My heart always melts a little bit when I find them snoozing on the same couch.  Winky decided to lick himself for several minutes as soon as I got my camera out.  Oh well, they’re still cute.

I’ve noticed that the older I get, the less booze I can drink without feeling completely awful the next day.  It all started a few months ago when I was sipping a beer around a campfire, talking and laughing with friends, and the next thing I knew I was in a stranger’s house spewing into some dude’s toilet.  If I hadn’t been in such a state of shambles I probably would have been humiliated.  Since then, it has all kind of gone down hill.

My hangovers range from that I-don’t-feel-quite-right sensation to oh-my-god-I-want-to-die feeling.  Most of the time I experience the latter.

I have compiled a list of all of the remedies I have tried to beat those hangover blues.  Some have been effective, some have not.

Time.  I know, this is really lame, but time has proven to be the most effective cure for a hangover.  Time heals all hangovers.  On New Year’s Day I was feeling particularly vomitocious.  It was well into the afternoon and I was still sprawled out on the couch, swaddled in what is now known by my family as  “the healing blanket”.  As my family discussed the really cheesy lasagna that we had for dinner the night before I closed my eyes and tried to block the image of melty cheese from my mind.  I had to immediately excuse myself to throw up.  When I came back my mom expressed her sympathy that I  would not be able to partake in the delicious fondue dinner party we were having that night.  I assured her that I would be fine by 5 or 6pm.  Come 5:30 I was ravenously chowing down on pepperoni sticks smothered in cheese.

Slurpee.  The blend of sugary sweet and slushy cold almost never fails me.  If I’ve had a raucous night and I’m near a 7-11 the next morning, I have to go.  I always get a half cherry half coke slurpee.  It not only settles my stomach but it also gives me some pep.  Those delicious icy treats work miracles.

Exercise. I’ve tried this remedy a few times and it tends to work, though it depends on the severity of the hangover.  If I’ve got the oh-my-god-I-want-to-die hangover then chances are I’m curled up in the fetal position on a bed, couch or bathroom floor.  A few months ago I went to a party and had consumed enough alcohol to feel gross the next morning.  Despite feeling blah I went ice skating for over 2 hours the next day with some of my fellow party goers and afterward I felt like a million bucks.

Tea. I don’t drink nearly enough tea after a night of drinking.  The few times that I’ve had some hot tea in the morning I’ve felt way better.  One time I slept over at a random dude’s house on his living room couch.  I woke up the next morning to find a cup of piping hot tea on the coffee table, put out there for me by the random dude’s roommate.  It was the sweetest thing ever.  There aren’t nearly enough guys in the world like the random dude’s roommate.

More alcohol.  A lot of guys claim that drinking a beer in the morning helps.  Just the thought of alcohol when I’m hungover makes me feel worse.  I took a few sips of beer once when I was feeling really desperate.  My nausea didn’t go away but my pounding head felt better. Another time I drank a frozen margarita.  It had about the same effect as a slurpee except I felt drunk again.

Crackers. I’ve heard that things like toast and crackers are good for hangovers.  Well, once I forced myself to eat some saltines because I was feeling sick all day and hadn’t eaten anything.  Then, still feeling terrible, I went on an outing with my family.  I had to have them pull the car over so I could ralph up my crackers.  So far, I’ve found no food that can cure an oh-my-god-I-want-to-die hangover.

There are other obvious things that help such as sleep, liquids, fresh air and showers.  Something that I would suggest avoiding are moving vehicles.  Cars, buses, trains, subways, boats- I’ve been there and it is not pretty.

Of course, the most effective way to avoid a hangover is to ‘drink responsibly’.  I have also learned that what they say about mixing beer, wine and liquor is true- the outcome can be horrifying.  Then again, to quote myself after my sister asked me if I had learned my lesson, moments after upchucking out her car door, “NO!”

I just created  a new page on my blog dedicated entirely to things that I hate.  I’m really not a big pessimist and I shall prove that by now posting about something that I love.  I truly love jello with whipped cream.  Yes, I am secretly six years old.

