Family visits, parties, brunch, gifts, and bullshit (and I mean actual bull shit)

I worked my ass off this past week in order to get the weekend off to go to Little Rock to see the family. Sunday was also my niece's birthday, and I assumed we'd be having a party Saturday night to mark that occasion. This assumption led to confusion/borderline outrage when my brother called me on Friday to let me know that the party was to start at three...and that he ordered a keg and a margarita machine. My niece is ten. Turns out the birthday party was gonna be on Friday night, and the party on Saturday was merely a block party.

I had planned to leave Tulsa at three o'clock, laeving me enough time to sleep in and recover from the party I went to Friday night. Instead I was up at ten (got at least 8 hours), packed up, left plenty of food out for Chuck, and ran the trash out before I left. When I went to throw the trash in the dumpster, I was given an unkind and very gross reminder that it had rained a lot the past week when dumpster juice splashed all over me.

Halfway up my steps, my phone rang and it was my mom wanting to know if I was on the road yet. She was excited that I was coming down to visit, as was I, but the more she talked the more I kept fixating on the fact that I was drenched in garbage water. So, I had to cut my mom off and exclaim that I needed to take a shower, and perhaps a immunization shot of some kind.

The drive in was as uneventful as a four-hour drive in a truck with no A/C and a weak radio antenna could be. I wound up listening to the MP3 player on my phone throught the mono earpiece the whole way there.

The party was pretty fun. The margaritas were plentiful, the BBQ ribs were awesome, and the boiled crawfish were really fresh, in that they were indeed still living when they were thrown in the boil. Most of the people there were my sister-in-law's work friends, and the reputation that preceded me with these people was mostly limited to the People Magazine article, which my sister-in-law had talked about/showed to all of them. My folks left a little early, and my step-brother and I left a little while after that. We wound up spending the rest of the night playing Playstation instead of going back to the party to do tequila shots. Nothing against my brother and tequila, but I was tired from the drive in and didn't need any more to drink.

Sunday, we went over to my brother's neighbor's house for Mother's Day brunch. That was the only meal I needed all day. Afterwards, since I had brought the truck back, my stepdad decided it would be a nice present to my mother for my stepbrother and I to help fetch and unload four truckloads of topsoil for her new garden...topsoil with enriched, composted manure blended in it. At this time I'd like to note that I only brought two pairs of footwear with me: My brand-new sneakers and an old pair of flip-flops.

It really wasn't that bad. My stepdad kept giving us shit for not being able to do manual labor as fast as he is used to. I explained to him that my step-brother sells cars, and I make pretty pictures for a living. We each made conscious decisions in our career paths to avoid having to ever shovel shit-rich soil and lamenting my casual clothing choices while doing it. Nothing says "I love you, mom!" like a dehydrated, exhausted thirty-year-old man wearing shitty-mud-soaked flip-flops and drenched in sweat.

After what was my fourth shower in two days, I squared up my part of the cost of the transmission repairs with the folks and got packed up to head back home. My mom, true to her nature, loaded me up with all sorts of goodies. Earlier in life, these goodies were far more impractical: Toys from my childhood, things she saw at the store, miscellaneous goofy shit, etc. This time around, I got my old drafting table back, a book on personal finance, a Star Wars design book (which is very practical to a guy like me), and their old fax/scanner/copier/printer. It was particularly fun to watch my mom go on and on about how to run the fax machine, then suddenly realize that I didn't have a land line to use it for that purpose. I'm sure I'll tinker with it and use it for printing stuff out, but mostly I took it so I'll have one less piece of office equipment to buy if I ever get Helper Monkey Design Studio off the ground.

Before I left, I made the decision to just leave food out for Chuck and leave him fresh kitty litter for the night. I figured he'd be fine for the 35 hours I was to be leaving him alone. When I got home, everything looked exactly as I had left it, except for the fact that in place of my trusty, old self sufficient cat, there was a talkative incredibly needy ball of nerve-racked fur clinging to my ankles for at least an hour after walking in the door. It's so nice to be missed.