Recently, when Miss Crankypants was doing her usual griping, a colleague suggested Miss CP had only to tell the slobs she was always going behind, picking up things after, to pick up their own darn socks, shoes, bathrobes, dental plates (eeww!) and other sundry items. And that’s just the cats!
Oh, if only it were so easy.
The misters, father and son, with whom Miss CP cohabitates are clever little engineers. They know exactly how many kicked-off pairs of shoes the Crankypants’ threshhold will bear before the Earth’s rotational axis is thrown off-kilter. Of course, they’re really worried that if Miss CP puts away their boots, sandals and slippers (in the closet no less!) they’ll never be able to find them again.
These guys also understand the power of illusion: If there’s a box of crackers in the cupboard, it doesn’t matter if the box is empty. Or that it’s been empty since last year’s Super Bowl.
When asked why anyone would put an empty box back in the cupboard, Mr. Crankypants has actually said,  “To throw the mice off track?”
These would be the same mice who have rented the basement studio of our queen-sized mattress.
But if Miss Crankypants wants to gripe in an honest and revealing way, it has to be about what two grown men can do to a perfectly normal bathroom in ten minutes or less. She has a laundry list of grievances, and would rather let a half-dozen cats loose in there than clean up behind those of the male persuasion.
First and foremost, there’s the usual whine about the toilet seat. And the watch-your-step area in front of the bowl. But it doesn’t stop there.
We move on to wiping their filthy paws on the guest towels, wearing pine-needle and mud encrusted clodhoppers on the bathroom rugs, leaving off the toothpaste cap (and globs of paste in strategic spots) and ignoring the two-foot wide ring around the tub.
What do they notice? That they cannot find the mouthwash if it’s inside the medicine cabinet! When Miss Cranky points out that people of good breeding keep their toiletries discretely hidden, they laugh and scratch themselves like the total neanderthals they are. And hairy ones at that!
Thus we arrive at the single-most irritating habit of the cohabiters: mustache hair in the sink!
The argument that these cast-off hairs may one day become encased in amber and therefore be valuable to science just doesn’t fly, boys. Clean out the sink or else you’ll be sleeping with the mice.