ChaosTheory

Jeremy just doesn't understand.  These things do happen to me.  All the time.  I think it's some sort of cosmic force that draws chaos to me.  In fact, science should study my life.  I'm a walking illustration of chaos theory.  Truly and obviously, these things could never be my fault.  They just happen--pure coincidence.  I admit, this past week was probably a bit more extreme than most.  Just a bit.

Wednesday:
Poor Audrey starts to have a seizure.  I herd Jack out into the hall.  Jack's getting older and has recently started having some bladder control issues in the afternoon if we forget to let him out around noon.  Jack immediately pees on the floor.  Audrey's in the kitchen on the floor now covered in pee.  I sigh, let Jack out, and wonder if we need to invest in Pine Sol and Mr. Clean.  Then I watch as the cat cocks her ears back, shakes her little stubby tail, and hurtles toward the front screen door where Mama sits meowing in at us (Mama is a calico cat who seems to have adopted us this past year, and let's just say Binny is none to pleased about the "intruder," even if she is always outside and Binny always inside.)  Thud!  Whap!  Binny slams into the door sending the wooden frame slamming.  Sigh.

Thursday:
Jeremy's sick and laying in bed reading.  I go on a cleaning spurt, which also includes unplugging the upstairs toilet.  I flush it to get some water in and watch as it slowly fills.  And keeps filling.  And overflows, and overflows, and overflows.  Somehow, my mind just shuts off.  For the life of me, I can't think how to get the toilet to stop overflowing and just stare as the water keeps coming, basically thinking "Uh oh."  Finally it stops.  I start grabbing old towels to sop up the zillion gallons of water pooling on the floor.  Just then, I hear Jeremy slamming out of the bedroom.

"What are you doing!"
"The toilet overflowed," I reply.  I can tell he's, well, to put it mildly, not very happy about something, so there's no way I'm going to tell him what actually happened.
"Why is it raining in the bedroom!"  Oops.  That's not good.  That's not a happy husband.  How do I get myself out of this one.
"I couldn't get it to stop," I meekly yell down the stairs.  All I hear is mumbling and the kitchen door slamming.  I decide that maybe I should stay away from him for a while.  Luckily, roughly 20 towels and half an hour later, I've finally got all the water mopped up off the floor and Jeremy has calmed down.

"Why didn't you stop it?" he asks incredulously.
"I couldn't remember how."
"You just open up the back of the toilet and push the little stopper down."  By this point, he's looking at me as if I'm the daftest person in the world.
"Oh," I respond simply.  That definitely makes sense.  I definitely new that.  "I forgot about that."  Jeremy responded something about wondering how I manage to function most days.  I tried to look cute and sweet so he couldn't stay mad about all the buckets and towels now scattered around the bedroom.

Friday
I'm filling up the plastic cat food cup so I can go feed Mama outside.  I reach into the tub of food, fill it up, go to pull it out, and immediately drop the whole cup in the pantry.  Cat food rains down all over everything.  Little tiny pieces of cat food all over the shelves, stuck in the bag of potatoes, covering the jars of canned preservers, inside the basket of light bulbs. . . I turn around, and Jeremy just looks at me, amazed.  And not the good sort of amazement.

"How do you do these things?"
"I don't know.  I just lost hold of it.  They just sort of happen."  It wouldn't have been so bad, but just that morning when I was running late for work, I instant messaged him from my computer downstairs, letting him know that I had "lost hold" of the blind again, which sent the thing flying up and rolling into a tight little tube at the top of the window.  Losing hold of the blind wouldn't be so bad, but I do it on a fairly regular basis.  And, since the windows are so tall, it means the person resetting it has to find a chair, climb up on it, take the blind down, and completely reroll it.  That person is usually Jeremy because I can't reroll anything right (he doesn't even bother having me try to coil extension cords or hoses anymore).  When I told him about the blind this morning, I had also said "I just lost hold of it," when explaining what had happened.

Saturday
I picked up the salt shaker to clean the kitchen counters.  I had just refilled all the salt shakers a few days before.  As I pick it up, the plug, which I obviously didn't get in tight, falls out, and salt pours all over the counter and floor.

"Oh crap!" I shout.
"What!  Jeremy turns around in his chair all worried that something bad had happened.  He looks at the salt and sighs.
"These things only happen to you.  No one else.  They're only Lisa things.  How do you do these things?"
"I don't know.  They just happen," I say as I begin to pile up the salt on the counter.  On the plus side, the toothpick finally came out.  The toothpick, which we had used  to unclug the holes in the shaker when the summer humidity started clogging them up, had been in the shaker since probably last July--after I lost hold of it.
Suddenly, he looks at me in a calculating way.  "You are not going to put that salt back in the shaker, are you?"
Okay, so he caught me.  I had been contemplating doing just that--I had just cleaned the counter, and we were out of salt.
"No.  Of course not," I replied, grabbing the garbage can and scooping the salt into it.  "But we are out of salt."

Sunday
Mama cat is extremely pregnant.  I tried to give her a lecture about "Tom," (the conflicted male cat who hissed at me, then meowed when I would go outside to feed Mama) when Tom first started hanging around in December.  She didn't listen.  Now Tom is gone, and Mama is wide as semi about to pop any day now.  Saturday, Mama was MIA when I went to feed her, which is very unusual because she has become very demanding about her food.

Sunday, around 4 am, I'm awakened to very loud little mews.  The very loud little mews are coming from our laundry room, which is adjacent to the bedroom.  How did Mama get in?  Well, the laundry room (which will eventually be the master bath) has no floor over about 1/2 of it, leaving a gigantic, gaping hole, through which you can see the ground about 4 feet below.  Apparently, Mama decided our laundry room was the safest place to have her new brood.  Not just in the laundry room, but behind my washer.  On the new section of unfinished, cypress floor that Jeremy had gotten installed.  Wonderful.