thanksgiving sucked

/28/08 This has quite possibly been the worst Thanksgiving I’ve ever had. I am finding that I have less and less patience for people in general. I drove 6 hours to come to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere to spend a few days with 3 of my very favorite people. I knew going into the trip that I was going to have to suffer the presence of 2 of my very least favorite people. Darla is my very best friend ever, and honestly I would do anything in the world for her, however I think I have found the one thing that I won’t do. I can deal with her snotty, bitchy sister and her smarmy brat niece, or I can deal with her drunken asshole boyfriend, but I have found that I cannot deal with them all at the same time. I have spent the better part of the last 41 hours either drunk, or crabby, or both. Neither of those 2 adults has reached the conclusion that there are other people in this house who have an opinion, or feelings. Lisa has spent most of the time I’ve been here telling Darla how to parent Nick, because, well, since Darla has managed to raise Nathan to the ripe old age of 17, he’s not been in trouble with the law, he’s doing fine, for the most part in school, and in general he’s a well-adjusted kid, clearly Darla’s an incompetent parent! Rick, on the other hand, has spent most of the time I’ve been here completely drunk and in general being an asshole to everybody except the baby. Last night, once the baby was asleep, the bratchild was also asleep, Nathan had gone to his room, and I laid down on my bed (the couch) in the living room to try to go to sleep. Rick and Lisa decided that they were going to stay up and watch the end of US Marshals or whatever the damn movie was. I plugged in my IPOd and tried to ignore them and go to sleep. Yeah, notsomuch. Asshole decided that he couldn’t hear the movie well enough, so turned up the volume, now that the baby was asleep in his room. I tried to ignore them as best I could until the movie ended. Silly me, I thought that I would actually get to go to sleep. Lisa headed to bed, but oh no, not asshole. He turned on a light, dug around in the cabinet and got out yet another movie to watch! I asked him if he was going to watch movies all night and his response was “oh, just for a little bit.” I got up and started into his bedroom to get in bed with Darla and he acted all offended, but I just told him “I can’t sleep with that TV on. I’ll go in there and sleep in your bed, you can stay up and watch tv all you want.” I eventually fell asleep, about 12:15 in the morning, in there with Darla. All was fine until 4:30 when he decided that he was ready to get in bed, at which point he came and tried to rouse me out of my spot. Darla told him to leave me be, so he slammed outta the bedroom and came out to the couch. I’m ok with it. Fucker. I got up around 7 to get up and hopefully get to spend a little time texting with Tom before he had to go to work, and sent Rick into his bed. I had about an hour of peace before Lisa & bratchild woke up and came out. While I was in the shower, Rick found it amusing and appropriate to try to gawk at me through the shower door, and bang on it. WTF??? He wasn’t even drunk yet… I think he was on his 2nd beer of the day. In all reality, if not for the fact that I will be unable to travel at Christmas, thus unable to do what I have done for nigh on 10 years now, which is spend Christmas with Darla & Nathan, I would not be here at all. I would have stayed home, gotten a few things done around the house, and started getting ready for Christmas. Unfortunately, next year, it will be Lisa’s year to have the bratchild at Christmas, so they’ll be back here again, which means I will NOT spend Christmas with Darla & Nathan for 2 years in a row. Sigh. I want so desperately to talk to someone specific, but even if he was not at work, I am not sure I could talk to him without being completely negative and bawling my eyes out, and I just don’t want to subject him to that. He doesn’t deserve my ranting and whining, because he brings a smile to my face and light to my world, and I hope that I do the same for him, at least sometimes. Eventually I think we’ll reach the point that I feel comfortable telling him what all is going through my head and fussing and crying my little eyeballs out when I’m overwhelmed, but I’m not sure he’s ready to deal with that right now. Saturday, November 29th dawned and Lisa & bratchild finally left. Soon after that, Darla & I headed for the big city. In that part of the state, that means Midland/Odessa… big woo, right? Well, our first