homer's terrible green guts

Caterpillar guts were the last straw.

I’ve been halfway immersed in a half assed home improvement project for about eleventy gazillion years now. It’s our playroom, you see. Our playroom is no bueno.

It’s great to have a playroom, a big space that has served us well during the years of fisher price and jumpy chairs and crawling. But as my sister Julie would say, thank the sweet seven pound baby Jesus, those days are behind us. Although some people insist on reliving the lowlights of their development by needing to once again learn to walk, the fact remains that the playroom is long overdue for a reinvention.

It used to be that once I became determined to start a project, I could do little else until it was completed. I’d be consumed with formulating the perfect plan and would then relentlessly shop and toil and fret and obsess until I could color it done.

This time, there are such epic distractions, I’m probably halfway through the project and I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing. When I began, all I knew for sure was that the green couch needed to be OUT (sorry Ellie) and the electronics needed to be IN.

Those home improvement shows on TLC are great inspiration, because although their projects are rarely uncomplicated, they always resolve their issues and put it all back together in the allotted 30 minutes of air time. Those shows vary wildly in the scope and breadth of their projects, but one thing they all have in common is that they begin by clearing the room. Clearing a room is a very smart starting point.

My starting point was to shove heavy things around and then sweep up the horrors that were revealed, only pausing long enough to wrestle the dumb dog away from the piles of debris that she wanted to eat.

One day I rushed out and bought a futon, and then demanded that the green couch be made gone. I shoved it all the way to the door, and then enlisted my husband to help me get it to the side yard where we could load it onto the truck or the curb or whatever; it was OUT by then so I did not care where it went and I stopped paying attention.

Sadly, my husband set the sofa down to rest in the back yard, and then he sat himself down to rest on the sofa. And then the little people joined him.

From their new vantage point in the yard, my children spied a couple of fat, black caterpillars, and set about the task of creating a habitat for them. The habitat involved screening and plastic and soil and leaves. The creatures were called Homer and Charlie, or something.

Meanwhile, I brought in the futon and set it up, it’s sort of “eh” but whatevs, it will do.

We maintained this new semi-status quo for several days while we kept busy with other things.

Next on the agenda was to prepare for the cable guys, who were coming to hook up the tv that would become the electronics hub. This involved pulling out the large entertainment center in the living room to reveal the scary tangle of cords that connected who knows what to who knows where, and/ or why. Naturally, I initiated this undertaking while in the midst of cooking dinner, because there was no time to waste I happened to look over from the kitchen one night and saw a cobweb and remembered that I wanted to see what was back there.

I unhooked the wii and got it out of there, I studied the scary cords and pretended to make a plan, but mostly I swept up a lot of unsavory stuff for my dog to eat. I was gently coaxing the entertainment center back to its corner position at the very moment that my rice boiled over when I felt the unfortunate, unforgettable, and unmistakably caterpillar shaped squoosh under my right heel.

Homer's guts were green, and that was the last straw.

My husband gently asked why I was freaking the fuck out, and I responded with my new battle cry: “Everything is TERRIBLE.”

Because when the couch is still in the back yard and you don’t like the new futon and there are too many cords and your kid can’t walk and the remote is lost and no one is helping and there are caterpillar guts on your bare foot, it’s okay to loose your shit a little bit. Right?

I'm sorry, Homer. If it makes you feel any better, Charlie's dead, too.