::My weekend - charming.
4:50 p.m. - 2004-08-02
I needed a template that was more cheery. The grey and the 49 Chevy were starting to depress me. Not that I don't like Chevys.
My last entry was really frickin long! Now that I'm looking at it in the new template, it looks really, really long.
Today was entertaining. I spent the weekend with my sister who had her tonsils out on Friday morning. Kaiser (or course) completey jerked her around, couldn't even manage to get the damn IV in her arm, even after six tries, and they discharged her with a prescription for the wrong pain medicine and without giving her any post-surgery pain medication (because there was no IV to put it in to). Poor kid. She suffered all weekend with horrible pain and could hardly even swallow water. I think she was glad not to have been alone at her house, though. I was glad to be there. I wish I could have taken today off and stayed a little bit longer with her, to help her get her meds squared away and such. I did call the Doctor's office as soon as they opened this morning and got her the prescription she needed.
The really entertaining thing was the email that I got from my step-mother this afternoon. I don't know if I have ever gone into detail about the horrendous experience SW and I had when we moved to California, but I'll attempt to sum it up as briefly as possible:
About the same time that SW and I moved to California, my father, his girlfriend, and their son decided to finally move to Reno, Nevada (they had been talking about doing this for about 10 years). So, they say to us, "how about you guys moving into this house when we leave?" It's a rental, so we figure, sure. It would be a whole house, after all. Well, my father's girlfriend is a horrid, horrid packrat and probably hasn't thrown anything away for the last 30 years. They wait to pack until the night before they are planning to pick up the moving truck, and well, suprise, not only does all of their crap not even fit onto the truck, but they leave behind heaps and heaps of garbage (litterally, full bags of kitchen garbage in the living room for SW and I to clean up. And underneath all of their crap was a level of filth that I can't even describe. I had to sweep the floor clear of a full inch of dust, dirt and dog hair before I could even run the vacuum. We had to scrub the house from carpet to ceiling, quite literally - standing on a latter with a bleachy mop trying to clean mildew from the ceilings. The front yard and back yard were full of junk left behind - from furniture that wouldn't fit into the truck to a rusted lawnmower left in the back yard to rot (grass and weeds were actually growing in it). It looked like we lived at the garbage dump, and I have to honestly say that I am not exagerating. We had to pay $100 to have all of this crap hauled away!! There were holes the size of softballs in many of the walls, the linoleum in the kitchen was torn and worn through to the subfloor, the lighting fixtures in the garage didn't even work, the carpet was stained were disgusting plants had sat with broken pots and no kind of drip dishes for years - it was a miracle that the landlord didn't charge us thousands of dollars to do all of the repairs that were necessary for the house.
So, all of that said, the email that I received today said:
Sorry we couldn't make it to any of your wedding events, but between working and my headaches, it was just too much. Hope things are going well for you and [SW]. We felt that getting you into our house on Larchmont Drive was your wedding present, as you only had to pay the month's rent...
It's so rediculous that I can sometimes hardly even believe that this is for real!
