The correct phrase to describe what happens when you pick up a full 5 pound container of puppy food by the lid, then discover that the lid was not as secure as you thought, all in front of said puppy and her three older, bigger siblings is ‘hand grenade in a hen house’.

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Life’s kinda funny. You’re keeping the house clean, sometimes neat, and you feel pretty good about that.

And then you dust your blinds and ceiling fans.

Great googley moogley, do I need to up my game.

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Things I did to prepare the house for a party to celebrate The Young Prince getting his Eagle Scout –

1. Declutter and pressure wash the back deck. This includes all furniture, grills, and pets.
2. Clear off and pressure wash the driveway and parking area. Yes, I know you already did this once this year, but it just didn’t sparkle in the false fall sunlight, according to my beloved.
3. Dust, oil, and polish all pieces of wooden furniture, including blinds and ceiling fans. Vacuum all upholstered furniture.
4. Disassemble, transport, reassemble, and place a new chair and table set Irish Woman bought on Facebook. This will provide additional seating in the basement, as well as a place for the Young Prince to play poker with his friends.
   • Clean gun I wore while on this trip, which the nice 20-something year old woman who sold the table to us noticed as I bent down for the umpteenth time to pick up pieces of the table.
5. Steam clean the carpets in the basement, study, living room, and hallway, because puppy.
   • After everything dries, vacuum up the puppy’s worth of extraneous fur that the steam cleaner kicked up from deep in the carpet’s nether regions.
6. Deep clean the kitchen, both bathrooms, living room, and laundry room. Make mental note to have a discussion with the Young Prince about housecleaning in the next few days.

This morning, not only am I out of spoons, but two large men in wingtips from the Medellin Spoon Cartel are standing on my front porch demanding the interest payment on the negative spoon balance I’m going to be running for the next couple of days.

Irish Woman and The Young Prince did most of the decorating, seetup, and food prep, so it wasn’t a solo adventure.

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Speaking of energy levels, if I could somehow harness the spike in psychological energy my darling wife has after having a bunch of folks over to the house, we could stop spending money on fusion power plant research. She is so bubbly that I’d like to bottle her and market the bottles to gas stations as both a fuel additive and an energy drink.

Meanwhile, my social battery is flatlined, smoking, and the chief engineer is calling up to the bridge asking permission to eject it into space before it goes critical. It is only because I had the foresight to set up the coffee machine last night and only had to hit the ‘ON’ button (albeit after several attempts to find it through one bloodshot eye) to get the sweet elixir of life flowing, that I have the wherewithal to do more than stare blankly into the flames.

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The other night, I took Irish Woman to a Brazilian steak house for dinner. It’s one of those establishments where nice men carry around large knives and swords laden with meat and carve you off a hunk whenever you want some more. The experience basically comes down to “you don’t eat a lot of anything, but you eat a little bit of everything” before you roll your overstuffed carcass out to the parking lot to drive home.

They even had a salad bar so that we could convince ourselves that we were having a nice, healthy, balanced meal. This delusion was good to have while I cut into my fourth helping of grilled critter later that evening.

It occurs to me that there should be a country cooking variation of this restaurant. You could have herds of little old southern women wandering around a dining area with pots of gumbo, baskets of biscuits, butter tubs full of country green beans, that sort of thing. The midwestern women could dish out small helpings of green bean casserole, tater-tot casserole, and lefse. The Texas women could walk around with brisket, smoked sausage, and warm homemade tortillas. The California women, well, we wouldn’t let them in the door. California ‘food’ just wouldn’t fit the aesthetic, and nobody wants to be harassed for their food choices while they signal for their seventh helping of something.

Only flaw would be the overhead for defibrillators that would have to be replaced due to overuse on a monthly basis.