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Related: Culture Forums, Support Forumscyberswede
(26,117 posts)Make the best of it!
Denninmi
(6,581 posts)Family can be a real trip.
Iggo
(47,534 posts)Mellow.
Gidney N Cloyd
(19,818 posts)Iggo
(47,534 posts)BlueJazz
(25,348 posts)Dune, Dune, Dune, Dune, Dune.......
Baitball Blogger
(46,682 posts)I have to explain what was happening up to that moment. Weeks before the gathering I had spent days working on a garage sale, believing that decluttering the house would help make the house more comfortable for everyone when they arrived on the Fourth. As we neared the end of the month my husband was completely immersed in closing business for the quarter that I was on my own tagging everything--and there was quite a bit since we hadn't cleared the house of the kid stuff, even though my children had already graduated from college and were on their own living their lives outside of Florida (Gracias ha Dios)
I didn't make much in the garage sale, but it was a tremendous success just to get rid of things that I would never miss, or thought I would never miss. I didn't even have a full day to enjoy my triumph when my daughter arrived a day ahead of everyone else and asked where her childhood Teddy bear was. Oh my God. I must have accidentally pulled it into a batch of other stuff toys when I dumped a sack of the toys on the floor of her room to tag them. She would later apologize for OCDing about her loss, but my OCD was worse as I did nothing but focus on the screw up, and I still had to focus on last minute clean-up of the house.
Let me just say, there is no such thing as a last minute clean-up of a house. By around this time I began to feel my age as all the standing around, tagging items, started to wear on my knees. I did two four hour shifts cleaning the house and I could swear the cartilage in my knees had worn down and I could feel bone rubbing on bone.
Then, just fifteen minutes before my son was to arrive with his new girlfriend, I tried to relax and get on the internet. It was down. The one job I had left for my husband was to make sure the router was plugged into a backup battery system. I had asked him to do it a month ago, and he had finally had time to do it an hour before my son arrived. But, apparently, something was wrong with the connection. So I called the cable company and tried to get them to walk me through the process to fix it and realized I could not answer his questions. I was completely brain dead. I just told the guy I couldn't do this at this time and hung up before he heard me break out into tears.
Ten minutes later everyone arrived and I realized I had worked too hard for this moment to succumb to exhaustion. Everyone was hungry by this time so we began to get the food together. We asked my son's girlfriend if she would be okay with grilled steaks and she replied she was a vegetarian. It was a fact my son failed to tell us.
Well, this is what happens when you're brain dead. I went into the refrigerator and looked for something suitable and pulled out breaded chicken tenders. "Will this do?" I asked.
She was on her way out of the kitchen about the time and politely let without answering.
It took me a month to recover from that poor planning of putting a garage sale and hosting a family gathering back to back.
Gidney N Cloyd
(19,818 posts)Like Switzerland.
HarveyDarkey
(9,077 posts)Gidney N Cloyd
(19,818 posts)Gidney N Cloyd
(19,818 posts)And may I add, I love my dog.
MiddleFingerMom
(25,163 posts).
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Mid-60's, a Saturday night and MiddleFingerMomDad & MiddleFingerMomMom are 15 minutes away from
about a dozen close friends arriving for a dinner party at our relatively small 1-story home when...
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... Sandy (our beautiful collie) gets explosive diarrhea (apparently MFMD had fed her something like FIERY
hot chili earlier that day). It had to have burned terribly because, WHILE it was happening... she apparently
tried desperately to get away from her own asshole by running away from it.
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ALL. THROUGH. THE. HOUSE.
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They threw open all the windows. MFMM started cleaning while MFMD went out back and quickly built a
HUGE bonfire (it was the dead of Michigan winter). The cocktails flowed like the Ol' Mississipp and little
finger-food hors-d-oeuvres were thrown together.
.
They never COULD go into the house that night except for (VERY quick) bathroom runs (pardon the
expression) but, from what I can remember... a TREMENDOUS time was had by all.
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Except, of course, for poor old Sandy.
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Kali
(55,003 posts)dog diarrhea beats that
Locut0s
(6,154 posts)Family, simultaneously the best AND worst thing in the world. For some the pendulum swings more to one side.