Tag: dog vomit

Saturday afternoon

So just in case the dog doesn’t eat its own vomit I am, even as we speak, rehearsing my surprised face for when the mister gets home from cricket. ‘OMG, that’s disgusting, how long has that been there I’ve been so lost in my work I didn’t even hear it.’

It’s not a complete lie. I have been focussed on my work. But not so focussed that I missed the distinctive sound of an animal retching. Really, who would have pets? It’s not just the sick and the poo…

…so, I was interrupted mid-sentence because my phone rang and a lovely man asked ‘are you the owner of (cat’s name)’ because in the ten minutes the big cat was outside this morning he managed to lose his collar. He (the lovely man) insisted on bringing it over so obviously I had to go downstairs and throw a cloth over the vomit as if I had just that minute discovered it because he would be able to see the vomit from the front door.

Turns out it’s a good thing the dog didn’t eat its own vomit, because the vomit was mostly a peach stone. I don’t know why a dog would swallow a peach stone. I would never eat a peach stone. But then I would never eat my own vomit either. (I really mean that, I’m not just saying that for dramatic effect.)

Our neighbour is very lovely, and it was nice to meet him, although I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t our other neighbour over the back fence who sits in her backyard and has loud conversations on the phone about frangipanis. I did not think that there was all that much mileage in a conversation about frangipanis, but my goodness there are conversations galore. I think frangipanis must be one of those plants that used to be in fashion, then everyone except the people who used to live in this house ripped them out of their gardens, and now everyone is planting them again. I hope that happens to loquats too, because I love loquats but it’s pretty rare for someone to give you a bag of loquats of their tree these days.

After I had thrown a cloth over the dog’s vomit, I scanned my immediate surroundings in the way that you do that if you know someone is about to knock on your door when you really hadn’t planned for someone to be knocking on your door. I quickly cleaned up the remnants of the Floppy Adolescent’s afternoon of online gaming. Remnants included but were not limited to:

the foil left from last night’s garlic bread that came as part of the combo deal. Last night the garlic bread was deemed disgusting and no one wants that, but apparently all it needed was another twelve hours to sit on the bench;
an empty Sprite bottle (also came as part of the combo deal);
an empty punnet that used to be a full punnet of tomatoes (did not come as part of the combo deal).

Sometimes I wonder how it is that I am nearly fifty years and I have not yet achieved greatness. Other times I don’t.

An inauspicious beginning

I try not to give in too much to feeling sorry for myself, but it was 6.15 am on my birthday, and I was on my way to the bathroom to throw up (because my perimenopausal body had decided that today was the day the menstrual nausea would visit) when I came across first a dog poo then second a cat vomit.

The beginning of my 49th year (it being my 48th birthday) was off to something of an ordinary start I think we can all agree. After throwing up, then cleaning up (dog poo first then cat vomit), then throwing up again I made myself a cup of tea. The name of the tea is womankind, but I think it is just a coincidence that it is pink on account of the fact that its ingredients include cranberry.

All of this was conducted in alternate states of swearing at the absent mister (using both adjectives and nouns) and crying. The kind of crying I was doing was the one where you’d prefer to be angry than sad, but you’re enormously sad and so a river of tears runs down your cheeks and you know your face is going to look puffy for the rest of the day. Also, I wear increasingly magnifying glasses which means that my eyes look slightly larger than they really are. Or slightly puffier. Depending on how the day is going.

This situation made me grumpy because the tarot reader I saw last year told me that we live our lives in cycles of seven years and so this coming year would be the first year of the new cycle so it would be exciting and all of the hard work of the last couple of years would begin to come to fruition. Of course, I don’t actually believe in tarot cards or runes, but I visit tarot readers regularly (but not frequently) and I often cast my runes just to see what they say. Which is a fair amount of commitment for something you don’t believe in.

Anyhoo, I got back into bed with my cup of tea and I was going to continue watching Wives and Daughters on Netflix. There was a whatsapp message from the mister who had stayed up late to make sure that he could send me a birthday message when I woke up. I ignored it which was rude, but not as rude as swearing at him (using above-mentioned adjectives and nouns).

I’m almost certain that Wives and Daughters was one of the novels on one of my Major English Texts reading lists in around 1988 which almost certainly means that I’ve never got around to reading it. I have not been enjoying the Netflix series at all (she has a most annoying stare) and sometime after I finished my cup of tea I fell back asleep.

It was a lovely refreshing sleep as such sleeps often are and when I was woken at 8.30 I was sufficiently recovered from my earlier misadventures to eat some of the breakfast that was delivered to me in bed after a gentle knock on the door. It was smoked salmon and avocado on toast which is one of my favourite foods, but I could only eat one slice. Perimenopausal nausea is awful, but usually lasts only a couple of hours at a time. There was also some fruit salad which was a beautifully-scented combination of blueberries and nectarines. I ate all of that. (Please note the second piece of toast was not wasted as it was consumed by the morning’s chef.)

Later in the day I was passing by Haigh’s and I bought myself a dozen peppermint creams. I have always loved peppermint creams because they remind me of a scene in a novel I used to re-read when I was young where the heroine stands against a lamppost eating a bag of peppermint creams. I have some vague sense that the peppermint creams were obtaining illicitly, but I remember nothing else about the novel – not why she was standing there, nor what happened next, not even what the novel was called. But I still adore peppermint creams.

I am a few days into my 49th year now, and while nothing particularly outstanding has happened so far, I have not had to clean up any dog poo or cat vomit and so I think we can say things have improved. I wish I had some moral to share with you, some lesson, some stunning conclusion. But really it was just a day that got off to an inauspicious start and never progressed past ordinary.