THIS POST RATED 'H' FOR HILLBILLY.
On Friday, I walked into my house to find it totally changed.
Yes. That is when I knew...the Clan had arrived.
Only parts of the Clan came...two of my uncles, my aunts, and four chilluns ranging from 6 months to 4 years. Also my grandma. My mom, in preparation, had gone to Costco with me on an ENTIRELY separate trip and bought over 400$ worth of meat for them.
No seriously. There were dino chicken nuggets, steak, turkey, fish, fish sticks, normal chicken...and on last night we ordered take-out Olive Garden (where they know my mom as the Party Lady):
24 breadsticks
a vat of alfredo sauce
a jumbo salad with 'extra toppings' (to which we added three tomatoes, an onion, a jar of olives, and a bag of croutons)
a small mountain of parmasean cheese
three bottles of dressing
and 3 large deep dish Supreme Lou Malnati's pizzas.
In the wake of the Clan (they left the 'Food Corner' p. much behind), there are two large ice cream cakes, two large boxes of juice pops, one batch of 'homemade' (they came from a magical Michigan thing called a 'cookie kube') cookies, two boxes of gram crackers and three hershey's bars and two bags of marshmallows, 23 boxes of Girl Scouts cookies (from Samoas to Peanut Butter), a mysterious chocolate egg-thing, a bag of chocolate chips the size of my torso, five two-liter bottles of soda, and various boxes of Froot Loops.
Seriously, there is so much food here. My kitchen, used to spare amounts of vegetables and 'foodless fridays', doesn't know what to do. I try to describe it, but honestly there is SO MUCH FOOD I can't even tell you. We are cramming it into corners at the moment. The Girl Scout cookies, lacking a place, are stacked on a counter in a formation that could prevent a nuclear bomb.
But enough about the food. You will understand the sheer amount that we have when I roll to school tomorrow.
As hillbillies, there is always something that happens that is passed down through generations. Generally, I hear about these stories late at night, after the copious beers. But this time, during the car rides to Chicago (we classy!), I heard about it (and experienced it) through much guffawing, snorting, and reeinactments of farts.
We had dropped my uncles off on Saturday at 'the game' while we went 'shopping' (We really didn't buy anything') and they came tottering out of a bar when it was time to go home. Whenever they talked, their breath was, as Sister put it, 'a rancid odour of doom' that richocheted around the car. Nothing like the smell of old cigarettes (I used to think it was the smell of food when I was little in Michigan) and many different types of liquour radiating off rain-soaked sweaty man-bodies. But it got worse.
We were on the highway, when uncle Doug decided he suddenly had to pee. Too bad we were on a highway, my mom said. But nooo! There's always a solution!
At first my mom wasn't going to do it. No relative of hers was going to pee in a forest, she said.
But they did.
We pulled over, and both of my fine esteemed uncles ran into the trees, past the sign that said clearly in red bold 'NO DUMPING' (my grandma had a guffaw over that), and didn't come back for like ten minutes.
In that ten-minute period, my aunt told us a similar tale in which my uncle had, in this act, tripped over his pants and snapped a tree in half.
It is a good life, the Michigan clan.
