This Homestead Ain't Big Enough For the Two of Us

It it's not one thing, it's another. If Val isn't a day late and a dollar short, she's a day early, and the recipient of infinite riches. Which brings us to today. Thanksgiving Eve. Something happened three hours ago that made me the thankfullest person in the universe. But we'll save that for Thanksgiving day. On with the Holiday Week of Hick. It's like the Summer of George.

Hick took the whole week off from work. He's been doing that for years. I suspect to thumb his nose at me for getting two-and-a-half days off every year. Heh, heh! He couldn't top my time off this year!

Hick has been underfoot, helping me with stuff I don't want help on. For example, he has spent two days cleaning The Pony's room. Too bad he wasn't available when Fukushima needed some scrubbin'. Hick is always ready to drop what he's doing, though, to run stick his nose where it doesn't belong. Like right in the middle of Val's business.

Yesterday, for example, when those dad-burned drawer knobs were intent on de-shirting Val every time she bellied up to the kitchen counter to work on some pre-pre-Thanksgiving dinner preparations. What Hick doesn't know is that Val survives perfectly well, and even thrives, without him rushing out to lecture her on crashing into things (when the knob was wrenched loose from the button gap on my shirt and the drawer sprung back into the cabinet) and complaining (which involves Val's potty-mouth ranting at the universe in general, and has nothing to do with Hick whatsoever, so he needs to quit eavesdropping).

This morning I asked a simple question, while I was whisking a sugar-free chocolate pudding pie for Hick's enjoyment tomorrow. He had been to town to the doctor for a shot, and had just returned, without even stepping into the kitchen with a greeting, and was puttering around first in The Pony's room, and then at the bookcase in the living room. The bookcase he filled up with Val's books when we moved in, his selection criteria being "the ones that were the prettiest."

"What are you going to do?"

That's an innocent question, right? Because sometimes Hick runs off without telling me, and I'd heard him the previous day declining a rabbit hunting excursion due to the shot appointment (heh, heh, Hick couldn't go shooting because he had to get shot).

"I'm cleaning up!"

"I just asked a simple question. You don't have to give me attitude."

"Well what do you THINK I'm doing? I'm cleaning off this bookcase."

"There's a whole pile of your papers here on the kitchen counter I'm going to be using, if you're wanting to clean up. You don't have to ruin every holiday with your attitude. You've done it since the day I met you, with both sets of boys."

"I don't have no attitude! Fine!"

With that, Hick came in and started throwing his sugar free candy from the counter into a wire bucket (also on the counter), grabbed some papers, and picked up several items off the kitchen table and disappeared I suppose into the bedroom with them, and then stationed himself back at the bookcase in the living room. I was done pouring his pie into the not-sugar-free crust, and turned to grab the thawing sugar-free Cool Whip from the cutting block for the topping.

There was Hick, standing behind the couch, going through the pages of one of my books that had been stacked on top of the waist-high bookcase!

"What are you doing?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing? I'm cleaning off the bookcase!"

"Looks like you're going through everything."

Let the record show that Hick is a well-known snoop, having been caught red-handed many years ago going through Val's personal correspondence from before she ever knew he existed. Let the record further show that he also had the nerve to complain about Val's prior dalliances. As if she should have known she would one day meet him, and refrain from speaking to members of either sex over the age of 18. So Val does not take kindly to someone rifling through her stuff, even it if was only a loser lottery ticket being used as a bookmark.

"No. I'm not going through everything. This just fell out of the book when I moved it."

Let that mighty fat record show that the book was laying on its back, and Hick moved it to the back of the couch, still laying on its back. So Val is unsure how gravity could make something "fall out" of the pages of that book.

"Huh. No wonder it took you so long in The Pony's room. You must have been looking through his stuff." (Like a crime scene investigator or a prison guard on a cell shakedown.)

"NO I DIDN'T."

With that, he stormed out of the house to go to town to buy mouse killer for the BARn. Or so he pretended.

If Val expires before her time, please check her neck for the marks of a spring-loaded metal hammer, and her mouth for tasty cheese.