Live Forever or Die Trying

Dean is at work, like always [in real life he is working for 22 days straight with 4 days of every week lasting 14 hours and the other lasting 12, although he is cutting out early/coming in late on some of those] so I am unpacking the house and setting up the rooms.

I am about to call it a night and crawl on the couch to sleep; I was not able to get the bed set up before I got tired. There is a knock on the door. I do down and let Josh in (my little brother). I am happy to see him, but we are both tired; he had driven the 22 hours from Texas to come up and visit. We chat for 30 minutes or so then decide to go to bed.

I offer him the other couch to sleep on and unpack some blankets for him to use. We both go to bed and just as I am about to go to sleep, there is another knock at the door.

I get up and see who it is; it is Molly and Holli, who have also driven up from Texas. I laugh because now I have nowhere to put them except on the floor in the media room with us. Holli slept the whole 22 hour drive, so she wants to watch some cartoons. I am really tired and think that I might be able to go to sleep even with them on. Molly and I chat and then both go to sleep.

Again, a knock at the door. It is Dean’s mom, sister, and step-dad, Harriet, Val and Phil. I start to get kinda stressed out because there is nowhere left to put any of these people and I need Dean to help me put beds together. I bring them up to the media room and find spots for them. They did the drive and are beyond tired.

Just as I drift off, “knock, knock”. I wake up furious. I JUST WANT TO SLEEP! My body is beyond tired and my brain is straining just to think straight, not to mention how stressed I am about all of these people here when we are not ready for guests!

It is Dean’s Grandparents, Boyce and Jane. They apologize for the late/early 4am arrival time and ask if they can skip the chat and go to bed. As I begin to explain that there are no beds because Dean is still at work and I need his help to put them together, he walks in the back door.

He is carrying a few large bags of stuff and said he stopped by little Tokyo in LA to get some stuff to send to our family; name brand items he got for pennies on the dollar. I smile and ask him if we could put the beds together and tell him about our guests.

We get our bed up and his grandparents take that one, and then the guest bed goes to his parents.

More thoroughly exhausted than I have ever been, I just want to go to sleep, but Dean wants to show everyone what he got. All of the group move into the media room where Dean unpacked all the goodies, mostly outrageously expensive shoes he got for a few bucks. There are probably 50 pairs ranging in size from baby to a size 12 in mens.

We all pick out some and discuss going to bed; it is 5am and the first lightening of the sky is breaking the dark night. We all go to our assigned sleeping areas except me and Dean. We want to check to see that everyone is happy. I see that for some reason, Dean has lined up all of the remaining shoes inside our bedroom door, blocking the walkway. I have no wits about me to stay sane and blow up at Dean asking him why he would do such a stupid thing! His grandparents are old and if they trip on those they will fall right down the stairs and break a hip! He replied that he wanted them there and his grandparents could step over them.

The shoes were 10 pairs wide, and 10 pairs deep. No one could step over it.

I start moving the ones that were directly in the way to make a path; the rest could wait till morning. As I was taking them to the closet, I noticed that the trash can in the master bath was full of ashes and cigarette butts. I start to panic. Not only are there cats roaming around the room where Jane and Boyce are sleeping, but one jumped in bed with them, and now their bathroom smells like a smoky bar. They don’t do animals in the house.

I scramble to remove the offending butts and shoo the cats away. What are they going to think of us! Our house is a mess and there are cats everywhere!

Holli started to cry; to wail.

Everyone woke up. We all just decided to get up and have breakfast even though none of us had slept in over 24 hours. I started our 4 cup coffee pot for 9 people and was instantly worried that it would not be able to keep up with tired people’s demands.

I was going to make pancakes for everyone but had difficulty locating the packed up plates to serve on. Dean said he had picked up some and were upstairs in our room. I asked him where, and he got upset at me for not knowing were they were. I was close to tears when Val took my hand and said she would help me look for them.

There were so many boxes in our room that it too some effort to see where they were. Val found them. They were not real plates at all, merely the wind-up lazy-Susans one would put into a microwave to spin the food around. They were 1970s green.

I despaired. We came down the stairs and heard a motor, a loud one in front of the house. Looking out we saw a speed boat revving up for a race.

Our house is situated on a bluff over a lake that has many “arms” coming off of it creating many little islands. Our bluff (only 12 feet high) was on one of the islands. Think Venice.

We saw a lot of kids playing in the waves and an ESPN boat speeding around filming the race with a giant camera. I went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast to find that I had been too slow and Grandma was making her own food because she was hungry. She said she could not wait for me to take care of it any longer. She found a frozen waffle, broke an egg over it, topped that with a dollop of grape jelly and tossed it into the toaster oven.

I felt like such a failure! Then I look over at the coffee pot and it was empty. Dean was playing with Holli and the cats on the floor and I knew he saw that it was empty, but did nothing about it! I started to cry and Dean saw me then I pointed at the coffee pot. He looked at it and shrugged as to say, “I don’t care”.

I had to get out of there, I was falling apart. I ran into the back yard. I had no sleep, the house was a mess, family was judging me every second because their needs were not met, and it made me look like a complete failure as a host.

I slumped into the grass and looked up at the newly rising sun. There was a glimmer in the near distance. I stood up and in doing so, saw that that the grass meeting the fence was an optic illusion; they were on the same plain but not connected. In between then was a pool! A HUGE pool!

I yelled at Dean to come out here and screamed over and over again, “we have a pool, we have a pool!”

It encircled the whole yard; long thin lap pools ran along the edges and met in the middle at a large and very deep pool. Then I focused onto the fence, but it was not a fence, it was a wall. A wall to a pool and guest house!

I ran over and looked inside to see a large dining room that had a table and chairs for 12 people, and connected to it was a 1000 square foot living area all decorated with bamboo furniture with squishy padding. I tried the door, and it was locked. I was too excited to go back to the house to get the house keys so I walked around back to see what other surprises there were.

To my amazement, everyone in the neighborhood had what we did and it all backed up to the same place that was converted into an open air market where all of the sidewalks were carpeted with the type of carpet you see on ships. I walked through several little stores and back around to pop out of the other side of the pool house.

Val, Molly, and Dean were looking into the water of our newly found pool. It needed some cleaning and the water levels were low, but it was exquisitely designed, so I did not mind the work.