Annie Get Your Gun

This past week was hard. Ted was in Boston all week for meetings and that leaves me home alone with three punks and two dogs. Not usually a problem and it really wasn't this week either but Im finally doing a tiny bit of interior design work and I had some of that to take care of as well.

I was in my office painting some lettering to go on the wall of my eight year old client when my neighbor Alicia showed up. She is what I call a Southern tomboy. She grew up in Alabama and is the one lonely sister to three or four brothers. She is Kick ASS!!  My kids and husband LOVE her, her awesome husband and son too. So she stops by with her son and comes into my office to hang out with me while I paint. First thing she says is " Dude... your office is disgusting", I'm like What? It's not that bad, I just haven't straightened up in a while.( like ever!)

"Dude this is a hot mess. I couldn't work in this chaos" She's totally pulling a "Stephanie" on me. I have finally met my match. She just calls it like she see's it. I LOVE it. I wasn't offended at all. Next she cruises into the garage where she continues on her OCD cleanliness rampage and tells me how nasty our garage is. Dude... like I don't already know it. Ted hates it when the garage is messy  but hasn't had the time to sweep and shop vac it out. She asks if I will give her permission to clean out the garage and make it look pretty, I tell her she's a freak but go ahead... do whatever blows your freakin skirt up you FREAK!

The next day Ted is home and I run out the door first thing in the morning to take Ari to volleyball when Alicia shows up with her son and starts to sweep out the garage. Ted is home and already pissey because we are out of milk so he can't have his cereal. In my defense we were technically NOT out of milk but the full gallon we did have expired that day and when I went to pour it in my coffee I realized that it tasted like crap so I dumped it down the drain. Nasty.

Alicia continues to sweep and straighten the garage when Ted walks out in his suit to go to work. He's like..."what the Hell are you doing to my garage?" Alicia loves Ted so she just explains to him that she needs something to do and since her own house is so freaking clean, she is looking for someone elses house to clean. He tells her she's a freak and heads off to work. Whew! Crisis avoided. ( he doesn't like other people doing things for him that he can do himself)

Two Days later after a clean office and a clean garage, the kids are playing outside in the steam. ( the yard) when Indy runs in and tells me that there is a snake outside and to come quickly. I do what any other self respecting housewife does in this situation... I grab my cell phone and run out the door with a dish towel on my shoulder. When I get outside and am able to determine that it is indeed a poisonous snake I do the next sensible thing... I call Alicia and her husband Curry and tell them to come quickly and get this snake out of our yard. She always tells me that if I see a poisonous snake to just call her and she come down with her shot gun and take care of it. So I get my tall rainboots on to protect my ankles and keep my eye on the snake ( from a safe distance) so I can point it out to Curry when he gets here. Like twenty three minutes later they finally show up. First they stop and chat with Ted and then finally head on over to me where I am still standing in the tall grass with my dish towel over my shoulder and my rainboots on trying not to loose sight of this beautiful diamond head snake.

When Curry arrives to the spot where I am standing... I get a good look at what he is carrying. I shall show you a picture so you can get the full effect.

Yes... that's a glass of red wine in one hand and a gun in the other. Oh by the way... That's his son standing next to him. Curry tells me that the snake isn't big enough to shoot. HIs son Alex starts to cry. I ask Curry why he is crying and he tells me that he is crying because he didn't get to shoot anything.

They spend the next half an hour harrassing me for worrying about a tiny little poisonous snake. He tells me about the Godzilla of a snake that was in the road the other night that was as big around as his forarm... Now that's the kind of snake you gotta shoot before he gets ahold of one of the kids.

Another neighbor rolls up in her golf cart with her two babies in the seat with her. The 9 month old in her lap and the two year old sitting next to her while she drives. She takes one look at Curry's hand gun and say's " Nice girl gun".

Yea that's how we roll down here in the deep South. The three most inportant things to a southerner...

"God, Guns and Football" That's about it in a nutshell. And wine of course.