Scratch That

Would happily trade today for any other given day.  Would be breaking all my rules to talk about any of it except for the reason I’m sporting this rather gruesome addition to my facial features…

It started at 8am with very angry knock on the front door. 

My early caller was Mrs Gerry-Hatrick from the house behind ours.  Now, to preface, Mr Gerry-Hatrick, is the nicest of neighbours you could hope for.  An amputee courtesy of WW2 and hard of hearing due to his age I often see him for a quick chat on my morning jaunts up to the café.  He inquires after me, and the puss chats about the footy and generally is just lovely.  But as is the way of the world sometimes he’s married to a woman who could gently be described as a bit of a fishwife.

Before you go ahead and hate her on my behalf you need to understand that I get why she is the way she is. Clearly she’s been hurt bad somewhere along the line and she’s making everyone else pay… it sucks, it kills everyone she’s around when she’s giving out a tirade like she did this morning, but I do get it.  I don’t hold it against her.

Anyway, she’d got a bee in her bonnet because one the two trash bins put out on the edge of the road for collecting this morning was overfilled, council have very strict policy as regards what they’ll pick up with the automatic trash picker-upper and the offending 5 small bags of trash were left on the berm much to the horror and disgust of Mrs G.  Deciding to take matters in hand she came round, knocked my door down and proceeded to rant and rave at me on my own behalf and as a proxy for my fellow building occupants, even going so far as to call us pigs. Me, a pig.

Thanks very much.

Now, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with a cat scratch on my face…

Well, while she was going off her nut at me she was holding the screen door open and Puss, who I’d gently placed on the top of the dresser out of the way, had caught a sniff of freedom and took it into hear head to make a bolt for it down the front of the dresser (the one that houses all my glassware, no less) in the hope she’d get as far as, and out of, the door. In the process, two of the glasses hit the deck, thankfully staying in one piece but as I grabbed her to prevent the escape I was not so clever as to manage to miss the flailing claws.

Of course, having copped it, both emotionally and physically, I showered, dressed (yes, I’d answered the door in my dressing gown) and I took responsibility for clearing up the rubbish (which amounted to picking up each of the 5 bags and dropping them in the bin) wheeling the bin back to  it’s usual place.  Now, given that for the last few days I’ve been walking past the bins, noticing that one of the bags on the top of the pile was mine (having been raided by the local possum posse) it would stand to reason that one of the bags on the floor would have been that one.

It wasn’t, leading me to belive that the offenders were in the other household adjoining our building rather than one of the residents from upstairs.  Of course, you can’t tell that to a ranty old lady, it’s better just to suck it up and move on.

They said there’d be days like these.

I believe ’em.