Don’t Call it a Vacation

T minus two days until I leave for New York and it’s hard to remember what I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks since returning from Seattle. I think the only explanation is that I’ve done basically nothing. The first day was beyond amazing. I couched in front of an America’s Next Top Model marathon, played with our 4-month-old golden retriever puppy and hung out with Raquel, my Filipino surrogate mother who doubles as my parents’ housekeeper. It was reminiscent of vacations in elementary school before I started playing softball all summer long and well before I started making lattes for 6 bucks an hour at the Marvelous Market Bakery. When I was 9, I just sat on the couch and watched Price is Right followed by Loving, followed by Days of Our Lives, followed by General Hospital and, well, you get the picture: I didn’t move, except to grab some Thin Mints from the kitchen.

So sitting in front of the television all day felt a tad retrogressive, but overall a welcome change.

Until the second day of my vacation. It turns out that the first day was sort of an anomaly and quality shows like ANTM don't generally air during the day. Sure, there are two hours of Law and Order broadcast from 2 until 4, but I’ve seen all of those. What’s worse is that sitting on the couch made me a slave to it. When I was working fulltime, I used to leave work, go straight to the gym, drop by H&M afterwards and then take the Circulator bus to meet friends in Georgetown. I was always on the go and the more I had on my calendar, the more I wanted to do. Being lazy has a similar effect. Because I sat on the couch for a whole day, the idea of going to the grocery store to buy bananas seemed like a momentous undertaking. Luckily, I found a reason to leave the house: Raquel’s granddaughter, Kate.

She’s 9 and while she is cute and extremely precocious, the girl never. stops. talking. For reasons beyond me, she is also convinced that we are the same age. She knows that I’m 24 (that was one of her first in a long line of rapid-fired queries), but she still asks me questions like: Do you like Chuck E. Cheese? What cartoons do you watch? What do you want to be when you grow up?

By the time she got to more profound questions (e.g. “if you could tame a wild puma, would you consider keeping it as a pet?”), I decided playtime was over and hightailed it to the gym. When I came back, I was soaked with sweat and wandered into the kitchen to grab some water. Raquel took one look at me and shrieked. She was disturbed by how sweaty I was and told me to go change immediately. I couldn’t understand why she was so shocked since I had told her that I was going running, and then she said:

“When you wear wet shirt, you get colds in your back.” Actually, she may have said “you get coals in your back.” Either way, there was no point in arguing. I went upstairs and took a shower. When I got out of the shower, she was not appeased. Apparently taking a shower right after working out can also cause the dreaded back-coals, as can leaving the house with wet hair, even though it’s 110 degrees outside. Of course leaving the house wasn’t a problem since I was enigmatically drawn back to the couch to watch more television. It’s a sickness. An addiction. After this week, I’m thinking about getting one of those bumper stickers that reads: kill your television.

Luckily I have other distractions. Well one big distraction, being the puppy Tyler, who happens to be insane. She is one of the cutest little puppy nuggets in the whole world, but God is she a handful. We brought her home when she was only two months old and she had a bladder the size of a fava bean, which led her to pee with the frequency of exhalation. We actually took her outside every 10 minutes or so. Johanna and I also played with the idea of calling her accidents “intentionals.”

Good news though: since I’ve come home from Seattle I’ve been ruling with an iron fist and her behavior has greatly improved. She hasn’t had any intentionals (except when someone she doesn’t know pets her. She literally explodes with excitement), she comes when I call her, she doesn’t bite and she doesn’t jump. Hallelujah. On a sidenote, she has the ridiculous habit of flipping over onto her back as soon as anyone approaches her so that they might scratch her tummy. Raquel thinks this very indelicate and actually joked, "she's a whore. She needs panty!"

But yesterday the puppy nugget did the most disgusting thing any puppy has ever done (with the exception of the dog next door, Rambo, who once lifted his leg and peed on his brother Eiffel). I noticed that she had disappeared for a couple of minutes and gone downstairs to harass Raquel. When she returned, she was playing with something that resembled a laptop battery. It was black and rectangular. I shooed her away so I could see what it was and when I picked it up, I noticed it was sort of gluey. I flipped it over to get a better look and staring back at me was a dead, decomposing mouse. She had found one of Dad’s sticky traps in the basement. And I was holding it in my hand. Worse, it was sort of STUCK to my hand. So I shook it off, threw Tyler in her cage and promptly started screaming. Raquel came running upstairs, took one look at the situation and joined me in my yelping. In the end, my gag reflex proved more than I could take and Raquel had to do the dirty deed of disposing of the thing. I was still trying to get over the horror when Raquel walked over to me, shook her head and said, “Steph! Why your hair is wet?!?”











One sick puppy.