It’s my party and I’ll burn my face if I want to

On the morning of our much-anticipated house-warming/Christmas party, I woke up to the sound of Terry screaming expletives at Rubin at the top of his voice.

“I’m guessing this WOULDN’T be a good time to let the neighbours know we’re expecting around 30 cars to park outside their homes this evening, and oh yeah, there might be some music too!” I thought as I struggled into my dressing gown and raced downstairs to the hall… where I was greeted by the sight of one small turd and two mugs of coffee (one of which had spilled slightly) sitting on top of the once-perfect cream carpet, which had been shampooed just a few days earlier, in anticipation of us welcoming all of our closest friends into our home.

The turd was Rubin’s, naturally. The coffee was Terry’s. (Because this would’ve been a much, MUCH stranger story if it had been the other way around, wouldn’t it?) Terry had let Rubin into the garden to perform his morning ablutions, as usual, and Rubin had raced back into the house, run upstairs (with Terry in hot pursuit) and proceeded to do his, er, “business” on the carpet instead.

“And there’s another one in the office,” Terry said, appearing behind me as I stared, dumbfounded, at the evidence of this crime. “It’s right next to your desk.”

And then The Black Eyed Peas walked in and struck up “Let’s Get It Started”. No, seriously…

The thing is, Rubin NEVER does this. Well, not any more, anyway. It’s honestly been YEARS now since he used to pull this kind of, er, crap, on a regular basis, but, much like my Second Head, he seems to sense when would be the worst possible time to strike. I guess this must be what people mean when they say animals have a sixth sense?

“This reminds me of that time we were just about to head to the airport to pick up Stephanie [my best friend, who lives in England], and Rubin pooped all over the couch, remember?” I said to Terry as we begun the cleanup. “Or that time we got up at 4am to catch a flight to Greece, and Rubin had basically exploded in the kitchen.”

He KNOWS, is what I’m saying. In exactly the same way that my own body likes to curse special occasions with a Second (Head) Coming, Rubin likes to curse them with a delivery of his own. It is UNCANNY.

(And no, he is not ill, I promise. Please don’t write to me to tell me he is obviously dying, because I hate it when people do that, and he’s really not.)

“He’s either breaking bad just for the hell of it, or something has really frightened him out in the garden,” said my mum, in response to my “please come and get Rubin before Terry kills him,” email a few minutes later. This left me with two possible explanations:

1. Rubin has been secretly dealing crystal meth all this time, and we can probably expect a visit from the cartel sometime soon. (I’ve always suspected something like this was going on with him, to be honest. It would explain SO MUCH.)

2. There is something really scary in my garden. Which… isn’t much better, really.)

With the stage thus set, it was time for me to examine the wreck that used to be my face, which, as you will recall from my last post, now included three additional heads, plus a giant red burn mark. I headed to the bathroom to inspect the damage, and discovered that there was good news, and, OF COURSE, also bad news.

The good news: the three heads had diminished in size, meaning that I would be able to more-or-less cover them with makeup. ( I say “more-or-less”. As I noted in this post, my appearance tends to degenerate over the course of a day/evening, so I figured I would be able to begin the party with just the one head, but by the end of it, the other three would have re-appeared, and I’d just have to hope everyone was drunk enough to assume they were seeing double quadruple.

The bad news: my cheek still looked like this:

Yeah, you all totally thought I was exaggerating about that, didn’t you? Well, I TOLD YOU SO. And actually, this photo doesn’t really do it justice: in real life it was even redder and, well, uglier. My parents and Terry all made valiant attempts to do the whole, “No one will notice!” thing, but it was blatantly obvious that, YES, everyone would notice, so they switched to a “It’s what’s inside that counts!” tactic instead. Which really didn’t help, because, in my case, “what’s inside” can basically be summed up as “SHOOZ SHOOZ DRESSES SKIRTS EMOSONGS FLORIDASUNSHINE PUPPIES THEOTHERS SHOOZ.”

My face may not be all that,” I told Terry when he started the “just let your personality shine through!” pep talk again, but it’s pretty much all I’ve got here, and you know it. If I rely on my personality, I’ll just be whining about The Others all night, and no one likes that at a party, do they?”

And after that, Terry wouldn’t talk to me no more.

As you can see from the (dark, grainy) photo accompanying this post, however, Cinderella did go to the ball, and for that she owes thanks to:

1. Industrial amounts of makeup

2. Very low-lighting

3. A cunning, “hair-over-one-side-of-the-face”‘do

4. Her beauty therapist friend, Lindsay, who came to the rescue with some “magic cream”, which arrived too late for the party itself, but which had the face back to almost-normal a couple of days later.

Oh yeah, and booze, obviously. For everyone else, I mean.

Luckily for me, by the time people started to arrive, I was able to completely forget about my stupid face and just enjoy the party instead. I’ve mentioned before that our last house was too small for us to entertain more than a few people at a time, but last weekend we had a houseful (and even enough room for some dancing), and it was really nice to see so many of our family and friends under the same roof. I think I can safely say the house has been well and truly “warmed”, and Terry and I both really enjoyed it. He’s now talking a lot about when we should throw the NEXT party. I, meanwhile, am just hoping I can get through the next year without burning my own face off again…