You know, I always knew my life would turn into a glamorous TV show. I just never thought it'd be some shit from the Home and Garden network.

See, the wife and I are having some work done on the old plumbing.

(No, that's not an uncomfortably personal euphemism. We're really having work done. On our plumbing. In our house. Our old house. See? Old plumbing. It ain't kinky. Keep yer pants on, dammit.)

Anyway, just like one of those real-life home improvement shows, we signed up to have some work done on the bathroom. New toilet, new sink... we're even having some pipe laid downstairs.

(Look, I told you -- it's not a euphemism. It's actual pipe. Really being laid.

Not, uh, in the euphemistic way, though.

Oh, don't give me that look. Perv.)

So. We find a contractor, and he's got himself a plumber, and some carpenters, and some electrical dude or other, and a plasterer, and... oh, it's like the frigging SuperFriends. One of 'em talks to the animals, and another one can shoot fire from the six inches of asscrack hanging out of his pants. But my very favorite is the one who apparently has the power to turn invisible when I want to know when the whole stinking lot of 'em is gonna be the hell back out of my house. Our 'two-week' job is now entering week six, and there's a whole laundry list of shit left to do -- staining, painting, fixtures to be installed... I think I might even have a drippy faucet.

(Look, for the last time, it's really the faucet. Not the 'faucet'.

At least, I hope that's what I mean -- my wife said she's gonna have one of the contractors take a wrench to the thing. Eep.)

Plus, just like in every damned one of those home design shows on TV, we're over budget. All we're missing is a smarmy host, with fake hair and bleached teeth, to wander through our bathroom with a camera crew, pointing at joists and chuckling over the sconces. Assuming we have sconces. I don't even know what the hell 'sconces' are. I tried to ask one of the contractor guys, but he said it'd cost me fifty bucks. Bastards.

As far as I can tell, though, things are starting to wind down. It looks like the heavy lifting has been done -- that would be whoever picked up the cash hoisting it into his wallet, of course. But I think they've put the saws and tools away, and are down to the 'soft' stuff. The easy stuff. Yea -- dare I say it? -- the quick stuff. We might just have the house back to ourselves by autumn, after all. Call it our 'fall sweeps'. *sigh*

Scene: A local marginally fancy Italian restaurant. I'm sitting alone at the bar, drinking a glass of red wine and waiting for my wife. A woman in her thirties is standing near the door, alone. Three sips into my shiraz, she walks over to me.

All of that really happened. The rest, below -- only in my head. Welcome to my delusions.

Woman: Um... hi. Are you Charlie?
Me: Uh, yeah. I'm Charlie.
Woman: Oh, hi! I'm Denise! It's good to finally meet you!
Me: Well... um, yeah. Hi there.
Woman: So -- wow, this is awkward, huh?
Me: Er, yeah. Actually, it is, sort of. I think you might be --
Woman: You know, I didn't expect you to be so tall. That's nice. I like tall men.
Me: Yes, but -- really? Tall guys, eh? Well... thanks. But I don't think --
Woman: You know, you've still got a lot of hair for a forty-eight year old. Not in great shape, though. And really, you wore that shirt? Please.
Me: Now, look -- first of all, I'm not forty-eight. And -- wait, what's wrong with this shirt? I like this shirt.
Woman: Well, there's no accounting for taste. It's okay, it's okay -- I don't mind taking on a 'project guy'. You'd better be packing heat in those jeans, though. Now lemme taste that wine.
Me: What the -- 'project guy'? Hold on, there -- I am a catch, dammit. Honey, you are lucky to be here with me, And if you want to see what's in these pants, then you'd better --
Woman: Wait. What is that on your finger? A wedding ring? Oh, you bastard. The dating service is supposed to screen you people out. And all those emails we sent? The cybersex -- the cybersex?! You were typing with that hand the whole time? Or... or worse! Ew! Dammit! I am out of here. Asshole!
Me: Wait, you don't understand -- I'm not Charlie. I mean, I am Charlie, but not that Charlie, whoever he is. It's all a mistake -- come back. We've never even had cybersex, and... oh. Hi, honey. Boy, you got here quick. Light traffic tonight, eh? Heh. Super.
Wife: Yeah, hi. You're an idiot. Now buy me dinner.
Me: Yes, dear. Say, by the way -- what do you think of this shirt?

So, yeah -- that never happened. Actually, the girl came over and asked if I was 'Frank'. But I wonder what would've happened if her blind date had been with a 'Charlie'. Or if I'd been thinking quickly enough to pretend I was 'Frank'. I think I'd be a lot happier if I could just let shit like this go. Super.

