For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for September 03, 2023

Children don’t, can’t know all that goes into a household. My kids did a lot of chores growing up. Now they are better suited to handle the world they are in. Now all the housework falls back to my wife and me.

Unless he has a secret second family, she is his elder daughter.

I love the way the colors of the stripes on Elizabeth’s shirt move around. I used to have a shirt like that. It was great.

::sigh:: With the power vested in him. ::re-sigh::

Ask Mr Gumbo to do it!

The thing I miss the most is, after coming home with the groceries, telling the kids to unload the car and then put the groceries away.

My dad used to say, “I’ll tell you what, since you’re such a good girl, I’ll let ya’ take out the garbage!”

Dad; “I have been thinking, (over the past two days) now that your brother has gone away, YOU are the ELDEST CHILD in the HOUSE!”

That’s the problem of having a college educated dentist for a father! Nothing gets past them. They have been trained to think quickly on their feet using their brains!

Avoid those juice boxes. A study was done a while back, which showed that those things get covered with mold on the inside… So you’re drinking juice that’s been soaked in mold.

Funny back in the mid nineties here in Ontario, Canada the recycling bins were all blue colored instead of the white color of regular garbage pails. So that you would get used to recycling blue.

But to give the colorist credit. It looks like they began to color it blue from the lower corner, but they ran out of the blue paint from coloring the shirt!

Yay?

With a little practice, you’ll learn to shirk the responsibility as well as your brother.

Ahh, with great power, comes great responsibility.

when i bailed out, ya think my step-mother allowed my sister to be tasked with taking the garbage to the burn barrel? nope. when i came home on leave and found the farm gone to weeds, i asked him (recalling girls that plowed, baled, etc) why isn’t my sister working? “she’s with her french class in paris for the summer”. he went bankrupt and sold the farm. that’s a grudge i held against my step-mother to this day, 50 years later.

I did chores as well. Especially as my parents got older. My sister and I would clean the whole house and cook dinner for them.

I knew it was gonna be the garbage from the start.

I was expecting it to be mowing the lawn

Yup, the more responsibility they give you the more work they want out of you. All I want is a raise.

Missing at the end: “I miss my brother!”

As the saying goes, there’s good and bad in everything.

Dad found someone to pass off his duty too ;P

She graduated…….?

Elizabeth’s dream fulfilled.

Alternate strip…

Elizabeth: “Could have taken out the garbage, washed the toilet, calculated the taxes and seen the Godfather trilogy with the same time it took you to do that needless ‘eldest child’ ritual!”

In the largest sense, sanitation is what allows civilizations. In 1665 the Great Plague killed as much as a fifth of the population in London. It all starts with control of refuse.

And THAT’S only the beginning……

I taught my son enough that anything he needs to do – he can figure it out. He can read and prepare any recipe, follow assembly instructions, read usage directions. And I taught him never ever fix electrical or any significant plumbing issue on his own. Some things is worth paying a professional. When son went off to college, he crowed about how he was having to help the other guys with the basics.

And with your promotion Elizabeth comes nothing, nada, not one red cent more in you allowance. Now go build some character and take the garbage out. You don’t want to be like Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout.

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout

Would not take the garbage out.

She’d wash the dishes and scrub the pans Cook the yams and spice the hams,

And though her parents would scream and shout, She simply would not take the garbage out. And so it piled up to the ceiling:

Coffee grounds, potato peelings,

Brown bananas and rotten peas,

Chunks of sour cottage cheese.

It filled the can, it covered the floor,

It cracked the windows and blocked the door, With bacon rinds and chicken bones, Drippy ends of ice cream cones,

Prune pits, peach pits, orange peels, Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal,

Pizza crusts and withered greens,

Soggy beans, and tangerines,

Crusts of black-burned buttered toast, Grisly bits of beefy roast.

The garbage rolled on down the halls,

It raised the roof, it broke the walls,

I mean, greasy napkins, cookie crumbs, Blobs of gooey bubble gum, Cellophane from old bologna, Rubbery, blubbery macaroni,

Peanut butter, caked and dry,

Curdled milk, and crusts of pie,

Rotting melons, dried-up mustard, Eggshells mixed with lemon custard,

Cold French fries and rancid meat, Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat.

At last the garbage reached so high

That finally it touched the sky,

And none of her friends would come to play, And all of her neighbors moved away;

And finally, Sarah Cynthia Stout

Said, “Okay, I’ll take the garbage out!”

But then, of course it was too late,

The garbage reached across the state, From New York to the Golden Gate;

And there in the garbage she did hate

Poor Sarah met an awful fate

That I cannot right now relate

Because the hour is much too late

But children, remember Sarah Stout,

And always take the garbage out.

I chuckled every time I knew she had to take out the trash, mow the lawn, shovel the snow, rake the leaves, and wash the dishes. Yep, it was no longer my problem, now I had to deal with my own mess instead of the whole family’s, the joke was on me.

Why does everybody in this strip drool when they eat anything? At least she isn’t making gross noises this time.

This is much nicer than most of us boomer/x-ers were told to take out the trash

I’ve had that job off-and-on for as long as I can remember. A fitting epitaph for me would be: “Who’s going to take out the trash now?”

Take out the papers and the trash or you don’t get no spending cash

Elizabeth realizes her relationship to John and Elly. She is their:

Subordinate

Loving

Adept

Valuable

Educated

Given the state of her bedroom, I doubt Liz will ever realize that the trash needs to be taken out unless Elly yells at her.

LOL,

I still ask my late 20’s nephew to take the cans up the hill whenever he visits. I figure until he’s married, has a kid or acts like a responsible adult, I can still treat him like a kid.

this is great! lol

Fair enough Elizabeth. You are major contributor of the garbage now.

Imperious Rex.