Heather Christena Schmidt

Today has been such a terrible day that drinkie time has been pushed up a little bit. I was originally supposed to have afternoon cocktails with some friends before my Trailer Trash Mom’s nightmarish text message put the kibosh on that anyway, so I’m doing it big. Before I describe this Terrible Tuesday to you, though, faithful blog followers, let me first start with a little disclaimer:

Every time I post a blog like this where I’m either (a) venting about my day; (b) describing some horrifically ridiculous situation; or, (c) both a and b, I am not – by any means – trying to solicit pity. I constantly get comments from people that say things like “I’m so sorry you had to deal with that” or “why do you put yourself through that, B(itch)?” And while I appreciate those words of thoughtfulness and encouragement to the highest degree – to the highest – I really do kick back and find humor about all the stupidity that seems to surround my life here in beautiful southern California. All my rants and dramas about my Trailer Trash Mom; all my complaining about my often-jerkish husband and his family that hates me; all my encounters with the assholes in my community – from the horribly opinionated summertime overachieving parents (SOAPs), to your everyday judgmental members of my community – all of what I share with you, my faithful blog followers, is purely anecdotal. I want you to see the bizarre and sardonic humor of it all like I do.

So with that being said, here’s my Terrible Tuesday.

My dad’s afraid of a lizard the size of my pinkie

Okay, so I think I recently mentioned that my father lives near to us and I like to call his home my “Free Laundry and Storage Facility.” Last night we went to do our laundry there (of course the husband always stays at home); and I ended up staying the night because the laundry wasn’t finished, and quite frankly dad had bought donuts for breakfast.

This morning though, it was about 180 degrees in his house, with just one window open. Two things happened at this moment: first, I got up and saw that my blog’s Facebook fan count had grown to literally quadruple what it was last night (if you aren’t a fan, you really should become one …) and then the other shoe dropped and my 69 year old dad flipped the fuck out because of a small lizard that is apparently his arch nemesis.

To sum it up in a nutshell: a few weeks ago, a small lizard, no larger than my pinkie finger, got into my dad’s garage. Since then he has seen it twice and decided that the only way to keep this little baby lizard out of his house is to keep it airtight shut, with the exception of one window.

So this morning, it was already something like 180 degrees in the house and I was finishing my laundry, sweat dripping from places I didn’t even know I could sweat. And then we had bath time, which added another 30 degrees to the house because of the humidity and then there was whining that a donut was not enough and “why can’t you make scrambled eggs?!” and now it was 250 degrees in the house and the heat from the stove as I scrambled the motherfucking eggs was actually blurring my vision.

You can see how the day got started. I wish the high of an additional 543 Facebook fans withstood this drama.

Then my fruit roll-ups were ruined, my cooking utensils put away, and the cabinet was reorganized.

Ugh. So then we got home and brought the laundry in. I went to the kitchen to see that my fruit roll-ups had again been ruined. This is the second time and it isn’t that it’s a bad recipe at all. I don’t want to talk about it beyond that.

But then I was getting to work prepping everything for dinner because my two elderly grandparents are coming over for dinner, along with my Trailer Trash Mom; and I saw that not only had my Ninja been put away when I wanted it to be left out, but my cooking pans cabinet had – again – been reorganized. My husband has never really gotten the whole concept that I need some space of my own, for things to be my way; he also has forgotten time and again that I have steel rods on my spine and a rotator cuff injury from forever ago. The cabinet is organized the way I need it to be organized, for both ease and physical ability, which is “messy” to him, so he constantly reorganizes it. This weekend, the refrigerator was reorganized and it was done so horribly that yesterday I was going to get eggs out and the egg carton fell, breaking three eggs into some fresh vegetables – ruining the whole thing.

You see? I have things set up a certain way for a reason. And it is my space. At this point in the day, I decided that (1) drinkie time was definitely coming early, and (2) tomorrow I will be heading to my husband’s work and rearranging things there so that he can see how it feels.

And in the coup de grâce of this Terrible Tuesday, my mother learned to text message, and showed up 4 hours early

Who shows up to dinner four hours early? I said seven. Not three.

But it gets better than that.

You all know about the antics of my Trailer Trash Mom. About a year ago she married this awful hillbilly guy she knew in high school and since then it’s all been downhill. She’s never really qualified for mother of the year – I mean, abandoning my father and myself when I was only 8 kind of set up the precedent for that. In any event, she’s back from her home in New Mexico, where she resides for part of the year with her husband, the other part here near my grandparents, helping them out.

So she sent me a text message shortly after we got home and it said the following:

Wood you lke to GO SwmMG? G n G n I Wll b there @2 or 3

She apparently was asking if I wanted to go swimming. At my own pool. A little later she sent another, saying she’d bring her bathing suit J N C.

Indeed. My mom texts now, and incoherently (at best).

So then they showed up and it was 3 o’clock, when I told them 7. No big deal, right? Wrong. I had plans. Plans to have afternoon drinks with a couple of my friends that were going to be coming through town. This annoyed me, but I had already started my own early drinkie time so – whatever, right?

Wrong. Then my mom broke out the “souvenirs” she brought from her and her hillbilly husband’s trip to Nebraska.

“Heather, we ate a lot of corn, and Nebraska is the Corn State and all … so I went to Ralph’s down the street and got you guys some popcorn. Sorry, though … I ate a couple of the bags last night when I got to town.”

Are you fucking kidding me?

Then it went where it should never have gone. She broke out the bottle of wine that she got for dinner, as my grandparents were in the other room completely out of earshot.

“I have never heard of this Menage a Trois wine before, but I’ve always wanted to be in a threesome so thought it would be a good one to get.”

Indeed. In. Fucking. Deed.

Please note: it is only 3:30. God only knows what will happen from here. This Terrible Tuesday can only go down – down into the depths of family dinner hell. Who knows what else this day has in store?  But again, we should all be laughing about this, because – quite frankly – it’s freaking hilarious. I’m laughing right now.