Let Me Tell You About My Family

Let me tell you about my extended family

Hubby has sisters to spare, but only has one brother. That brother is married, and his wife is super special. Really. Super special. Now to be fair, she’s nice. Nice in a really weird way, but nice. For example, I remember when she was worried the kids were hungry because they refused to eat their non-child approved lunch of shrimp cocktail and cucumber sandwiches (which were lovely by the way) so she gave them a package of Oreo cookies to tide them over until dinner. The Girl wasn’t on solids yet when this occurred but I made a note not to let this particular sister-in-law babysit.

Moving on, previously mentioned family member is a wee bit OCD about some things. In particular is an obsession with keeping her living room pristine. Seriously. Your stature in her eyes is obvious depending on whether she allows you to sit in her living room. Or walk in it. Most people (family especially) get hustled from the front door through the entry and directly to the family room opposite the kitchen. I’d also like to say her kitchen is always spotless, and I was a little jealous until I realized it’s because every meal comes from the microwave or a take-out bag.

Another thing she’s OCD about is pets. She doesn’t like them. It just about killed her when her daughter got a gerbil for her birthday two years ago. I believe children should have a pet. It teaches them responsibility and kindness to animals. If not children, teenagers will do. In any case, the gerbil stayed and everything went smoothly, mostly, for a year. Then the gerbil escaped. I thought she was going to have a stroke.

Okay, so OCD, insanely protective of her living room, doesn’t like pets, and has an escaped gerbil on the loose. You know where this is going, right? She tore the house apart, almost literally, looking for that damned gerbil and swearing she would find it before it did any damage. The gerbil had other ideas. We thought the gerbil won, after all, she didn’t find it and time went on.

Then she found it. I think you know that’s not a good thing, not at this point. The gerbil sort of won, at least it got the last word in on behalf of the entire family. Yes, it is now a dearly departed gerbil, and it chose her living room couch as its final resting place. Between the cushions. That no one ever went in there helped prolong the discovery.

Lesson: gerbils are evil. No, wait, that’s not it. Let people sit in the living room. Closer, but no. Life sucks sometimes is a fact, not a lesson. Oh, yeah: Foreshadowing – it isn’t just for entertainment anymore.

Cat Herders

The Girl once had so many interests she couldn’t decide on a career path. We told her it wasn’t a big deal, I mean a lot of college kids change their majors and she wasn’t even close to graduating from high school yet. Now she’s close, and she settled on Marine Biology. She wants to talk to whales. Oh, joy.

The unfortunate part about having a teenage girl with a newfound passion for whale calls, is that I have a teenage girl with a newfound passion for whale calls. Practicing them. At home. Out loud. Darth Jingles has come to grips with the oddity that her girl makes loud, strange noises while wandering around the house and yard, but Nimoy is still freaked out about it. The poor kitten just about jumps out of her skin when The Girl emulates a … I’m going to say blue whale … and she sprints to the safety of Grandma (me). Remember, if The Girl is her kitty-momma, then I’m kitty-grandma. Grandma is much safer to associate with than her mom, and I kind of see how this whole grandparent thing works now from a different perspective.

Before Marine Biology, The Girl had passions for paleontology and anthropology. She still does, in evidence is how many documentaries about mummies we watch. Yay, mummies – the well dressed zombies of the ancient world. I can say that here, but I can’t usually mentioned zombies and mummies in the same paragraph because, while The Girl likes mummies, she hates zombies and everything to do with them. That being said, we recently saw a thing about ancient Egypt and the things they put with mummies. Not just the royal ones everyone gushes over. Proper burial was a big thing back then. Do you know what they used to mummify and bury with people all the time? Not whales, thankfully. Actually no, that would be amusing. The next time Egypt goes on a mummy-making kick, someone suggest whales to ferry the dead to the afterlife, okay?

Cats. Sorry, I got a little sidetracked there. They mummified and buried cats with people. Mummified cats was such a booming business that apparently they raised cats for the purpose. Cat ranches. It stands to reason if there were cat ranches, then there were cat herders. Right?
The Girl and I just about fell on the floor laughing when the narrator mentioned cat ranches, both of us went immediately to cat herders.

For those who don’t know, ‘as difficult as herding cats’ is an idiom referring to how challenging it is to bring differently-minded people together to accomplish a goal. More to the point for the purposes of this tale is that EDS once did a commercial about cat herding. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/vTwJzTsb2QQ . It’s worth a look because this clip is why my daughter was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. I’m not sure where exactly the phrase comes from, but it doesn’t matter.

Literal cat herding - the Egyptians did it.