Beer for Lunch and a Recounting of the Infamous Air Freshener Incident...

I'm having beer for lunch today. Not beer WITH lunch. Beer FOR lunch. Don't judge. It's been one of those days. One of those weeks. Hell, one of those MONTHS. No, nothing really 'bad' has happened. I'm just still moping over my near-misses with agents... I know, I should get over it, but if I could just 'get over it', I wouldn't care, and if I didn't care, I wouldn't be putting myself through this torture chamber that passes for the road to publication.

But I digress, and I have promised that I will put up some funny posts since I've been moping so much. And as KLo requested that I tell of the 'air freshener incident' I will now do so. Hopefully, you will enjoy. If I happen to get a little goofy by the end, we'll know I'm running out of beer... just joking, it's just one beer, and I'm not even driving the tractor later... :)



To begin this story, you must understand the entire situation of that day. Things have been very busy and very crazy recently, as only the life of aspiring writers who are also mothers or into horses can get crazy and busy. On the day of the aforementioned incident, we were shorthanded, had a lame horse, had a client who was supposed to buy a horse drop off the face of the earth, a man coming to take samples of all of the fields for seeding/fertilizing, a flat tire on the tractor, a sick kid, and an elderly cat who had lain against the electric heater and literally slow roasted a section of his own back... and that's just what I can remember offhand. Serious shifizzle was going down. Anyway, that was the sort of energy circulating. On top of all that, I'd just gotten one of THOSE rejections. The sort where you're 'almost' cool enough to work on the school newspaper, but not quite. So I was totally useless, beyond saving everyone else from any loose chocolate calories.
Lunch that day wasn't really lunch either. I mean, we sat down and started watching A Nightmare on Elm Street (the new one) but we had to get up for a hundred different little things that interrupted lunch. That combined with the AWFUL writing of the movie (although I ADORE Jackie Earl Haley's portrayal of Freddie) which only made me groan over how someone got the movie made while I can't even land an agent, sort of ruined lunch. The result was that lunch blurred into the afternoon chores and while we normally would have been outside doing something specific, we were, instead, doing random things inside. Like cleaning the cat litter boxes.
Now I work on a horse farm, but really the lady collects cats. Seriously. We have cats off the street, rescued from dumpsters, taken from hoarders and saved from the roadside. A few have wondered up of their own accord and one was thrown from the window of a moving van. The point is, where there are many cats, there is much cat poop. So cleaning the litter boxes is a daily thing. I was the one cleaning boxes. My coworker, code name Momma Chiquita was emptying the trash cans. My sister Fenris was yelling at her cell phone as it randomly dropped calls. While I filled up the trash cans Momma Chiquita was emptying with fresh dirty cat litter, we were arguing about how mean our boss Jefe, should be to both the woman who no longer seems to be in residence on planet earth (leaving us with a horrid pain-in-the-ass horse) and some random man who had done something stupid. The thing about Jefe is, she's a good boss, but sometimes she's TOO nice. And then we all get mad on her behalf. Also, Jefe had some other personal troubles at the time, and did not need extra stress.
While Momma Chiquita and I were arguing, Jefe came through the lounge from her office announcing that she now had to deal with an entirely new matter that involved her ex-husband (I will leave it at that) and went into the laundry room beyond us. As Jefe entered the room, Fenris exited, now yelling at the farm phone, which wasn't letting her dial a regular number. Meanwhile, Fenris' cell phone was ringing off the hook as our mother called for about the third time in a row, trying desperately to make contact. Over our conversation, Momma Chiquita and I could hear Jefe's cell phone start ringing out in the wash room, with, what we were sure, would be the most recently discovered catastrophe. Throwing out random snarks and bets as to what that catastrophe might be, neither of us saw Jefe come back into the room, although we heard her because she was still talking on the phone.
Wending her way between the two of us, she was passed and nearly to the office door before we noticed the smile on her face and the fact that her hand was raised into the air above her head. Really, it was the suffocating scent of 'tropical forest' that got our attention. A fine layer of mist was issuing forth from Jefe's raised hand as she doused everything in three rooms with an entire can of air freshener, including Fenris who was still screaming at the phone. The smile on Jefe's face was as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's but said clearly that 'Everything might be going to shit, but it can still smell like a rose, dammit.'
Well, we got so damned tickled about being hosed in air freshener that we laughed until our sides hurt, and afterwards, none of it seemed half so bad. The moral of the story? Anything can smell better with the right attitude, even if you're still dealing with genuine shit. It's all in how you tackle it.
So when the going gets tough, get a little air freshener and get to work!















*I know that's bee spray, but what are the chances I had a photo of someone holding air freshener that way?