After that traumatic event I planned to spend the rest of the day relaxing on the couch.

Mom had other plans for me, though. Apparently getting baby carrots stuck up your nose doesn’t count as a sick day.

Mom’s plan was to pick up a whole bunch of creams:

In other words, my whole family is totally disgusting.

(In case you don’t know what hemorrhoid cream is, I’ll just say that it has to do with an itchy heinie. I didn’t know my father had this problem, but it does explain why he gets so cranky on long car rides.)

To make matters worse, Mom took Archie and Diablo along to buy this stuff. Every time Diablo tried to attack another dog, Archie began to stagger around, whizzing all over the place. We had to dodge the whiz each time. Plus Mom couldn’t bite Diablo’s neck unless she wanted to get whizzed on.

When we got to the drugstore, Mom told me to hold on to the dogs while she went inside.

“No way,” I told her. “You can’t leave me alone with these maniacs.”

“Fine,” she said, and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “You go in and buy the stuff.”

That seemed like a better deal. I went into the drugstore, found all the items on the shelf, and brought them to the cashier. She smiled at me.

“No school today?” she said.

“Oh, I just, um … had a few medical issues,” I told her. I figured that was less embarrassing than explaining about the baby carrots.

After she rang up the zit cream and the foot fungus cream, she gave me this sad look. But when she picked up the hemorrhoid cream she looked like she was about to cry.

That’s when I realized she thought they were all for me! I was just about to tell her that they were for my disgusting family and I was the only normal one, when she pulled out a box of lollipops from under the counter.

“Go on. Help yourself, you poor little guy.”

Well, I can’t resist a freebie, so I took three of them.

But I scratched my heinie on my way out, just to make her feel like she had done a good deed.