Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Easter Sunday and Familial Relations

I made it through Easter Sunday dinner, and I know exactly how I did it, too.  I wrote about my misgivings here, in Family Rant.  That survival knowledge will be very useful later on when The Girl shows up with Shotgun Bob for the next holiday circus - very likely Thanksgiving.  That gives me time to plan out an alternative strategy; a sort of 'Plan B' in case 'Plan A' slams head on into a runaway train hauling 87 tons of dynamite.  It's always good to plan ahead.


Perfect Manhattan
I'm not on good terms with Shotgun Bob, mainly due to his wife The Girl.  The two of them decided to head North for Easter weekend and grace us with their presence for a couple days.  Since Shotgun Bob is family I moved out of my bedroom and went to stay at Main Lady's place for a few days, which is a long way from being banished to the salt mines in Siberia.  Main Lady is living with Centenarian right now, which left me with Excellent Rachmaninoff and the two cats (Ebony and Pumpkin) for company.  This allowed Shotgun Bob and The Girl to move into my bedroom and sleep on my bed while they were in town, thus saving a couple hundred dollars on a motel room.  For reasons that were never made clear to me, Feed Bag got left with The Girl's sister for the duration.

I showed up for Church services at 10:00 on Easter morning and did my bit.  I also started praying for tranquility and Divine intervention so we could all make it through Easter dinner without The Girl or Shotgun Bob getting on my very last nerve and disintegrating every bit of elasticity from my temper.

I've often wondered about the statistics on domestic disturbance calls and whether or not I'd see a spike during holiday season.  I tend to think I might.

In the end I decided to give the Lord some help.  I augmented my prayers with Xanax and chased the pills with a perfect manhattan.  The combination worked nicely.

2 comments:

Capt. Schmoe said...

Well played mas Jack, well played. No one was murdered or even got hurt.

You would have been proud of me, I refrained from imbibing until after sunset on Easter, despite my frustrations with the folks. I called it the 24 hours of lent.

Of course as soon as they walked out the door, I rewarded myself the some Crown Royal. Straight up.

Better living through chemistry.

Mad Jack said...

Thank you, Captain.

Truly you are a better man than I, Capt. Schmoe. I couldn't make 8 hours, let alone 24. I think I'm going to borrow that phrase 24 hours of Lent. I'll give credit to you when I use it - it kind of sums everything up, doesn't it? Kind of a nice, neat way of describing the situation.