By the way, I totally respect food photographers.

Last week, when it was randomly 70 degrees and beautiful outside, I ventured into the city to do some urban hiking.  I stumbled upon Meridian Hill Park in the Columbia Heights neighborhood.  It is arguably the most pavement you will ever see in a park.  I thought it was pretty cool, though, and I’d say it’s worth a visit.  I’m sure it’s even cooler when they fill all of the fountains up with water.  For now, a great place to do some illegal skateboarding.

The word was “separate”.  He told me it was spelled s-e-p-e-r-a-t-e.  I got it wrong on my test.  I was devastated.

I was reminded of my dad’s bad spelling several years later when my Uncle Dennis suddenly passed away.  It was a tragic event for my family and the wake and funeral were particularly emotional.  My mom and aunts thought that it would be nice to leave blank guest books around the funeral home during the wake so that family and friends could write down some of their fondest memories of Dennis.  My aunt who delivered the eulogy at the funeral the next day could share some of those memories.

After a draining evening we decided to gather the guest books and read through the entries.  Page after page was filled with touching stories of my uncle’s warmth and generosity.  Then, we got to my dad’s entry.

For starters, he misspelled Dennis’s name repeatedly.  The person he was referring to in this book was someone by the name of Denise.  My dad recounted happy memories of going down to the shorehouse with Denise.  Except my dad also has really messy handwriting, so shorehouse looked something more like $horehouse.   That’s right, in that guest book meant to pay homage to wonderful, caring Uncle Dennis my dad wrote about visiting some dollar whorehouse with a broad named Denise.

Again, I was reminded of my dad’s bad spelling tonight when I passed by the dry erase board on the refrigerator, where we write down stuff we need at the grocery store.  Lets take a closer look, shall we?

For starters, my dad appears to have dyslexia.  I really just don’t know how else to explain “begals”.  He also misspelled spaghetti.  I admit, it’s  one of the trickier words to spell and my background in Italian has made me particularly sensitive to correct spelling of pasta variations .  I could let that one slide. My favorite, though, is the way he attempted to write yogurt.  I had to google  this one to make sure that he didn’t just accidentally correctly spell some weird British version of the word.  Nope, not even close.  It looks like someone needs to revisit 2nd grade spelling class.

*The next day he added another item to the grocery list: Soy Sause

Had Rocky not been a complete pest, this photo probably would have been trashed.  I used too slow a shutter speed, so Winky would have been really blurry and I can tell that it would have been overexposed because his paw dangling from the couch is very light.  Rocky was a brat, though, and this photo pleasantly surprised me.  Sure, it’s blurry but there’s also some strange and fierce movement here.  It looks like he is about to morph into a werewolf or go Cujo on someone.  I don’t know…there’s just something about it that I like.  Unexpected photos truly are the best photos.

The reason I escaped to the woods was because I was bored and needed some new life experiences.  My time spent in Pennsylvania was nothing short of new and weird escapades.

Part of the gig that I signed up for there was to take care of several permanently injured birds of prey.  This included picking up feathers, pellets, leftover mouse/chick/rat guts, scraping bird poop off of the walls, feeding the birds, etc.  I was basically the birds’ bitch.  We had one day of training and then we were left to our own devices.

When my ticket came up for bird care I was more or less by myself with no one around to assist me.  I had a checklist of daily duties, though.  I knew where everything was.  I’d be fine.

The morning went by smoothly.  I picked up all of the gross bird things, scrubbed and hosed off all of the green and brown poop encrusted on the walls, and refilled the water dishes.  I was so proud of myself, being all self-sufficient and what not.

Then it came time to prepare the meals.  I remembered there being a few steps in this process so I consulted my handy dandy checklist.  First thing’s first I had to defrost a bunch of frozen chicks, mice and rats.  I filled up the sink with hot water and went into the freezer and grabbed a Ziploc bag full of day old mutated chicks.  I pried the frozen chicks apart and tossed them into the hot water.  Then I grabbed a bag full of mice.  I wasn’t sure which bag I was supposed to use because there were a lot of baggies full of dead rodents, so I just grabbed the first one I saw.  I tossed those into the water and waited.

