Holiday 07 (in brief)

For those of you who didn't get to spend the last five days with those people who swear we look alike because we're related (I'm trying to convince them the resemblance is mere coincidence), I offer the following recap...

Uh, somebody pull the battery out of that smoke detector.
(Because it was going off. Again. Mom was cooking.)

Well, that rabid possum just would not give up. I hit him forty or fifty times with that stick. I thought he was dead. I went to pick him up by his tail, and he turned around to snap at me. So... I hit the damn thing another forty or fifty times.
(My uncle has a lot of stories like this about the poor bastards who get into his garage. Don't call PETA--he'll just beat the shit out 'em with that stick. He may sound like an asshole, but when I was running from Ex, I ran to his house. The dude hits rabid beasts with a stick. Sometimes, knowing that kind of dude comes in handy.)

That happened to me once at Bingo.
(My sister works in retail, and a quick change artist got $250 out of her register. According to my aunt, they also hit Catholic church basements. We all thought that was funny. It doesn't seem so funny now that I'm typing it. Maybe you had to be there.)

Frankly, I don't really care if Iran gets the bomb. We have the bomb. We're the only ones who have ever used it. And we used it on two civilian populations.
(That was my dad, and the dude has a point. And no, I won't be entertaining arguments about this is in the comments.)

I once dated a woman named Dagmar Stockfish. (This was a different uncle. And Dagmar, you ain't missing much. He's turned out to be much more of an asshole than the one with the stick.)

I need a magnifying glass to read the phone book.
Something seems to have happened to my bowels.
If I sit down on that floor, I may not be able to get up until next Christmas.
The clothes in my closet have been there so long, they're back in style again.
(There was a lot of this talk of the joys of aging.)

Oh, wow. That's...uh...a really pretty color.
(That was all my dad could come up with after he opened the half sweater/half sweatshirt my grandma bought him. It will come in handy for all those occasions when he's not sure if it's casual or business casual.)

Mom, go in the living room and ask to see your daughter-in-law's new tattoo. It's on her ring finger.
(A few months ago, my sister-in-law got drunk on all of four glasses of wine and got my brother's name tattooed on her ring finger. Unfortunately, tattoos on your hand have a tendency to wear quickly. So, it's beginning to look like she's in love with IKE instead of MIKE.)

There was other stuff, but it was even more boring than above. I don't know what it is about spending the holidays at home, but it has a way of eating at my soul.

I kept looking at my sister and saying, "Couldn't you go into labor already so we can get the fuck out of here?" She didn't. Typical family--you ask for one small thing, and they let you down.