We're having the heater in our house replaced this week. I see the logic in doing furnace-related work in the middle of summer -- it's often cheaper if the contractors know you're not desperately warming your private bits over the stove when you call. But I still appreciate the irony of a couple of guys putting in a new heater on one of the hottest days of the year. It's supposed to approach one hundred degrees in New England later this week. If we turned the old furnace on, the house would actually get cooler.

The current heater utilizes a technology called 'passive steam dispersion'. Where 'technology' is used in the very loosest sense. We're talking 'drunk sorority girl at a kegger' loose here; maybe even 'Jenny McCarthy on a casting couch' loose. And that's 'loose', people.

Because a 'passive steam' heating system doesn't require anything approaching 'technology', as far as I can tell. 'Passive steam' heating involves heating up air, which then rises. Passively. Hence the name.

So it just requires fire. Fire and long tubes. Cro-Magnon man might have had contractors lumber into his cave, many thousands of years ago, and charge him an arm and an axe-blade to install 'passive steam' heat. A bunch of burning sticks and some hollow tree trunks would pretty much cover it. Cro-Magnon man might've even taken it on as a DIY project, because Cro-Magnon man didn't have to worry about fucking up his plaster walls and hardwood floors. Cro-Magnon man got off easy, yo.

I didn't get the details on what's going into the basement in a few days, but it's been spun to me that it's 'better'. Which I've taken, perhaps overly optimistically, to mean 'less passive'. Maybe something's going to push the hot air up the tubes for once, so the upstairs finally gets some heat. Or maybe they'll train the hamsters keeping the current furnace running to carry hot air up the tubes.

I don't frankly care, so long as the bedroom's warm enough to sleep in, and the new furnace looks expensive. I'm gonna have to sell this place someday, and if I'm replacing the damned furnace, I don't want any fricking questions from prospective buyers about it. They'd better walk in, see the furnace, and gape in wonder at its obvious furnatory power. I want to see flashing lights and little humming dials on the thing. Maybe some steam coming out of the bottom -- but not so much that you'd think there's a leak. Just enough to be all impressive and mysterious and shit. And stick one of those Van De Graaff generators up on top, or something. For the money it's costing, a couple of extras aren't gonna kill you.

Actually, it's not so bad. The company's giving us a pretty reasonable price, so I don't want to piss them off. Especially when we're planning to ask them to schlep out here in the middle of a blizzard in January to install the air conditioner. And who said home improvement couldn't be entertaining?

I took my dog to the vet on Saturday. She's got this raised, raw patch of skin on her leg that she keeps licking and aggravating.

(That's my dog with the issue, not the veterinarian. If the vet's got a raw patch of skin on her leg, I certainly don't know anything about it.

On the other hand, if she's been licking it, too, I'd be interested to learn more. I might even pay to see that. For clinical comparison purposes only, of course.)

My dog's pretty amazing when it comes to vet visits. She's always a sweetheart with people, even strangers, but you might think doctors would be different. Especially animal doctors. There's simply no way to translate 'bend over and cough' into dogspeak, so they can't possibly see it coming. So to speak.

To her credit, though, my dog takes it all in stride. The prods, the pokes, the needles when necessary -- she even stands still and quiet when they flip her around and take her temperature. Sure, she looks up at me with those sad, accusing 'who are these people, and why the hell aren't you stopping them?' eyes. But she doesn't make any obvious fuss.

Which to me is simply astonishing. Personally, if some bozo tried to stick a tube full of mercury up my caboose without explaining why using life-size diagrams and forms filled out in triplicate, I'd bite the bastard without a second thought. Which may explain why they insist on muzzling me when I go in for a physical, but that's not important right now.

The good news is, my pup checked out okay, though the doc prescribed antibiotics to ensure the wound has a chance to heal properly. I'm not convinced there wasn't some mistake made, because these pills look suspiciously like pills for people. In fact, they're caplets -- exactly the same size as Contacs or other cold medicines.

And for all my doggie's patience with the vet, she is not happy about ingesting something against her will. This is the same dog that went through a poop-eating phase a few years back. Who'd have known she'd go all fricking gourmand on us?

So far, things have gone reasonably well. It's been a while since I had to cram medicine down the dog's throat, so the first dose was a nightmare. The pill was in her mouth four times, and spat on the floor four times. Somewhere near the end of the process, the caplet broke, leaving medicinal powder all over her snout, my hands, and the kitchen floor. I knew I could probably rub a strip of bacon over everything to get most of the stuff into her, but at that point, she'd suffered enough. As had I. I called it a 'draw', but remembered my old 'dispensing to a dog' technique in the process.

