Well, and so it is.

Sometimes you have to wipe up poop. Sometimes it's on the floor, sometimes it's just around the toilet seat. And sometimes it's on the bum of your autistic six-year-old nephew. And you just have to wipe it up. Because no one else is going to do it, certainly not your autistic nephew, who is trying to play with a green slinky while you're wiping up said poop.

Well, poop really isn't all that bad. After all, everyone poops. It's just kind of stinky and kind of squishy and unpleasant, and it gets on your hands when you try to wipe it off of your nephew's bum and/or legs (how it got on his legs I will never know, nor do I wish to), but it's natural stuff. It's not radioactive (usually) and the germs contained therein are usually easily washable with the proper application of soap and hot water.

And if you wipe up poop, it usually means that your mother, who is tired after having watched her grandchildren all day, does not have to do it.

Which means you will garner favorite child status very quickly indeed.

Which shows just how crude we really are:

Our family got the electronic pocket 20Q (twenty questions) game for Christmas. Last night, as we played the card game Phase 10 together, (also a Christmas gift to the family), my mom got the 20Q game out and started playing with it while waiting for her turn in the card game.

She tried several things (some of which it got, some it didn't) and then my brother suggested that we try to see if it would guess 'poop.'

That's right: poop.

Within a few questions we were all giggling like a bunch of third graders as the 20Q game asked seemingly innocuous questions such as:

Is it warm?
Do you hold it when you use it?
Is it colorful?
Does it get wet?

Seriously. We had trouble breathing. (In fact, I have rarely seen my mom & dad laugh so hard.) And when it finally got to the last question, the table nearly exploded in the uproar:

"Is it a poop (feces)?"

So, yeah. We freely embraced potty humor last night. Which, now that I come to think about it, is actually pretty cool.

(It's good to be with the family again.)

On bird poo and the threat of machines taking over the world

So, I woke up this morning and had to send a quick email, so I went into the living room where I keep my laptop (long story, but it involves my laptop's apparent refusal to speak at all with our apartment's wireless, thus necessitating plugging it directly into the router via ethernet cable and...actually, I guess that wasn't a really long story at all...) and discovered what appeared to be a smattering of bird poo over the laptop's cover.

Um, what?

Bird poo? On the laptop. Which was inside.

WHAT?

I do not comprehend it. I could not find a bird in our apartment; I can only guess how one got in (through the gap to the side of the window air conditioning unit, perhaps?) and then got out again (the same place, or maybe it simply was made of dark matter and thus didn't even interact with ordinary matter, except, of course, for its poop, which inexplicably was made of ordinary matter?) but somehow it did it. And left its mark so that we would know of its passing through our lives.

Um, yes.

Also, apparently my career is under threat from machines. Who could have guessed?

What's lacking in my writing:

OH my goodness.

So, I found out today that someone has searched my blog for the term 'nephew.' (Have I ever mentioned how much I love reviewing my sitemeter stats? (Which, incidentally, has led to the discovery that most people who come across my blog randomly find it by searching for pictures of Olympus Mons and gallbladders. Which. Okay. I feel a little weird about. But whatever.))

Anyway.

But the 'nephew' search made me think of all the things you might find or not find by searching my blog for certain terms.

Terms like 'cow.' Which shows that I write "Holy Cow" a heck of a lot.

Or 'monkey.'

Or 'poop.'

But it made me realize that there are some glaring omissions in my use of words.

I, for instance, have never written about gnomes. Or grease. Or gravity.

Er.

Maybe I have a thing against words starting with 'g.'

In any case, at least it's given me some topics to ponder, perchance to write. Perchance.

I wonder what would come up if I searched for 'perchance.'

Let's see, shall we?