So, Saturday morning I wake up and M is already awake. I go into the kitchen to get some coffee to face the day and there’s a Harley Davidson night light plugged into a kitchen outlet. Hmmm. I’m guessing this is a gift that appeared from nowhere and no I’m suppose to react to it... except in my un-coffeed state I’m not really sure how to approach this new thing. Normally any “gifts” are revealed with great pomp, circumstance, and with a 4 page typed explanation of the significance of the gift, the story of how it was purchased, and what it means to M and B to give it to us... there was no story of the night light.
I choose to ignore it, but mention it to hubby when he wakes up. He said “hmmm” and chose to ignore it too. Finally M happens to scurry into the kitchen when I went in for a refill and I point to the night light and said “pretty”, and then the floodgates of explanation opened up and she apologized that it was cracked (I didn’t notice) and how she thought it would be perfect for the home what with hubby’s recent Harley purchase and blah blah I lapsed into a coma and didn’t listen to anything else. Inside my head I was wondering why, if it had a sensor, it wasn’t turning off, and whether she would be offended if I pulled it out of the socket because I’m not crazy at all about the air freshners you plug into sockets, let alone a light source that doesn’t seem to turn off on its own. I waited until we left before unplugging it surreptitiously.
The weather has totally sucked, which means locked in house, or locked in car, or locked in a mall, so we opted for the wider open spaces of the mall. Since it is raining and B’s heart will explode at any moment, hubby told us to jump out when he pulled up to the mall and he’d park the car. M and I jumped out, but B didn’t... oh brother. So then I was stuck with M while she bitched about how B doesn’t do anything he’s told unless its his idea and how annoying he was and blah blah blah I didn’t hear the rest because I was looking for a mall cop so I could lay in front of the Segway and be run over... there were no mall cops to be seen.
We got Subway sandwiches to eat. M made this whole elaborate thing about folding the paper that her sandwich was wrapped in, and looking up to see if anyone was noticing how she was elaborately folding the paper of the sandwich as if she wanted someone to ask “WTF are you doing?” Nobody did. As a matter of fact, hubby and I have perfected the “oh gawd don’t look at them because they’ll start talking about stupid crap” eye avoidance technique. Hell, I’ll look under the table if it keeps me from hearing about their friend, Mimi, you probably don’t remember her because she moved into the neighborhood 10 years after you graduated and went into the service, but Mimi started this frame shop and she did such a wonderful job on the things we brought in to be framed, as a matter of fact, we brought in this newspaper article reprint and she told us that she had the most lovely frame for it and asked if she could frame it the way she saw it and if we didn’t like it then she would frame it how we wanted it and she did such a lovely job that we just didn’t have the heart to tell her that the frame was about 5 times more than the print, but we just got it anyway because she was so proud of the frame, anyway, she doesn’t work in that store any more“
You are probably thinking to yourself, as we did, A.) that Mimi screwed you out of a ton of money, and B.) WTF was the point of telling us about Mimi?
This would go hand in hand with her saying, out of the blue: ”So you were telling us how much you enjoy watching the Food Channel... well, we watch a show about all of the hot dog and hamburger places there are, and one time they did donuts and they talked all about Krispy Kreme donuts and how great they were and we were suppose to get a Krispy Kreme shop in town and people waited and waited and finally someone went to Spokane, where there was a Krispy Kreme shop and bought some and brought them back, but we didn’t like them, they said they were suppose to be warm, but these were cold and nobody cared for them and it turns out that they never built the Krispy Kreme shop in town“.
A.) NOBODY mentioned anything about watching the Food channel, we never watch the Food channel so I can only imagine that the voices in her head watch it, and B.) Who gives a rat’s ass about Krispy Kreme donuts?
We ended up at Macaroni Grill later that night and there was a huge ”to do“ about the fact that there was a wine on the menu that was labeled a ”Columbia Valley“ wine, but it was actually a ”Walla Walla“ wine and NOT a ”Columbia Valley“ wine and the history of why it wasn’t considered a ”Columbia Valley“ wine... meanwhile the waiter is standing there patiently wishing for death unless we gave him our order so he could wait on the other 50 tables he had.
Somewhere in the meal, M turns to me and says ”Why do you think Michael Jackson put towels over his kids’ heads?“ I.... don’t..... know
