….Dick Cheney – in the form of a 15-year-old girl – blasts peace and tranquility all to hell with his shotgun. At least that’s how mornings have been at my house recently.

Getting Hollis out of bed remains one of the more difficult aspects of living with a teenager. And let me say this right now – not that I’m excusing it – but she and several other billion teenagers are pretty much the same way.

But now that she is on the junior varsity cheerleading squad, we are facing practice times that will require her to be at school – 30 minutes away – by 6:45 a.m. That’s a 5:45 a.m. wake-up call so we can hit the road by 6:15 a.m.

Right now I can’t get her up for her 7:30 a.m. class. I’ve turned  into this nagging apparition who appears in her doorway, bleary-eyed, every five minutes, sternly admonishing her to get out of bed. I start at 6:15 a.m. and this morning, it was 6:40 a.m. before she rolled out of bed, assuring me she had plenty of time to get ready.

Now I’ve heard that before. I try to get her to actually lay out her clothing for the next morning the night before. “I know what I’m wearing in my mind,” she tells me. Then the next morning, she changes her mind and is on the phone asking her cousin to bring some article of clothing in the midst of Shelby getting ready for school.

Hey, a girl’s got the right to change her mind, but with five minutes before pickup, that’s not the time.

So even though Hollis THINKS she can get ready pretty pronto, it’s a 75-25 chance something will keep that from happening.

She let me know her disapproval about my nagging this morning by slamming the toilet lid up and then down and then banging around in the dryer looking for something she had envisioned she would wear. Normally I put her clean clothes away (because I know if I give them to her to do it, they’ll never make it in the drawers, which, I might add, are pulled out of the dressers and sitting on the floor.)

But this hasn’t been a normal week. Monday night we all ate dinner at Baker’s Crust (Hollis doesn’t like the sound of the word “crust” or “casserole.” Just an interesting tidbit when you play the Hollis-version of Trivial Pursuit or want to torture her with words….). That had me working later in my home office to get the paper done, so I didn’t get the clothes put away by the time Hollis went to bed. Then Tuesday morning, I was out the door before she left to head into the main office in Norfoolk to finish up the Clipper with the designer and since I was asked to help out during election night. I didn’t get home until 11 p.m. thanks to a Berekley bridge lift.

I called Hollis again at 10 p.m. to find she had been home for two hours (after cheerleading practice and then attending a volleyball game) and never thought to put the dogs out, who hadn’t been put out since 7:30 a.m. I’ve simply got to improve her situational awareness when it comes to animal care. When I got home, I was pleased there were no accidents other than a suspicious vomit spot that could have been the cats. Charlee, however, was nowhere to be seen. I peeked in Hollis’ room to find Charlee sleeping on the bed. She thumped her tail, but made no effort to get up. Cool. Two bed hogs together — let’s see how that goes.

But during one of the many wake-up calls, I noticed a stain on the floor that looked perhaps like a pee stain but now I think it might have been stomach bile. Charlee never got her evening meal because I normally feed the dogs in the morning and again at night. And Hollis certainly wouldn’t think to feed them. If Charlee peed, that would have been the first time since I got her 11 months ago. And after holding it for 14 hours, I can’t imagine her going after just 7.  But then Hollis admitted the spot was thick like vomit, not wet like pee, since she (eewwww)  stepped in it.

And God help me and I’m not proud of it, but I smiled a little at that statement.