What Relaxation is Supposed to Look Like

On Wednesday night Marty and I were invited to meet up with friends for trivia night at a local bar.  By the time the call came in, I was already enshrouded in my coziest comfy clothes and was preparing to settle in for a late-January evening of hibernation.   I declined the offer, grabbed a kiss goodbye from Mart, poured a glass of boxed Cabernet Sauvignon (yes, we get classy here at 37 Westford), and drew myself a bath in our newly renovated upstairs bathroom.  As the water filled the tub, I readied the Dave Wilcox station on Last FM, lit some candles, and dimmed the lights. 

I then retreated downstairs, bribed Joey into her crate with a piece of Puperonni, and checked in on Tao who was perched comfortably on a chair in the dining room.

Back upstairs, I dipped my toes in to test the water, which was just right, dropped the towel, and submerged myself.

Ahhh…

Two second later, my ahhh moment was shrilly disrupted by the ring of my work cell, which sat positioned atop a stack of ungraded papers on the desk in my office down the hall.  This spooked Tao who scampered into the bathroom and made a skidding stop that sent the bathmat flying into the speaker, which, precariously placed as it was, careened into my goblet of wine.

Argh…

So there I stood, naked and shivering, mopping wine from the newly laid tiles with toilet paper as Tao skirted around me, trying for a taste of the red fluid that was now seeping into the grout.  As you can guess, toilet paper isn’t designed for a mess of this caliber and it disintegrated into messy balls that stuck to the floor and to my hands.  As I stood at the sink washing the incident clean, I thought:  okay, I may be one glass of wine down, but I ain't givin' up yet.

Stepping back into the tub, the once warm water was now only luke, so I emptied it a bit and refilled it to my liking.  Within minutes, Tao rejoined me – as curious as ever – and insisted that she sit on the edge of the tub and oscillate between batting at her own distorted reflection, and staring critically at my exposed body as if to say, “Yuck, lady, would you cover yourself?  This is disguuussting.”

In the meantime, the soothing tunes coming from my speaker ceased to be as the battery fizzled to a statically hum and died, only to be replaced by a yelping, Joey who insisted that she needed to go outside now, and that now means NOW Ow Ow Ow Yowl...!

I acquiesced, rose dripping wet, shooed Tao from the edge of the tub, wrapped a towel around me, and relented down the stairs to retrieve Joey from her crate and let her outside - all the while, she insisting that that licking droplets of water from my legs was far better than drinking from her bowl.

If this is life with cat and dog, I need at least another decade to preen my patience before I even think of having kids.