Another Turkey Day Involving Indigestion, Laughter and the Word "No"
Thanksgiving this year was interesting. It finally dawned on Jim to say "No" to everyone beseeching him to help them while offering nothing in return. And I didn't even have to do or say a thing.
Silly neighbor has left us alone for a few weeks now. I think that has come about because Jim and I both started saying no to the things we cannot do well, or safely. Jim told her no several dozen times when she's wanted him to do mechanical things. Jim is useless at many things mechanical and he's smart enough to know it. After I drove her daughter to ballet and the daughter reeked of cigarette smoke I told her I could not drive the girl. It's one of those smells that makes my asthma go nuts.
I am nervous about tomorrow because we're doing her estranged husband a favor. Fetching him from the airport. He flew to the States back this spring, and for well over a year has been largely incommunicado with Jim right up until last week when he called Jim out of the blue asking for a ride. He's been just as vague as he had been right after we discovered he'd left our neighbor. Doesn't know how long he's staying, doesn't know what his plans are, if he's staying or going, or reconciling with the wife or not. Tomorrow will be interesting. I'm a tiny bit angry that he has treated Jim like this. I suspect there will be a no issued if he tries to get Jim to do things for him. We're both a little annoyed with him.
He freely offered to bring back several industrial sized bottles of benadryl, which I asked him to do 16 months ago. He tried to do a lame half assed intervention 3 separate times afterward, asking if i was using them to get high. As if! Ha! He does not understand a lot of us Masties (mast cell) use benadryl as our H1 drug. I do. H1, H2 daily and sometimes I take a proton pump inhibitor too! A girl has to do what a girl must do!
Velma came sniffing around early on Thanksgiving Day afternoon, hinting she wanted to go out to eat with us. Considering she still says she didn't run her car into the gate, even after video footage and her car's paint on the gate I thought it was a pretty ballsy move. We both played dumb, and didn't offer, even as we had reservations. I don't know if we could have added her in as we're had our reservations in place a good month, since Canadian Thanksgiving.
Light quick lunch at the yacht club at eleven am, a nap, fending off Velma, a quick swim before heading over to pick up Dave and Buddy. I could tell as soon as we pulled up just by the guys body language that something had gone down, but thought it was likely some run in with neighbor Jerzey who definitely fried a ton of brain cells in the 60s and 70s.
We took off to the restaurant owned by a friend overlooking the harbor area at Playa Flamingo, and the drive was pleasant enough. I don't know Dave well, but he seemed nice enough.
When we got to the restaurant Buddy started ragging on Jim for not telling him that Dave was going to meet us at Buddy's house. Buddy was grumbling because he'd just had his floors polished and waxed and Dave needed to store his bike in the house while we were at the restaurant. It got weirder from there, Buddy started complaining that the kitchen was taking too long with the food, he had an AA meeting to go to. Apparently he goes to AA every single evening. I didn't know, and I don't think Jim did either.
By the time Buddy started trying to get either Jim or Dave to buy his purple bucket of bolts, his starting to hint he's going to be leaving his car with us again when he goes home in December, his badmouthing everyone we all know what happened was Dave and I started talking.
The two introverts ignored the contrarian while the extrovert didn't say much and we started talking about jobs we'd held in the distant past. We'd both worked in failing radio stations back in the dark ages, before corporations bought out most stations and installed DJ 3000 (made up name for automated music systems). I worked for around 6 months selling radio advertising in college, one of my 10,000 random weird jobs to stay afloat.
We laughed, we cried, citing times at our respective stations where we tried to cash paychecks at the bank with the bank saying the station didn't have funds enough to pay us. How the job of selling advertising was also that of collecting on those same customers that didn't seem to want to pay for already run advertising. You also frequently had to write advertising copy, pick the music and lay it all out with the roadmap of what you wanted to the DJ who was going to make the commercial. I was certainly unprepared for all of that, but did it anyway. We talked about new general managers firing every single staffer when they came in, of bosses too cheap to buy coffee creamers or office supplies and some of the shenanigans of the on air talent.
Dave and I had a rollicking good time, while the contrarian Buddy kept an eye on the clock for his AA meeting and Jim stayed silent. It's never a good sign when Jim, ever the talker and socializer, stays quiet. It usually means he's colossally peeved about something. I found out when we got home. It was Buddy. He'd just had a bellyful of Buddy's blaming, griping and moaning mixed with Buddy's assumptions we'd store his cars and other ways I've been pointing out for ages that Buddy had taken advantage of us over the last few years. I guess he just finally got fed up, while Dave and I chose to ignore it and have a good time anyway.
Today was a relaxed day of leftovers, swimming in the pool for an hour. I'm up to an hour now, and a lot of loafing about. I found myself this afternoon working on quilting another quilt while watching a CNN news report on a new Covid variant and thought here we are more than 20 months later and I'm doing the same darn thing I was doing back at the beginning of the pandemic. Same as it ever wa
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