I Am Completely Serious

I spent the week house- and pet-sitting for my parents, and except for pet-wrangling and some IT stuff, I spent every motile moment cleaning.

They are really bad about cleaning, okay! They have one of those huge wheeled garbage bins, and I filled it all the way up.

I did about ten loads of laundry, mostly bedding, because Dad leaves blankets lying around everywhere in the winter and the dogs lie on them. They came back late last night. I hadn't yet gotten the last load out of the dryer and into the closet before I went to bed - this load contained a blanket Mom likes and their good flannel bedsheets.

Obviously, when I got up this morning he'd 1) put a pair of his muddy shoes on the table and 2) put the contents of the dryer on top of the shoes.

Buying a toy and thinking “I’m going to have to keep this hidden from Dad, he’ll want one but he’s not old enough.”

This was basically just spell-checking pleadings and asking me if his “wording made sense.” He didn’t actually usually change his wording if I said it didn’t, he just enjoyed it when I tried to tell him he was lawyering wrong.

When I was thirteen, though, he had a case in which someone had been found to have some illegal material on his work computer. This guy assured Dad that he’d just gotten said illegal material as attachments to spam, and that he hadn’t wanted any of it.

The prosecution gave us copies of the emails in question with full headers, and the headers obviously rendered these documents far too intimidating for Dad. He got home, handed them to me, and asked me to look over them and explain them to me.

I hope that the information which I have presented here has instilled in you an appropriate sense of dread.

The actual illegal stuff had been redacted out, but the “benign” files had not. These included a photo of a woman posing suggestively next to her horse. This image formed an important part of a long-running conversation that Dad’s client had been having with her!

I have never stopped telling my dad that he is lawyering wrong.

Dark-colored coffee cup covered in pale, highly-visible streaks of dried-out improperly-incorporated instant cappuccino, sitting innocuously alongside several other ostensibly "clean" dishes.

I have informed Dad that he is not even allowed near the sink anymore. Put your dishes in the dishwasher and back away slowly.