The next day went much more smoothly. I gave her a chance -- knowing she wouldn't take it -- to swallow the pill buried in a Snausage. She didn't realize the alternative, of course, so she refused. I managed to get her mouth open, splop the pill as far back in her mouth as I could, and massaged her throat until she swallowed it whole. It's the same thing I imagine some orderly doing to me when I'm cantankerous and senile. Like, say, in a few months.

Since then, the mutt has actually chosen the Snausage route. Not entirely willingly, mind you. I threw her three treats, one adulterated with the offending caplet. The two pure Snausages were snatched out of the air and swallowed in one motion. She grabbed the third, too, but realized something was horribly wrong mid-gulp, and spat half of it onto the floor.

Luckily for me, it was the Snausage half, so she ended up swallowing the pill. No muss, no fuss -- and she gets to eat slobbery half-eaten Snausage off the floor to cleanse her palate afterward. That's what I call a win-win. I think even my finicky pooch would agree.

So, here's the thing I don't understand.

(Okay, so it's not the only thing I don't understand. There are lots of things I don't understand -- advanced calculus, chaos theory, people who watch 'Everybody Loves Raymond'... but I'm just saying -- this is one thing I don't understand. Just one more for the pile.)

Anyway, here's the thing: there are three large mammals living in our house -- me, my wife, and the dog. There are other, smaller mammals -- i.e., mice -- that seem to also live here, or at least visit from time to time, but they don't count, because we're trying hard to kill the little fuckers. So, forget them. It's just three mammals that we generally don't want to die anytime soon, unless maybe one of them pees on the couch. So that's one part.

Then, there are my pants. My pants are the other part. Large mammals living in my house, and my pants. Those are the two parts. Try and keep up, now -- this is where it all comes together.

So, three mammals living in the house. And my pants, which may either be on my body or off. Those are the variables. And there are thus the following possible situations with regard to drool, in decreasing order of goodness:

1) My wife's drool on my pants while I'm wearing them
Comments: This is exceptionally good. At worst, it means that she's resting on my lap or my legs, sleeping -- and drooling -- peacefully. Which is very cute, of course. And at best... well, look, folks, let's face it -- there are only so many ways somebody else's drool can get on your pants. Oh, mama!

2) My wife's drool on my pants while I'm not wearing them
Comments: Okay, not nearly as good, except possibly from a kinky, weird 'jeans-licking' sort of fetish perspective. And I don't think I have that particular fetish. At least, it's never come up before. The hot fudge fetish, sure. The one with the busty twins and the fluffy pillows in a Jiffy Lube -- yeah, that one, too. But I'm not sure about the 'slobbering all over the pants' one. On the other hand, anytime there's a woman drooling and I'm not wearing my pants... that has to be pretty good, right?

3) My drool on my pants while I'm wearing them
Comments: Frankly, it's pretty clear that this is rarely 'good', per se. If I'm drooling on my own damned pants, I'm likely in no condition to do anything useful with whatever it is I'm drooling about, whether it's food, or booze, or a large mammal of some kind. Nuff said.

4) My drool on my pants while I'm not wearing them
Comments: Pretty much see #3 above, except add to it that I've apparently decided at some point to take my pants off during the process. Nuffer said, I think. Nuffer said, indeed.

5) My dog's drool on my pants while I'm wearing them
Comments: There's no possible way this can be good. The dog's either trying to eat my food, working on taking a bite out of me, or -- most often -- just drooling indiscriminately all over everything, with my pants just happening to be in the line of slobber. The only good thing about this situation is that if I'm wearing the pants, then I'm usually in a position to nip the drooly dipshit in the bud before they're soaked completely.

6) My dog's drool on my pants while I'm not wearing them
Comments: Again, see above. I typically see that this has happened in the aftermath, when my pants are slobber-soaked and dripping with drool. Some people might tell me to stop leaving my pants on the floor. Personally, I think I should just have the dog's saliva glands removed. Either way -- I don't care. So long as the pants are finally safe.

So. Now that you understand the possibilities -- and my strong opinions about which ones are preferable -- my question is this:

Why -- why, oh why -- do these things occur with exactly the opposite frequency from what I want?

Why is it that I find dog-slobbered pants lying around my room three or four times a week, and find myself wearing wife-slobbered pants once in a blue moon? And how is it that I drool on my own pants with haunting regularity? And for that matter, how the hell does the dog even have so much slobber to begin with? She's the tiniest of the three of us, but that bitch could out-drool my wife and I together in a contest. Put a steak in front of the dog, and you could fricking surf the wave from the kitchen to the living room. Freaky.

Anyway, I'm just saying. I don't mind being drooled on -- it just needs to be the right kind of drool, at the right kind of time. And it almost never is. Who knew slobber could be so persnickety?