View from the North 40: Laugh me a river

It’s a pretty sure sign I’m in a crabby mood when I read the headline “Homeowner finds naked intruder in her tub, eating Cheetos,” and my brain says “Meh, whatever.”

The story seems to have all the elements I would normally find appealing: the suspense of a break-in, the mystery of the man who supposedly told the female intruder to intrude, the surprise of finding her naked, the absurdity of her lounging in the tub rather than ransacking the house and the confusion of the intruder having brought her own cooler full of food, including the Cheetos which were – for crying out loud – only half eaten and left abandoned on the toilet next to the tub.

This. Is. Awesome. Normally. This week, I didn’t want to talk about it. My laugh factory was closed due to a strike.

I blame spring cleaning. For that matter, I blame regular cleaning.

There’s just too much scrubbing and wiping and shuffling stuff around trying to find a place for it and dirty dishes because we eat at home and dirty floors because of mud and dirty furniture and bedding because the cat keeps running in from the great muddy-silty outdoors and jumping up on the couch then running back to the bedroom to finishing cleaning his paws on my bedding. The dog had to be bathed and clipped.

Probably close to eight months worth of dirt, gravel, dried mud clumps, hair, food, receipts, a few “forgot we stashed it there” construction purchases and a variety of other life’s detritus had to be cleaned out of the pickup. The pickup was at a new level of dirty.

I’m not selling my pickup, but, based on what I found, never buy a vehicle from someone who has a fuzzy dog, has long hair and has someone in the family who shall remain nameless, but who eats in the vehicle and has named that gap between the seat and the console “the fry hole.”

At this point, I think the only way we could get the pickup dirtier is if I started hauling hay in the cab rather than the box and the cat took up smoking and long drives in the country for a hobby.

Life has to be about more than just cleaning. That’s a primal directive, isn’t it? The key to happiness? And pretty much how I live life. Doesn’t that make cleaning against my moral code?

No wonder I’ve been so dispirited.

I read last night that a badger dug it’s way into a tunnel at the historic Craignethan Castle in Scotland and that part of the castle had to be shut down because the badger was “very angry.” And then HuffPo reported that “it’s not clear what the animal did to leave the impression that it was ‘very angry’” then shared castle manager Historic Scotland’s twitter post of a color drawing of a large herd of cartoon badgers doing jumping jacks in a field of green.

That should have been funny.

At the very least I should have been amazed to learn that apparently the badger is Scotland’s largest wild carnivore. What?! Whatever.

I surfed the internet.

I found lots of news, photos and videos about people in north-central Montana who are getting flooded and roads getting washed out.

Life could be worse for me, I decided. I shouldn’t be so ungrateful of the gifts I am given, right?

And this Reuters article was the next gift: While huge public debate in the U.S. centers around whether or not sex ed should even be mentioned in American schools, in Norway, Reuters reported, high school graduates celebrate the end of their K-12 careers with a variety of activities that almost all involve alcohol, nudity and sex. Most of it in public.

In fact, Reuters said, Norway’s former minister of transportation Terje Moe Gustavsen who now runs the Public Roads Administration, issued a statement titled “No to sex on roundabouts” saying that “everyone understands that being in and around roundabouts is a traffic hazard.” Sex on roundabouts.

He also warned them to stay dressed on bridges. Bridges.

If I understand Gustavsen correctly, the problem isn’t that the 18- and 19-year-olds are having an extended drunken, nude, sex party in public, it’s that “drivers can get too much of a surprise and completely forget that they are driving,” thus causing an accident.

This logic. Is. Awesome.

I do not condone or approve of this behavior, I’m just doing my part to laugh for those who have a good reason right now not to.

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No, it’s the fumes at [email protected]/.