So we’re sending our helper home for a week for her brother’s wedding (yes after she has worked maybe 8 months with us, yes to the best of my knowledge you are only required by HK law to give your helper a ticket in her second year of service with you but honestly we rarely follow this. Y-eah sorry, we still get really mad when our helpers lie to us, we’re not saints) and here’s a list of stuff that has also happened a la Murphy’s Law:
1) The dog gets diarrhea (Rockstar’s wearing Crocs indoors though I perpetually have Hexodane in small spray bottles anyway… This is me being melodramatic, because she’s missed like once in the last few days and she really beats herself up about it, she’s that nice. I am talking about the dog.)
2) We discover our main credit card got scammed sometime while we were on that last vacation so we’re busy changing all the auto-payments the card is linked to. Way to go, credit card fraud a-holes, that was the most senseless use of several hours of our life ever.
3) The car battery dies and we have to get it replaced. (During which time we also discover we are sans spare tire in boot. In fact, we can’t remember where we left it, from changing a flat years ago Yes While I Still Worked. And uh, we haven’t changed the battery since we got the car 6-7 years ago. Ok fine, ever. Also Yes We Really Aren’t Car People.)
This is what’s going thru my head:
1) It’s nice our helper told us her brother’s getting married. (Because we’ve been lied to a lot by previous helpers, and some of the stories were bad)
2) Shouldn’t have given JD that chicken soup from the table. Don’t all dogs eat chicken? Isn’t chicken soup chicken?? (But seriously this one was my fault. Kings is so telling me off when he reads this. Been awhile, I forgot JD has quite a weak stomach. For a dog. I gave her the chicken breast we used to boil soup. If she were a kopitiam mutt – and I say this with love – she would be a total FAIL. Lucky for her she is the most atas in the family, having appeared couple times in Pet Pet magazine back when we still did agility competitions.)
3) Citibank sure picks up dodgy transactions on our cards faster now. Is it possible somewhere in the credit-verse we’ve been flagged as hi-risk, with our constant online shopping and traveling?
If you have never had the pleasure of a late-night call from a credit card company (Kings is right! If it’s important they speak good English! Not 100% Cantonese only!), it’s usually locations you’ve never been in or strange tiny transactions. Salami Slicing comes to mind… Because no one is going to pick up the phone and listen to annoying elevator-esque on-hold-music in order to call it in over a few cents’ rounding.
4) How nice the car battery died while we were in the parking lot. Rather than say, on a highway somewhere in the middle of a muggy Hong Kong summer.
(It was like we were happily driving about with the proverbial giant bulls-eye on the bum of our old second-hand beemer-with-the-super-glued-interior and a sign saying “Noow! Now’s the time to strike us with car trouble, Fate! And yet, and yet we were not struck, praise God.
How lucky can you get, one morning you wake up and the car simply refuses to start, rather than say, stops somewhere in the path of other cars whizzing by at mach speed and you have a small child and dog in there to boot. )
Did you know you can get some local dealership to replace your battery at practically all hours? But you should not get the local dealerships that local taxis frequent to fix your Beemer no matter how crappy you think your Beemer is.
5) Oh wow, I forgot how good Kings is at housework.
Briefly, I considered us all cleaning at the same time, because that’s what another girlfriend of mine who comes from a pretty privileged home does with her son and hub on weekends (instead of say, Rockstar helping me with laundry tonight) but Kings tears about the place and gets mad at anything in the way. As in we have heard him tick off the dog for shedding – without irony. As in she moves so much around the apartment more hairs drop off and therefore needs to lie down in one corner and not move.
So it’s out the door on school run.
Intrepid Explorer Rockstar
Oh yeah. Rockstar blades to the car park now. We wouldn’t let him blade all the way to his class like he wanted, in case maybe other kids started wanting to do it too; there is a very busy thoroughfare right outside – not to mention stairs. I don’t know what the binoculars were for. JD’s a little blurry from trying to get further away while he sailed by.
No, he has never actually bumped her or rolled over her tail or anything – but I caught him clattering about in circles round and round her once. She grumbled at at me to call my child off. (If you’ve ever had a Border Collie, especially a female, you’ll know they only look like dogs.)
Yup, it’s been surprisingly refreshing to do everything for ourselves for a bit. For one, Kings stays home more. For 48 hours more, anyways…
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