stop was The Candle Café in Midland. It’s absolutely my favorite candle shop. More on that later, when I can gather my thoughts for a more positive, less rant-filled post. One of Darla’s other friends met us at the Candle Café. This is a person that I was never terribly crazy about, but in the last couple of years, she’s made some choices that cause me to want nothing to do with her. At any rate, I knew we were going to have to meet up with her, as she had some things to give to Darla for Christmas, but I told Darla to begin with, I do NOT want to spend the whole day with her. It’s bad enough that we get less than 24 hours of time for just us (except for dipshit rick and the boys). So we were driving into Midland, and we passed a street on the outskirts and she said “her aunt lives down that road”. Now, see, I was willing to begin with to meet up with this chick because I thought she lived in Abilene and was only in town for the holiday weekend. But HELL NO, she fricking LIVES THERE. She lives less than 2 hours from Darla, yet the only time that she can find to see Darla is when I have driven 6 hours to see her. WTF???? So as we were leaving, Darla retrieved her things from the chick’s car and the chick said she would follow us to the Christmas bazaar that we were planning on hitting next. As Darla got in the car I said (probably rather loudly, and honestly, believing that chick was in her own car already) “Oh HELL NO, I am not spending all day with her, how long is she planning on following us around? I did not drive 6 hours and 400 miles plus another 120 today to put up with her bullshit today!” Chick pulled out of her parking space before we did, but not angrily as far as I could tell. Darla said we’ll just tell her we’re heading back home after the bazaar. When we got to the bazaar, she wasn’t there yet, which surprised us, but in all honesty, I didn’t care, since I really didn’t want to be with her anyway. She arrived a few minutes later and we set about wandering around. As is our nature, we wind up being in different booths at the same time, but we always manage to hook back up every few minutes. I hadn’t seen her in about 30 minutes, and it had been about 15 since I’d seen Darla, but I did find Darla again and was at a booth with her looking at hair stuff, when chick came up with her bags acting all pissy, and told Darla she was leaving. Darla asked her if there was something wrong and she said no, that she just needed to go home. Off and on throughout the rest of the day Darla fretted about why she left early, if Darla had done something to hurt her feelings or piss her off. I tried to get her to not worry about it, I suspect that perhaps she heard my rant about not wanting to spend the whole day with her, and I don’t rightly give a damn. In the last 6 years, I have NEVER been able to have a visit out there with Darla without her horning in on something, on at least 1 day of my visit. She’s self absorbed, and always has an agenda. When Darla had Nick, she was Darla’s coach in labor & delivery, and she stayed with Darla when she went home from the hospital until I got there. Darla’s choice was to breast feed, and Darla was open about this, though because of some delivery complications, her milk didn’t come in very quickly, and so Nick had to be started on formula. Until I was there and I was able to have a say so and support Darla, chick was doing everything she could to hinder breast feeding. Again, I say WTF??? She was totally unhelpful about making sure the pump was nearby and as soon as he started fussing, instead of handing him to Darla (who wasn’t allowed to lift anything over about 3 lbs, and had to be off her feet except to go to the bathroom for a week after he was born), she carried him into the kitchen with her while she fixed a formula bottle. Yep, she is just one more person in Darla’s world who wants everything her way, hence I don’t want to deal with her if possible. After the Christmas bazaar (which was fun, but that will all go into a nicer post as well), we headed back to Midland to hit the mall, since I THOUGHT that’s where the nearest Lane Bryant was. Talk about a fustercluck mess! The first entrance/exit that we came to was closed off, so it took 20 minutes to get into the stupid parking lot. Yeah, no Lane Bryant. Picked up a few things at Bath & Body Works as long as we were there, then hit Victoria’s Secret to see if they had the sweats Darla wanted. By the time that we got to Academy to pick up what pinhead had sent $ for, and got to Walmart, it was 5:30. We made our rounds and got everything that was on our written