Christmas Notes

(These are some random notes that I took during my trip back to Pennsylvania.)

2010-12-22 03:24 EST:

Everything in this house is broken and my familiy is basically living in squalor. I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was this bad. My sister is a surrogate mom for seven cats, three I remember from a few years ago. Every single room, including the basement but not the attic, has been adapted to fit into the busy lifestyle of cats. Most if not all rooms contain litter boxes, though I am relieved to see that they are practically immaculate.

She asserts at least three times in our first conversation that her cats are her children, but I have never heard of a parent converting their entire home into Disneyland. I grew up inside these walls, and I am familiar with the quirky eccentricities of its plumbing, but I just spent about 2 minutes of my life (that I will never get back) manually rolling up a window blind in the bathroom because it no longer retracts automatically when pulled. It's expected that my childhood home would change in new and unpredictable ways, but I am stricken with sadness to see the home my mother bought in 1970 for a third of what my last car cost turned into a kitty-centric hovel. This is their house now. Mom just lives in it. She used to spend her evenings and weekends repairing this place with her own two hands. Sanding it, painting it, shoveling snow in the winter, gardening in the summer. Now, every nook of every room is strewn with books and greeting cards and boxes and there's no more living room in the living room. The space is no longer hers to use, and she now lives between the places where the cats are, storing away the things they may shred or pee on at any moment.

2010-12-22 13:14 EST:

I don't know what this swill is, but Mom calls it coffee. She made it at 10 and keeps it in a thermos. Heidi has taken a flimsy bread knife she tells me she bought specifically for this purpose and is anxiously sawing open the cardboard tube that used to be the core of a roll of packing tape. If not cut open, there is a potential for an animal to get caught in it. I wonder to myself if she is planning on dumping this former roll of tape in a park or off in the woods, or if she is rather going to put it in the garbage so it can be compacted and dumped into a landfill. Somewhere at the dump right now, a huge rat with a neck as big around as a roll of tape is immensely grateful.

2010-12-22 23:12 EST:

Sister decided that since I brought my leftovers home in a styrofoam container she would punish me by disabling the wifi in the house. It's good to know that the petty spitefulness of our grandmother is alive and well in her, because it means I might still be able to convince her to cut off her nose somehow.

2010-12-25 12:33 EST:

Things my sister has bitched about in the last 45 minutes (abridged):

• cooking the carrots too long (twice) (last night it was not cooking potatoes long enough)
• using the vegetable steamer without her supervision (see carrot rant)
• other people drinking coffee
• the quality of cookies a neighbor gave her as a gift
• mashing potatoes in a pan and not a bowl
• kitchen drain not draining
• passing dishes clockwise vs. counterclockwise at the table
• turkey having gristle
• placement of her keys
• people eating too quickly
• using the wrong-sized container to store cranberry sauce (this had two follow-up rants: using oatmeal-only containers for not oatmeal; difficulty in putting away aforementioned containers)
• setting cookies on the kitchen table
• hugging her in a manner that would have touched her earring
• the sound of her filing her own fingernail with an emery board
• someone applying hand lotion during the gift exchange
• the annoyance of having distant family call on Christmas (twice)

After that, I just stopped keeping track. You'd think that this would be an atypically high volume of sample bitching what with it being Christmas dinner and all, but really this is average for when she hasn't isolated herself. She calmed down a bit after she got some gifts to distract her, but after a while she started complaining about the technique of a recipe in a book she'd received.

2010-12-26 22:03 EST:

The sister enjoys collecting movie and TV quotes. She does this by rewinding every scene of what she's watching on her DVR to jot it down, ignorant of how supremely annoying it can be for the other people in the room to be forced to watch the same thing three or four times in a row. I think this is the longest five minutes of Monk I've ever had to sit through, and that's saying something.

2010-12-27 13:36 EST:

I'm told that a water main has broken during the night. Authorities recommend boiling any drinking water before consuming it. They suggest we do this for the next 3 days. I wonder if I can get a hotel.

(I did. It was awesome.)