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| Wednesday, May 12, 2004 Long Story Longer:
We had known all along that it was going to be a very difficult trip. As a matter of fact, during the planning stages, when Ani was still pregnant, she had voiced concern about being part of the wedding. After all, Ruby isn’t even two months old yet (not till Friday), and we are pretty new at this parental responsibility stuff. We had kind of planned on hibernating during the first few months of parenthood. That was also before we realized that the wedding was the day before Mother’s Day. This is the reason that we had to do the trip in one day. Someone in my line of work trying to get even part of Mother’s Day weekend off is like an accountant vacationing in the month of April. It just doesn’t happen without a miracle or unemployment. To add to our worries, I had taken my truck in to have the oil changed before the trip, and apparently it had dumped a significant amount of fluid on the driveway before I had left for work. Ani had called me to tell me this, but by the time I could really take the time to check, it was too dark for me to see what had been leaking, or if they hadn’t put the drain plug back on right. I knew someone once who had them put the wrong size nut on the oil pan and all his oil leaked out until his engine froze. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the case with my truck after a flashlight check in a poorly lit service station, but I didn’t want to find out for sure in Fresno when my truck seized up. It turns out they just overfilled it, and the excess wound up on my driveway. (If I’d have wanted to clean oil off of my driveway, I would have changed the oil myself, but that’s material for another rant.) We debated back and forth until about two in the morning, and even though we both think we could have done it, we decided to play it safe and take care of young Ruby and ourselves. We thought it best to write off the money spent on Ani’s bridesmaid dress, and get some sleep, which didn’t really happen anyway. Ruby was happier with us awake, which made us feel even better about our decision to take it easy. I must admit, that I have rarely felt as relieved as I did when we finally stopped debating, and in retrospect, I think we made the right choice. I did get to have my mom over for a Mother’s day dinner, since Charis was already covering my Saturday night shift.
My dad came over and dropped off a Mother’s day present from Linda and himself: an hour long table massage (I think I saw a little tear of joy on Ani's face when she opened that envelope), along with an amazingly cute crocheted hat:
And I got a little rest before the evil mommathon on Sunday. I won’t describe that horror in the horrendous lengthy detail with which it has haunted my subsequent dreams: just imagine hoards of people who don’t eat out very often, feeling nervous and possibly resentful about being dressed up and in a nice restaurant, and don’t necessarily want to be with one another, but feel obligated to do so. Then imagine running back and forth through this crowd, not just an uncomfortable resentful crowd, but the largest crowd of the year, for sixteen hours while they treat you like a servant who is somehow responsible for their discomfort. That’ll give you an idea of what mother’s day means to me. Thankfully it’s over, and I hope that next Easter/Mother’s day will be my last such nightmares. I know that Ani feels bad about missing Stacey’s wedding; they’ve been the kind of best friends that can pick up where they left off, even after years of living on opposite ends of the country. We wish Stacey and Steve the best in their lives to come. I hope that we can make a trip to New York next spring to congratulate them in person. I also would like to apologize to the Douglass family. Stacey’s parents and sister have been so great to us during Ruby’s early days, that I hate to have missed their hospitality, and I hope that our absence caused them no distress. Oh yeah; this dog loves this baby who is really cute.
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