Day 1 • Day 2 • Day 3 • Day 4 • Day 5 • Day 6 • Day 7 • Day 8 • Day 9 • Day 10 • Day 11 • Day 12
With all the ladies yesterday, I should have known their counterparts wouldn’t be far behind. When I opened the front door this morning, ten lords paraded past me into the house. How can I be sure they’re lords? Because each one formally announced himself as such upon entering: Lord Jim, Lord Byron, a shorter one named Fauntleroy, and so on and so forth. Most of them are prim and proper, as you’d expect, but two don’t fit the stereotype: One has a sparkly jacket and pants but no shirt, whereas the other is dressed all in black, including a cape and a bizarre-looking helmet. That one calls himself Vader.
At first, the lords were just jumping around Willy-Nilly,1 but Lord Vader proclaimed they would all jump in unison. This naturally caused quite a stir — lords don’t like being told what to do — but Vader calmly lifted a gloved hand, and suddenly his most vocal opponent began to choke. Within moments the guy had fallen to the floor and stopped breathing. Vader beckoned for his two servants, whom I hadn’t even noticed come in, to cart the body away and bury it in the back yard.
Jump with me. It is your destiny.
I assumed the whole thing was an act, but the other lords were sufficiently spooked that they immediately took to following Vader’s lead. Most of them caught on pretty quickly, though the least coordinated of the bunch stumbled into Vader a couple times, and did not live to learn from his mistakes. Fortunately, after those two deaths, everything went a little more smoothly. For the lords, that is...
Do you remember how the Banks’s home shook in Mary Poppins every time the cannon fired from their roof? Well, with all the lords jumping together, it’s kind of like that, except the house quakes every three seconds instead of every hour, and we have far fewer valuables remaining intact.2
With so many people in the house at once, and everyone constantly getting in each other’s way, emotions have been running high. Everywhere the dancers turn, they collide with something.3 The dancers yell at the maids, the maids at the lords, the lords at the dancers, and I at the maids, lords, dancers, and parrots.4
Needing a break from the insanity, I headed to the grocery store to pick up enough food for dinner for twenty-seven people. Both my credit cards were rejected, but they took my debit card.5 I then returned home to the wonderful aroma of chicken roasting in the oven.
Problem is, I knew for a fact that we’d already gone through all the meat in our freezer. It was as I feared: When I looked on the porch, I found only two of the original three hens.
In the basement, I also found that all the jumping had caused two of the newly laid pipes to burst. The pipe-laying geese were going at it beak-to-beak as the basement flooded. The rest of the birds had lined up two by two to climb into a large Rubbermaid storage container they'd fitted with a sail.
I couldn't reach our plumber, but luckily, I remembered a van from Joe’s Plumbing had been parked across the street for two days. Surely, they’d welcome some extra business. As soon as I neared the van, however, it pulled its satellite dishes back inside and tore off down the road, presumably toward some other plumbing emergency.
I hope our plumber calls back soon; all the jumping cracked the shut-off valve, so we have no way to stymy the flow of water. And the mafioso parrot keeps giving me the evil eye because of it.
I fear what tomorrow will bring.
1 That’s one of the lords: Lord William Nilly.
2 Also, at no time has one of the maids tried sliding up the banister.
3 Walls, lords, maids, birds, furniture, large hadrons...
4 Oh yeah, and the pole dancer got into fisticuffs with one of the swans. (She lost. Never mind that the swan had neither fists nor cuffs.)
5 As in, they didn't give it back.
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