I am going to murder my brother yet.
For the past week, I've been oh so carefully sorting out the pieces of a puzzle, carefully placing all those without one straight side upside down in the box, so that when it comes times to get them back out, I can just flip them out (I'm fully aware that they wouldn't all come out right side up, but at least more would than originally did). It took a week and I was almost done, and I come home today to find half of them flipped right side up in the box, combined with pieces I did not put there.
It's a stupid thing to be upset over, but I hate it when people mess with things I work on. And invariably he does. It's not like he's a little kid who doesn't understand any better; he's two years younger than I am, he knows better.
Although he does know better than to say that he did it. It's been "I don't know who did it!" since the start. Which I don't really believe, for the reasons below:
1.) The dog cannot reach that table. I know she used to eat puzzle pieces if they were left in her general area, but she can't reach them, and if she could, she would have eaten them, not turned them over.
2.) The cats did not do it either. They would have tipped over the whole box and then used the pieces for soccer. And they can't really put in more pieces; our requirement for cats seems to be (according to my mother, at any rate) cute, but not too bright.
3.) My mother says she didn't do it, and I happen to believe her. She doesn't touch things I'm working on unless she ends up "cleaning" my room (the puzzle wasn't in there). And she has her own she's working on.
4.) My father hasn't been in that room for a week, and he isn't even in town now.
Which kind of leaves the little one, who denies doing it (except he's absolutely the worst liar in the world; even I can tell when he's lying, and I suck at identifying that kind of thing), just like he denies doing everything else he ever does. He's been playing with Mother's puzzle all week, despite repeated tellings of "don't", and he simply can't keep his hands off anything, especially when he's supposed to be doing homework (which he does in that room, since he's too easily "distracted" in any other room). It's just so annoying.
So now I'm going to have to dump out the whole thing again and redo it all. And he's going to get away with it, like he gets away with everything, because it "doesn't matter". It matters to me, even if it is just a silly little thing.
Whatever. I'm cranky anyway today.
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"Nothing worth having is easy."
Three years!