Once defrosted, I piled all of the dead animals into a large metal bowl and began the feeding process.  I went around to each enclosure and tossed the appropriate number of food stuffs onto the feeding stumps.  When I got to the barn owl cage, I stopped.  I was told not to enter their cage because the male and female barn owls had just had a baby.  They were very protective of the baby and thus aggressive to anyone who tried to enter the cage.  I attempted to toss the mice onto their feeding stump from the doorway but, seeing as though I’m incredibly uncoordinated, I missed the stump every single time and they all splattered to the ground.  Oh, well.  No big deal.

I continued on my way, feeding the other birds.  Suddenly something shiny caught my eye in that large metal bowl.   I took a closer look and a wave of nausea and anxiety passed over me.  In that bowl was a soggy white mouse with a metal tag on its little ear.  I rummaged through the other squishy mice and saw more metal tags.  I’m no ornithologist, but surely pieces of metal can’t be good for a bird’s diet.

I quickly went back into the birds’ cages that I had already fed and retrieved all of the mice with metal tags.  Thankfully, only a few mice donned those sharp and shiny ear pieces.  Then, there were those darn aggressive barn owls.  The mice were not within arm’s reach of the doorway.  If I went in there, I would get dive bombed.  Rats.  I didn’t see any metal tags.  Chance it? Yeah.

I spent the rest of that day and night worrying that I had killed the baby barn owl.  Or the mother barn owl.  Or the father barn owl.  Or the whole goddamn barn owl family.  I could just picture coming in the next day and walking past the barn owl cage and finding dead owls everywhere.  I started to plan my alibi.  I would swear that I had no idea what their cause of death was.  But what if they performed an autopsy?  Do I still deny any wrongdoing?  I tried reassuring myself that everything would be okay.  Even if I did accidentally feed them a tagged mouse or two, owls have, like, a really good digestive tract.  I mean, if they are able to eat animals whole- teeth, bones and all- then surely they can handle a few shards of metal.  But there was always that doubt.  Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night.

That next morning my heart raced as I approached the barn owl enclosure.  Would I witness the worst thing that could possibly happen on my 2nd day of animal care?  I peered into the cage.  I first looked at the ground.  All of the mice had been eaten.  No dead owls on the ground.  There the family was, all three of them, hanging out on their usual perches, leering at me.  They were alive! I had never been so relieved.

Happy and Healthy Barn Owls

I never told anyone what happened.  No one needed to know.  I just went on as if that little incident had never happened.  Only one animal suffered a casualty during my time as animal care taker and that was a toad.  Totally not my fault, I swear.

Now, I had visited this house before when my old college roommate was living there in the springtime with different housemates that I did not know and never ended up meeting.  One step in the house and I knew I did not want to be there.  It was messy and gross.  Really flipping gross.  There was an enormous garbage can inside the dining room area that was literally overflowing with trash.  The kitchen area was equally nasty.  Crusty pots and pans filled the sink.  Weird neon colored goo seeped from the fridge.  The living room was just this shamble of odd chairs and random furniture pieces placed in no particular fashion.  I won’t even go into what the bathroom looked like.  The downstairs, where most of the bedrooms were, scared the hell out of me.  It was dark and damp.   I was essentially covering my eyes when my friend showed me her sleeping quarters.  I wanted to get the F out of this place immediately.

As fate would have it, I moved into that hell-hole of a house about three months later.  Terrifying memories helped me prepare for the worst when I stepped into my new home for the second time.  I was relieved to see that it had been cleaned and the odd dresser drawers in the middle of the living room had been cleared out.  Someone even had the courtesy to throw out the trash.  It actually wasn’t so bad.  I was the fourth person to arrive so I had three bedrooms to choose from.  All of the rooms left were located in the dark and scary basement.  It didn’t take me long to pick the bigger of the rooms, although it was still the size of a closet.  Also, it didn’t have any windows.  The upside was that it had a private door out to the backyard.  That door was the deciding factor for me.  Of course it took a little bit of getting used to when I would wake up in the pitch black, look at my clock and think “oh, shit! it’s 12:30 in the afternoon” but I grew to love that cave of a room.

