Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Is she talking about lizards AGAIN?

If you're a regular reader, then you know I have a well-documented terror slash fear slash phobia of lizards and frogs. Despite Mr. J's skepticism, it IS a real phobia and has a real name which I can't remember right now. I also have several lizard&frog-based theories, prime among them being that the lizards&frogs step up their efforts to get into the house when Mr. J is out of town.

For instance: Sunday night, a random huge frog?toad? who didn't get the memo that Mr. J was leaving MONDAY launched itself at our glass-paneled front door as we were watching the season premier of the Amazing Race. I suppose, what with our door being in total disrepair and as ancient as all the other fixtures in our house and it being a fairly large frog?toad?, we're lucky that it didn't knock the glass right out of the moulding thus landing it in our foyer. Mr. J did the honorable thing and without so much as a single cuss word, snuck out our alternate front door, crept up to it and smacked it across the porch with a folded-up Whole Foods brown paper bag (does that count as recycling?). So it goes hopping across the porch for a bit then I saw it hop up and over the wall into the gardenia bushes. Which will now go unweeded for another few weeks because I'm not messing with frogs. But I digress. Where was I? Lizards.

As planned, Mr. J left Monday afternoon for his biz trip and so I shouldn't have been a bit surprised when I found a lizard lurking behind the reading chairs at 10:00 p.m. last night. I WAS surprised that the only reason I found it was that I was hustling over to get to Fizzy who was noisily throwing up in the corner -- all over the lizard. I didn't know whether I should be completely torqued at the dog, who is so utterly high maintenance that if you delay her evening snack by just 30 minutes she will retaliate by throwing up, or completely grateful to her for doing it on the lizard. Anyway, the lizard, which was fairly large compared to the ones that have snuck in lately, was obviously stunned and alarmed by this twist of fate and not moving quickly. Which gave me a chance to run for a can of bug spray (oh yes, Raid stops more than ants & roaches in their tracks) and a shoe. So I drowned it in Raid, whacked it with the shoe (Mr. J's Merrells. Sorry honey.) and then securely covered it with a Hawaiian lei patterned Dixie cup leftover from Dagny's birthday party. Where it will remain until Mr. J returns.

Then I used gloves and roughly half a roll of Bounty, along with my now-standard holy trio of Lysol, Febreze and Slatkin's air freshener to clean up after the dog and mop up the overflow Raid puddles. Wait, didn't I write that exact same line just a few days ago? II've had quite enough of cleaning up after the dog . Who snuck that into my job description?

And, if anyone is interested, there is still no sign of the lizard in my MomMobile, so I will probably give it another week and then declare it dead. At least in reality. In my head it will live on and on.


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