the speeding oven)
We rode in torturous and squished conditions for well over 2000 miles. We were immensely hot and aggravated. Dmitri spent the days trying to smother me, which was even hotter and even more aggravating. It was sooooo hot that our nostrils filled with crusty, salty kitty-sweat. The humans got to get out of the car. We mostly did not. They slept in a tent at night, while we made our best attempts to fur up their seats and strew kitty litter all about.
We had to go through LOTS of states.
We rode along the Mexican border from San Diego to Yuma, AZ. (Mama forgot to take a picture of the Arizona sign.) It’s hard to tell, but the border fence is there. And we had to stop at border checkpoints a few times, even though we never left the US. Luckily, they didn’t ask to see kitty passports.
I agree with New Mexico’s motto, this whole ‘Land of Enchantment’ business, because the elevation was much higher in NM and therefore I wasn’t as hot. Dmitri whined a lot in New Mexico, but he seemed to forget his troubles when Mama gave us canned food.
Mama and Robyn kept oohing and aahing over these silly rocks.
In Albuquerque, NM, there was a dingo sculpture that looked a lot like our friend Lluvia. We miss her and Auntie Kim.
Texas drivers were NOT friendly, judging by the disgruntled nature of the comments from the front seat.
Oklahoma did NOT have winds sweeping o’er the plains, as I’d been promised.
It did, however, have cute little houses on the plains.
Arkansas was good, naturally. It had a house with fabulous gay boys and air conditioning. They gave us TUNA!!
Tennessee was interesting. The humans camped in the rain, and Dmi and I were allowed to remain dry and cozy in the car. We were visited in the night by some rogue raccoons .. Dmitri thought we should let them in, but I knew they were hoodlums and forbade it. They retaliated by breaking into the humans’ trash.
After the coons in Tennessee, we traveled into North Carolina and then into Georgia (no pictures of either). Robyn and her brother graciously drove us to Noni and Jacques’ house in Peachtree City, where we have been treated (rightly) as royalty. I write this from the comfort of Mama’s childhood bed, sprawled on a pillow beside her. Our grandparent humans seem bent on spoiling us rotten! They even have a TV for us!!! There is a crotchety old cat who seems to rule this domicile, but the humans appear to favor us over him. He hisses foully at Dmitri and myself, and we merely scoff in return whilst chowing down on smorgasbords of tuna, treats, and catnip. We have been given an exquisite new scratcher and ample carpet remnants for our destructive pleasure. Dmitri made the mistake of eating some shiny ribbons, which did not agree with his digestion, but the humans were prompt in removing the offense from our quarters. On the whole, I find this situation most agreeable. I’m hopeful that subsequent excursions will be this luxurious.
– annika
Overheard and Seen in Gatlinburg, TN
I wrote a post on this earlier today, and somehow it disappeared into the ether. I’m going to do my best to recreate.
Having exhausted any and all possibilities of things to do in Cherokee, we decided to venture forth today to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Those of you not fortunate enough to have been born in the South may not know much about this gem of a city, so let me tell you that it’s as White Trash as they come (sorry, Aunt Tricia!). It’s brimming with wedding chapels in which you can have the kitschy wedding of your dreams (or whims), and it’s got a Hard Rock Cafe and a TGIFridays to boot. It’s got an alpine amusement park, with skiing in the winter and alpine sliding in the summer. There were people there on legitimate vacations — like, this is the trip they save for all year, and many of them come EVERY year — and our mockery felt almost cruel. But, nevertheless, we went for the people watching. And boy, were there ever people to watch.
We had the quintessential White Trash experience of having an Olde Tyme Photo made (fear not, it shall be posted post haste). The woman who helped dress Mama and us girls like brothel floozies from the wild West was extra special. She kept encouraging Amelia to “fluff her puppies” in order to achieve a true trollop look. Her children were younger than all of us, and each has a two-year-old. She turned to my mother and said, ‘Well, Mama, all these girls and you ain’t got no grandbabies yet?’
We went in Cooter’s, a mini-golf and go-kart establishment slash museum devoted to the Dukes of Hazzard. While there, we overheard the following.
Little girl: ‘Daddy, we gone play some golf?’
Daddy: ‘No! We are in here to look at Cooters. Now hush!’
And maybe my favorite overheard exchange of the day occurred at a restaurant where we were dining, by way of introduction. A man rolls in on his Hoveround with his party and recognizes folks at a nearby table.
‘Now, this here is the skeet-shootin’est sonuvagun I know, and this here’s the lyin’est bass fisherman I ever done met. Glad for y’all to meet each other.’
I do really wish I’d been traveling with a head-mounted video camera. Or at least an audio recorder. And in all fairness, the quote-worthy quips we’ve heard and the comical actions and exchanges we’ve seen have by no means been limited to others. This family has more than its fair share of ill behavior and ridiculous exchanges. I’ll be posting highlights soon.
m.
