Home away from home


Flea and Tick collars for people. Why isn’t this a reality? Why are they not marketed for people? We don’t lick ourselves nearly as much as animals do and they get to be protected with heavy-duty pesticides. If you bite us do we not itch? If you burrow under our skin insert your jaws into our flesh do we not find you and get grossed out? We get nothing and we don’t have the protection of fur in our favor either. We are just great big all you can eat cafeterias for those little monsters.

And so now that you are your own little ecosystem you may want to change the habitat and make that fauna more water based and less you based. This may occur to you after you have tossed a few little tick families to the curb and have begun to think about top spotting yourself next month and thinking “Boy! I sure do need a shower Right Now!” Now imagine if you are away from home. You will learn that the controls on your shower are completely intuitive and the easiest to understand, best designed shower controls on the planet, but that everyone else lives with shower controls seemingly designed and drawn up by Dali and built by Rube Goldberg.

It is a distinctly humiliating moment when you come to the point when you have to admit defeat to a chrome handle. I have to wonder what chamber of horrors they send shower control designers to in order to bring them to the point where they design a system that is engineered to make sure you must take a bath. It’s all about form over function with those design Nazis. If it looks good it doesn’t have to work. They all assume that these fixtures will photograph beautifully in Italian Architectural Digest and are such works of art that it doesn’t matter they don’t function, they look so good! If they do a really good job at making the controls impossible to understand and counter intuitive, they can market it as “specially designed for your guest bath”. I really find it relaxing to stand naked and chilly in the bathroom trying to figure out how to make water come out of the shower nozzle. There is nothing less conductive to relaxation then having to crack open the bathroom door after spending fifteen minutes struggling with the tap and hollering at your host to have them come and turn your shower on for you while you stand there trying to make small talk with your host while clutching the shower curtain around yourself and agreeing with your host that you will be certainly be dinning out on this story for years! .

If your hosts are unavailable or hiding from you and working on their humorous essay submission for Italian Architectural Digest, don’t even bother trying to get the pets of the household to help you out with this. They’ll just get you confused. They don’t think its in their best interest to teach you about how the shower works because they think that once you learn the scales will be lifted from your eyes and the next thing they know, they’ll be plopped into the tube and wind up smelling of wild botanicals and having prissy, easy to style coats. Dogs are too butch for deep conditioning.

I discovered that after all these years with the nephdogs that I never knew that they were such early risers. Dogger thinks the day doesn’t dawn until I wish her a good morning and take her out to pee, it could be 11:00am, it doesn’t matter, I am the dawn. The Nephdogs rise with the false dawn and yodel greetings to it, starting at about 2am. I haven’t been awake this early in the morning over a weekend since The Kitty was The Kitten and he thought as long as it was daylight somewhere that we all needed to get up and celebrate the new day together. The Kitten was lucky then and the Nephdogs lucky this weekend that none of them ended up “some where” over the rainbow.