welcome to my nightmare

how long into a visit to my in-laws does it take to drive my blood pressure through the roof?

apparently, they are able to raise it now before i even step foot in the door. i woke with a headache like no other yesterday morning. against my bitter prayers leading into this day, the sun did rise on pierogie-making-day (PMD).

okay, i will admit, on occasion i can be a bit dramatic. but i can assure you, i am NOT dramatizing the insanity of PMD. i am NOT that good of a storyteller.

besides i have witnesses -- my mother attended once and swore to never set foot in there again. my sister-in-law can sympathize as an outsider to the defective gene pool but she's more easygoing than me... when she goes for hugs, i scream for drugs.

granted this year has been rough on my husband's family -- my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and given estimates of only about a year to live. as stubborn as a mule, his determination to prove the doctors wrong has remarkedly given him a new reason to live and is now successfully beating back the cancer.

my husband's uncle went in for surgery on his hand and walked out with a brain tumor. poor uncle john who was caretaker for my sick in-laws (mother-in-law only mentally and not officially) now needed a caretaker of his own after undergoing brain surgery.

for any family, this would result in a normal disruption of everyday and traditional events. for my in-laws who are already living far west of normal, this bordered on the land of make-believe and flying unicorns.

my m-i-l will never win the "clean house award". in fact, if ed mcmahon shows up with a large check and balloons to her front door, she will promptly slam the door in his face to prevent him from walking across the threshold. if i were ed, i would run back to the van. my first interaction with her included a similar event, i rang the doorbell to see if my future husband was home, she answered it, said no and slammed the door in my face. if i only knew then what my life would be like now...

regardless of the past year's events, their house is disgusting.

as my s-i-l babyproofed the living room for li'l oscar to crawl about without worry of him putting a petrified pizza crust in his mouth or pulling himself up by a stack of newspapers from 1992, i went to work on the kitchen.

before we could begin PMD i needed to clear a workspace in the kitchen from various pots and pans, bags, dirty and clean what-have-yous that take up residence in what is supposed to be a kitchen table and chairs. before we could begin PMD i needed to scrub the floors and counters to remove a years worth of crud (i scrubbed it before last year's PMD, too) before we lay a new layer of flour, sauerkraut, and potato blobs on it.

my m-i-l just stood in the kitchen and watched. hovered. but neither acted or moved in shame, remorse or even with any gratefulness of what was happening. my blood pressure boiled as i scrubbed away at filth, anger seething from my pores. my husband hovered too, i think partly to keep me from sinking my fangs into her once and for all.

there were no christmas mix tapes this year and production of pierogies were cut back (only about 15 lbs worth of stuffing ingredients -- potato, saurkraut and mushrooms & cheese down from the usual 25 lbs).

we moved rapid-fire through the process trying to maintain some resemblance of normal through out the day as my f-i-l determinely rolled out dough, and assembly-line workers like myself stuffed and crimped the 15 lbs of fillings into the little circles of dough. and my m-i-l continued to hover, moving from task to task without accomplishing anything.

SNAFU at its best -- situation normal, all fcuked up.