the cardinal rule of science lab

By the time I went to bed on Saturday night -- more like Sunday morning -- I'm pretty sure I had a residue. I think that's my new qualification for whether or not an evening was ridiculous. Did I come home feeling coated in a residue? Even more points if I also have to brush crusted beer out of my hair. Which I did. REDIC.

Saturday until about 2 in the morning I was at the Hi-Tone for GonerFest 6, taking pictures and taking it all in for Live From Memphis (blog post still forthcoming). Turns out taking it all in also meant getting moshed on, crowd-surfed over and beveraged on. Yes, beveraged. It's a verb, and it includes any manner of alcoholic drinks that get thrown, slung, sloshed or spilled during a variety of activities in large crowds. Beveraged. Look it up.

Anywho.

I'll hash out all the bands I saw fully in my post for LFM, but no doubt I was impressed. And recalculating my budget to figure out if I could afford a trip to the record store. (Mostly because of these guys - 100 percent homegrown.) But by the time I got home, around 2:30 a.m., I was exhausted and starving and fantasizing about eating something over the sink, where calories don't exist, putting on my fleece jammies and hitting my bed like it stole something. And I finally pulled in the driveway, and I unlocked the backdoor and just when I inhaled deeply to breathe that sigh of relief, it hit me. The stench. The undeniable, impossibly specific odor of poop.

I should probably back up here.

You know how sometimes you talk about something for a while and hem and haw, but when it finally does happen it's all of the sudden? That's what happened at our house Saturday morning, when I woke up and my mom told me that she was going to drive to Olive Branch to look at puppies.

With my oldest brother Noah in town for the weekend talking about being ready to get a dog, and me basically NEVER shutting up about Otis Redding the Mythical Weiner Dog, ever, even when I'm sleeping or my mouth is full of food or if perhaps I came down with a very instantaneous case of TMJ, even then I would STILL be talking about him, my mom apparently just couldn't take it any more. It was time.

And so when I got home Saturday afternoon, there was a fuzzball in the kitchen named Sadie. Fast forward to 2:30 a.m. Sadie is yelping her little furry ass off. My nostrils are being invaded by the doo doo patrol. I stand there for a few minutes wondering what I should do, knowing that if I even went close to her crate to see if she DID poo that it'll cause a serious situation that could potentially wake the neighborhood. And we live across the street from a crazy man who talks into the back of his hand while pacing his driveway shirtless. Not a person I want to wake up in the middle of the night. So I leave her be, and head for the fridge. Mmm, leftovers.

Luckily, my mom is up just a minute later to check on her. Not so luckily, we discover that she has done a monster poo ALL up in that crate. And since little fuzzball Sadie is a standard poodle pup who's yet to have her first hair cut, there's poo in a lot of places. Like in her paws and around her chin and all in the hair around her butt and let me tell you she REEKS but son of a bitch, if she still wasn't pretty damn cute.

The poo sitch was resolved, but not before I unknowingly put my nose way too close to her little paws and almost gagged. I had violated the first rule of science lab, that apparently applies to finding out if something is poo or dirt. WAFT. For God's sake, waft.


cheers,
elizabeth