"The same thing we do every night, try to take over the world clean the house!" - The Brain, Animaniacs

 

Pugsley, clutching his drink as if his life depended upon it. In this case, it did, since that’s where I poured in the antidote. Muahahaha.

On Saturday, The Mrs. took a huge gamble. The Mrs. left me, The Boy, and Pugsley all to our own devices. Oh, sure, I’d like to tell you that she was gambling away our nest egg playing baccarat in Monaco, but in reality The Mrs. had been invited to sign some books at a book store, and would be gone for hours.

The Mrs. does not trust me to take both The Boy and Pugsley on Cub Scout camping trips. I’ll explain:

The Mrs. is worried that I’ll come home after taking Both Boys out and she’ll say: “Where’s Pugsley?” and I’ll respond with, “He wasn’t with you?”

So, having The Boy and Pugsley all to myself on a Saturday afternoon is rare. I had fantastic plans about what The Boy and I would do after Pugsley went down for his nap. We would build an unpermitted aircraft hangar as our first step toward building our own air force and taking over Texas. The whole point of that is world domination, but I’m stating the obvious.

Anyhow, it was way way way too hot outside for all of that nonsense. If you live in Texas, it’s better to attempt to build the infrastructure for a mad-scientist-type world takeover in November. That way you catch people paying off their credit cards from Christmas in January, so they don’t notice a change of management so much. Ever notice when they inaugurate new presidents? Hmmm?

Instead we stayed inside. As the coffee The Mrs. left behind slowly permeated my synaptic nervous system, I began to be much more dictatorial. Immediately, I began ordering the small blonde household residents about.

Immediately, I was met with a chorus of:

“Awww, man,” from The Boy, and

“Ee-ee-ee EE hauf!” from Pugsley.

Despite the malingering whining from the tiny ones, I rule with an Iron Pinkie. Soon enough, small bodies were scurrying back and forth, taking trash out, mowing lawns, and welding up a new trellis.

In the span of the five hours that The Mrs. was gone, I reconfigured our media center (sounds pompous for plugging some electrical crap in, doesn’t it?) led The Boys to clean up all the spare clothing in both bathrooms, cleaned toilets, lifted barges, toted bales, etc., etc.

The Mrs. showed up, and far from seeing the scene of devastation that she was expecting, saw a house that had no less than three rooms that were cleaner than when she left. (I didn’t do dishes. Sorry.)

I always default back to that old Andy Griffith Show when Aunt Bea left to visit some relation or other, and left Andy and Opie all by themselves. They had a kegger, of course (my memory is a little vague here) and then had to rush to clean up everything so that when Aunt Bea showed back up, everything was nice and tidy.

That made Aunt Bea sad, since she didn’t feel needed. I think (again, memory is a little rough here) that Andy roughed up Aunt Bea and then she was okay. Or maybe not. Maybe it was Barney.

Anyhow, The Mrs. showed up and just was happy that the three pagans that were left in charge of the place made it a little nicer. Which is good, since I really, really don’t remember what Andy did to make Aunt Bea feel good again. I do think that The Mrs. will trust us when she has to be gone again. Fortunately, she has no idea about the kegger we had.

Thankfully, nobody reads anything on the Internet, right?