list. I had forgotten to write one thing down, but it wasn’t anything major. By 6:15, I was over it and burnt to the ground, so we went to find an open checkout lane. UMM, you know those commercials now, about opening more checkout lanes on Saturdays? I think they forgot to get that information to the Walmart in Midland, right there on I20. I swear to you, there were 8 self-checkouts, 3 express lanes (20 items or less), and 1, yes, I said ONE regular checkout open. uMM, yeah, a total of 12 out of I think 36 or 40 lanes were open. Helpful, since I needed to reload a gift card, and we had about 30 items. I just gave up on the reload, and we did the self checkout, after which we noticed as we walked out, that 2 more regular lanes had been opened. GRRRRR! We rolled into the driveway about 8:45 or so to find that we had company, one of butthead’s co-workers. No idea how long she’d been there, but of course butthead was drunk, the baby wasn’t bathed or ready for bed, AND as I discovered when I heated up some potato casserole and got some carrots for MY dinner, NOT FRICKING FED YET! Therefore, instead of eating my potatoes, I had to feed them to the baby. The company left around 10:30, and the baby was bathed by then. When Darla tried to settle Nick down to sleep, butthead had to keep trying to “help” however in his drunken state, and because he will tell him “you don’t have to go to sleep, but you have to sit here with me and watch tv” the baby thinks he’s going to be rescued and not have to go to sleep yet. I think finally around 11:30 butthead went to bed, and within about 10 minutes, Nick was out for the count. So, finally, it’s nearly midnight, and there’s now way in HELL I am going to try to get the itunes stuff transferred from my computer to Darla & nathan’s so she can sync when she wants to update it. I also discovered that asshole had opened and drunk half of each of my last 2 Dublin Dr Peppers. OK, now screwing me out of my Dr P is a killing offense in my book. And this pinhead has opened not ONE, but TWO, and drunk the sum total of 1 of them, leaving the halves to go flat. Not that I would drink out of anything I know he’s drunk out of, since he’s got a wad of chew in his mouth most of the time, so God knows what his drunk ass left in the cans after taking a swig! Sunday morning I was hoping to be on the road by 10 a.m., but that didn’t happen because I had to do the whole itunes transfer thing, and even then, it didn’t transfer into her Itunes, it just went to her music folder. So I left Nathan in charge of making sure that everything got into the proper place, as well as recreating the playlists, but I was hysterical before I gave him the task! OH, and Lisa called to see if I would go to the Cracker Barrel in Abilene and pick up the baby doll that bratchild left the day before when they stopped for lunch. Um, yeah, that is a great big NO! Especially since I didn’t plan on going through Abilene! I wound up leaving about 11:30. Stopped in Ozona at the DQ to get a DP and some lunch. Yeah, I’d filled my cup with some on my way out the door, not realizing that dipshit had given the company something to drink in it the night before, and left fricking LIMES in the bottom. I HATE LIMES! Yep, we’re up to 3 wasted dr p’s now, 2 from Dublin at a cost of about $1.25 each, plus a regular one. So, I place my order “Hunger Buster with cheese with KETCHUP AND PICKLES ONLY, and a large dr pepper. “ she repeated it back to me, correctly, gave me my total, and I pulled up. I got my drink and about 3 minutes later they told me to pull forward and wait. Sigh, so I did, and about 5 minutes later, here came my food. Go back 2 sentences and see what I said. Go on, I’ll wait. Yep, clear as day I said KETCHUP & PICKLES ONLY. My burger came out “sub ketchup for mustard” WTF??? It’s a good thing that my aversion to onions and tomato slices has to do with flavor/texture, and not an allergy, because hot damn, there they were, nestled in among the shredded lettuce. As frustrated as it made me, it just wasn’t worth the bullshit of waiting in line behind the million cars parked, or the 7 in the drive through to raise hell about it. I only made 1 stop after that, in San Angelo for gasoline and a potty break. It took me a total of about 6 hours from door to door, including the 2 stops, so I made pretty good time. When I got home, the house was pretty much in the same state I’d left it in, which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t a huge deal, but since I’d been hearing for a couple of weeks that Helen’s plan was to do some cleaning while I was gone. Oh well.