When Jessie and I were living in our first place together, he had this large aquarium that housed an aquatic turtle.  This thing got so disgusting that I refused to ever clean it.  It was basically a load of turtle shit, old food, and turtle sheddings.  It smelled just awful.  Jessie used to use this weird pump thing that you hooked up to a hose and then a faucet that would drain the water using suction (he had bought it for a water bed he used to have) and drain the dirty water and then dump a bunch of bleach in the tank and scrub it out before rinsing a few times and refilling the tank and reintroducing the turtle.  One time he decided to  forego the pump thingy and syphon the water out by sucking on the hose until the water started draining.  The suck method worked fine when he initially drained the dirty water, but he started having problems when he was trying to drain the dirty-bleach water.  I kept telling him that he should get the pump thingy and let that do the work.  Every time I said this, he would give me an annoyed look and go back to sucking on this hose.  I eventually gave up until I heard the air bubble in the hose break and saw Jessie snork down about a cup and a half of dirty, bleachy, tank water.  He gasped twice, ran for the front door, and barfed all over our front porch.  The only thing I could say to him was, “You puked on the PORCH?!??!”  7 years later and he still hasn’t lived that one down.  If only he had listened.

Last night we were sitting out on our back deck playing with Lukas.  I had made lime Jello earlier because I thought it would be a nice cool dessert for Lukas (and us) on a hot day.  I gave Jessie his little dish and sat on the ground with Lukas so I could feed him his Jello.  I was showing Lukas how to slurp up Jello like a vacuum and I slurped up a particularly large piece that made Jessie laugh.  He inhaled a piece of Jello and started coughing.  He coughed a lot which made Lukas go over to him in concern to see if he was ok.  That’s when Jessie jumped up and puked all over our effing patio (almost puking on Lukas).  That makes two times this guy has puked all over a porch of ours.  I’m just really glad that a) he didn’t puke on Lukas and b) none of the neighbors were outside at the time.  Poor Lukas started crying and ran to me.  I whisked him inside and sat on the couch with him and fed him the rest of his Jello while Jessie composed himself.  He came into the living room with us and sat down looking quite sheepish before I had the opportunity to start laughing hysterically.  Her laughed too, and Lukas laughed and we had a lovely family moment.  I can’t help but wonder how many more times, in the years to come, this guy will barf on our porches.

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