Girl, Get Me Out Of This Hell Hole

I fear vacation/relaxation time. Seriously. Every time I don't work on a weekend something ends up making wish to God I had. Remember my last post about the bucolic house in the mountains weekend? Try Amityville Horror instead.

As is usual, any trip with my parents is bound to include, at some point in the venture, a huge screaming match wherein Dad gets to keep his nuts by an incredibly slight margin. In this case, we had the showdown at high noon just to get it out of the way (or on the way) right from the get go.

The house has a lockbox. In the box is the key. After an hour and a half drive, naturally we are all more than ready to get inside the house. Dad had assured mom the day before that of course he had the code. And there was a hide-a-key. Unfortunately for Dad, he did NOT get the code and the key was not where it should have been. In addition he had not charged his cell phone and they had to use mine. Mom was PISSED. Mind you, she had just had an epidural injection of the lower spine the day before for her herniated disk, and was supposed to be laying down flat. She was in pain, and on cortisone. Cortisone is a lovely drug, but it brings out the psycho killer in everyone. Very short fuse on the old rage bomb.

I told kiddobean to just keep circling the property and never ever look the grandma in the eye. She was stomping through bushes like Bigfoot on a bad hair day. It was a truly impressive freak-out even for her, and she has had some doozies.

We finally find the hidden key and are gratefully headed indoors. Where we are greeted by a HUGE contingent of black flies. Like 50+. Nasty right? It got better when we looked around and noticed the dead ones all over the floor. Some of them appeared quite big. Hello friends and neighbors those biggie sized ones are not flies they are big black wasps!

Look up in the windows! It's a bird. It's a plane. It's 25+ living big black wasps.

They landed on my head and I reached up and brushed them off without thinking about it. Then I had a tiny baby shit attack. Small child insisted she was going to sleep in the car.

We ended killing a bunch of the wasp and then spending the weekend hiding out down in the basement rec room area. It was like being in a cave. Mom was so pissed she marched out on the porch, plucked my cigarette out of my mouth and took a good 3 puffs off it. She is a hard core reformed smoker. The very act of smoking in front of her grandchild and her husband should have been a sign to all and sundry that you were just NOT to fuck with this woman. Dad didn't get it of course, and it is a minor miracle he is still alive.

The no energy use house (it produces and sells to the grid more than it uses) was nice and all. But it had no microwave. It also had a restaurant coffee pot system that had to be primed with multiple pots of water before it could even make a pot. And it only made a full pot of coffee. And they didn't have the right sized filter. I had a killer caffeine withdrawal headache by 3 in the morning. I was awake, kiddo was awake, and mom was awake. Dad was snoring on the best bed in the house. I ended up boiling water and coffee on the stove and straining it through a dishtowel just to get rid of the headache. It was just delightful. And to think I could have stayed in town, and been paid 300+ bucks for 16 hours of work and been way less miserable.

We got back on Sunday and kiddo and made it home for a shower. She was so cute trying to be upbeat about the weekend. The pretty drive, the breakfast in Hood River, etc etc.

After a hot shower and the realization that the weekend was over, she looked at me and said, "That sucked."

Like a Hoover Vacuum.