Zombie Grasshoppers Bring Down The Kitties!

1. Last night, my hubby looked at me and said "It's Monday."

2. I acknowledged the truth of that statement.

3. He sort of glared at me and said, "It's Monday. Where's the blog post?"

4. I informed him I'd posted on Sunday night.

5. To which he replied, "That was a writing post. I want a funny post. It's Monday. You're supposed to do a funny post."

6. Sheesh. My public, he is never satisfied. So, because he makes awesome cupcakes for my blog interviews, does laundry, and selflessly gives me 10 hour writing days at the bookstore when he'd rather I was home parenting with him, I'm doing my usual funny-ish Monday post on a Tuesday.

7. Yesterday, I noticed a co-worker's fingernails.

8. They were noteworthy because every nail was ridiculously short except for her pinkies. Both nails on her pinkies were long.

9. Because I'm the curious sort, and because not everyone wears the evidence of their mental instability on their sleeve so I truly had no warning, I asked her why she kept her pinky nails so much longer than the rest.

10. She turned around, extended one pinky nail toward my left ear, and said "I have to keep them long to clean out my cat's ears."

11. It took me .01 seconds to realize she was about to give me a personal demonstration of the ear-canal-grooming she usually reserved for her cat.

12. I backed up and said (possibly with volume) "Were you about to stick your fingernail in my ear?!?"

13. She said "Well, yes. I was just going to show you ... "

14. This, dear reader, is an egregious breach of my personal space the likes of which have not been perpetrated upon my person since I was eight months pregnant with The Scientist and some hairy behemouth of a stranger planted himself in front of me in the ice cream aisle of my local grocery store so he could rub my belly without asking permission.

15. I slapped her hand down and said "There are boundaries here. Boundaries! You can't stick your fingernails in people's ears willy nilly!"

16. My manager, who was inside the office with us, nearly fell off his chair laughing. I realized he wasn't going to be any help at all. I was stuck dealing with Crazysauce all by myself.

17. She then said, "Well, they say you shouldn't stick anything smaller than your elbow inside your ear."

18. I said, "And yet you were coming at me with your fingernail. Which is equal parts disgusting and disturbing. I've owned cats all my life and never once have I been tempted to dig into their ear canal with my fingernail. What is wrong with you?"

19. She said, "How else am I supposed to get the grasshopppers out?"

20. I nearly gagged. My manager was now crying, he was laughing so hard. And she was still eyeing my ears with her pinky nails standing at attention.

21. I said, "I'm so sorry I asked. Really, very, truly sorry. Forget I ever said anything. This discussion is over. Over!"

22. And because a woman who keeps a set of grasshopper-retrievers at the end of her pinkies isn't exactly the kind of woman who understands when she's totally breached the comfort level of those around her, she wouldn't stop. She proceeded to tell me a story about when her mother got a beetle stuck in her ear.

23. Because you're my faithful followers and your plans today probably didn't include revisiting your breakfast the hard way, I won't indulge you with the horrible, no good, very bad details.

24. I've learned a valuable lesson, though. There are no such things as innocent questions, and if one isn't absolutely prepared to dive head first into someone else's sheer luancy, one should keep one's curiosity to oneself.

25. Speaking of sheer lunacy, I did have to wonder if a grasshopper burrows into a cat's ears, does it munch on brains if left long enough to its own devices? And if so, would it be called a Zombie Grasshopper?

26. *sigh* I know. I'm just as bad as she is.