More Adventures In Suburbia

So, just for fun, let’s summarize the last few weeks of Mike’s exciting life in Upstate NY.

Because, with three kids, three dogs, two cats, guinea pigs and frog, our house didn’t seem full enough, the weekend before Christmas, we adopted another cat. Actually, it’s a 4 month old Maine Coon rescue kitten, and it’s decided that my pillows, both day and night, are the perfect place for it to sleep. Normally, I’d joke that I like to sleep with some pussy on my pillow, this really isn’t what I had in mind.

On Christmas morning, right after opening his gifts, our son promptly began to regurgitate (vomit, toss his cookies, pray to the porcelain god, etc.) his Christmas Eve dinner and apparently everything else that he had eaten over the past several months. Talk about Christmas gifts that you’re not going to forget.

The next day we went over to my wife’s brother’s house. Because, what’s better to do when your whole family is possibly contagious with a nasty viral bug, than to go visiting relatives, right? It puts a whole new spin on that “spirit of giving” that we have during the holiday.

Our son’s high school hockey team was in a tournament the weekend after Christmas. Surprisingly, they played way over their heads and won the tournament. Very nice. It helped take the sting out of the next two games last week, which they lost, against inferior opponents. Ah, the unpredictability of youth.

The Sunday after Christmas, a wind storm struck Rochester, knocking out power all over the place. My wife and I were in the local sporting goods store, snagging some bargains, when the power started to fail. My wife had just found some seriously mismarked apparel, and was waiting in line to capitalize on the store’s mistake. That was, of course, until smoke started pouring out of one of the back store rooms

My wife was directed to immediately drop what she had and exit the store. Now, I’m sure you can imagine, to a power shopper like my wife, when clutching a mismarked jacket, there probably isn’t any phrase more hated in the English language than “drop what you have and exit the store”. She started complaining to the clerk (she was next in line, by god!) that if the previous customer hadn’t been such an idiot, my wife would have already been checked out and on her way.

Please, like we all haven’t been there, right?

The wild eyed young clerk, who, from all appearances, biggest stressor in life is if she misses latest episode of The Hills on MTV, looked at my wife and said “Uh, Madam, the store may be on fire and you’re complaining not getting checked out?” We all have different priorities, I guess.

Happily, that wasn’t our last experience with un-controlled flames and smoke for the holiday season. On New Year’s day, as we were taking down our Christmas decorations, our dryer did its’ best rendition of the Talking Head’s song “Burning Down The House”. We all thought that our youngest daughter was burning her lunch, when it turned out the dryer was burning our clothes. But, don’t fear trusty reader, a new dryer was purchased, picked up and installed before dinner the very next day. When it comes to shopping and spending money, nothing stands in our way. All I can say is that we’ve done our best to stimulate the economy, et tu?

To round off the weekend, our son’s team beat the only undefeated team in the league on Saturday (a little consistency in performance would be nice), the virus that we thought we had passed off retuned and laid a few more of us low, and our daughter received her first college acceptance letter.

We went to a wedding on Saturday, where the bride and groom were doctorial students at the University of Rochester. It was strange being at a wedding where I felt like I brought down the intelligence curve, you know? This was one of those affairs where they wrote their own vows, which, frankly, I’ve never been a big fan of, but hey, whatever floats your boat. The groom did a great job writing his vows, and talked about all of the adventures that they were going to have together during the blessed union.

I thought to myself, “Dude, you have no idea what you’re talking about”.