Thankfully, my housemates were fairly clean so our little house didn’t get too gross and when it did I cleaned it.  I mean, with no modern distractions what else did I have to do?  I didn’t mind vacuuming or washing all of the dishes that people had neglected once in a while.  I will admit that our house constantly reeked of curry and ginger.  It was hard to get mad, though.  Our housemate, Goldenrod, truly an old and unique soul, had some pretty extreme dietary restrictions and would always be brewing strange teas and cooking with those familiar spices.  Overall, life in the woods was good.

Then, winter came.

As the weather got colder bad things started happening at the house.  It was the week of Thanksgiving when most of my housemates left to visit their families in other states.  I stayed behind with two others and that is when things turned awry.  It all started with copious amounts of mouse shit at the bottom of the stairs, conveniently located near a giant gnawed hole in the wall.  Then, came the stories.  Every morning my housemates would talk about how many mice they saw scurrying in their room the night before.  Sometimes in the morning they would tell me about the mouse shit they found on their beds.  Their BEDS (and pillow, once).

Naturally, we set up a mousetrap and put it near that giant mouse hole at the bottom of the stairs.  We caught a couple mice over those next few days.  Sometimes I would be watching a movie upstairs and hear a loud SNAP and I would smile, knowing that we got another little fucker.

I think I failed to mention in this story that I have a terrible fear of mice.  I could go into the history of my rampant rodent phobia, but that is a story for another day.  Even though I had not yet witnessed a mouse in my room, or seen mouse excrement for that matter, I was scared shitless at night.  I couldn’t sleep for days.  I would turn off my lights and turn on my iPod and listen to it for hours to drown out any possible mousey sounds of scampering or gnawing.  One night I heard loud clanging and furious chewing coming from the hallway.  I knew right away what was happening.  A mouse had gotten caught in the trap, but only part way, so it was trying to gnaw its way back into his hole, trap and all.  I waited patiently until my other housemate handled the situation (the mouse eventually freed himself and fled the scene).   Another time I drifted into a very light sleep when I was suddenly awoken by the sound of a rustling plastic bag from the near corner of my room.  I was too afraid to turn my light on but I pounded on my bed frame and the rustling stopped.  In the morning I discovered a bunch of mouse shit in my trash can.  It was my fault, really.  I had thrown out some old peanut butter fudge in there.  Well, I learned my lesson and never again did I keep food in my room.  The mice never bothered me again.

My housemates weren’t so lucky.  My friend, who lived in the room next to mine, came back from her holiday to discover a true shit show.   Mouse shit everywhere- on high shelves (who knew mice could scale bare walls?), under sheets, inside dresser drawers (and, consequently, on clothes).  And it wasn’t just mouse shit.  The mice had found some ramen noodles and decided that they wanted to dine amongst her clothes in the dresser.  Oh, and of course there was urine.

Time passed and so did my insomnia.  Miraculously, the mice ignored my cave room.  I only had one actual mouse sighting and that was on my last weekend living at that house.  I was in my friend’s room, the one that got seriously fucked over by them, and I saw a flash of gray out of the corner of my eye.  It was a literal flash from one corner of the small room to the other.  I ran out of the room and into my mouse free room, where I hide behind my door.  “I know what I saw!” I shrieked.

One time we complained to the higher ups about our mouse infestation problems.  They just laughed at us and said something to the extent of, “it’s all a part of the experience”.  And you know what, I think they were right.  Looking back I don’t think I would have wanted it any other way.

*I feel that it is necessary to add that a minute or so after I published this piece I went downstairs into my kitchen to get a drink. There, on the stove, was a GIANT mouse. The first mouse I’ve seen in my house in years. What the fudge?!