sit right back and you'll hear a tale...

ahhhh, the weekend. a time to sit back and relax - reflect - renew. hang out with your family. get some gardening done. maybe take in a movie. go get a drink with friends. even celebrate a birthday! birds chirp in the distance...the green grass is aflutter with a spring breeze, gleaming in the sun.

WAKE UP.

friday: my mom comes over at 6pm (after saying she'd be there at 5, prompting me to get out of work early, which I guess isn't such a bad thing) and we go to the bar/restaurant (banker's) where my sister denise said we'd all meet for...wait for it...karaoke. my mother had told denise and I that what she wanted for her birthday, which by the way is in april, was to go out and do karaoke. easy enough, and great, since my mom is difficult to buy for. (and I'll explain that statement in another post another time, it's a great story.) except my mom works nights and rarely has a weekend off, so we had to wait until may to actually carry out the birthday karaoke.

anyways, so we have dinner there, and denise and her entourage show up. there were about 12 people there total. denise only told a few of them that we were there for my mom's birthday..oops, sorry mom. so during dinner, my mom tells me that she will not be singing. excuse me, what??? then why the hell are we here? it's because she likes to WATCH karaoke. eeeeexcellent. no pressure there.

we are informed that karaoke begins at about 10:30. we finish dinner at 7:30, denise et al arrive at 7:45. now, I love my sister, but she has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the gym. like all her friends are from the gym, she goes to the gym every day including weekends, she talks about the gym when she's not at the gym...she's even had surgery and went to the gym anyway just to do "light" exercise, which consisted of her doing basically an entire spinning class. so naturally, her entourage was all people from the gym. and I timed it - 20 minutes went by before she began talking about the gym. I was amazed it took so long. and it doesn't help that 2 of her gym friends are instructors, and she likes to get information about what the next day's routine was going to be so she can show up everyone else by already knowing what they're going to do.

anyone who knows me knows I am not a gym person, so I am going to relay the gist of the conversation the best way I can without knowing what the hell they are talking about: "so greg, are we going to do squares tomorrow?" "yeah, though it's going to be more like the A thing where you step up and step down, and you need a partner." "oh, I love that! remember last week when we did the 4 person rounds? that was so fun!" "and the NEXT day, we're going to do the inverse triangle kegel deer mounting routine!" okay, that last one was made up. by greg! just kidding. or am I!

so forever happened until it was finally time to kara. or oke. whichever. so we look at the big book and hear a few people sing - some good, some bad, some drunk. but the audience was totally not into it. and there was my mom, smoking her 8 inch long misty cigarettes, while the group of us sang happy birthday (me with my own mic singing like marilyn monroe, shouting out her age to the audience, who could not possibly have cared less); me and my sister's friend april sang "still rock and roll to me" by billy joel, where I pointed to april when I sang "can't dress trashy" because, I'm sorry, but she was looking hoochie; and then denise, greg, april, tammy and I sang "sweet child o mine" - which was WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. if you ever do karaoke, please do yourselves a favor and do not sing this. there are 2 guitar solos, one of which is 24 measures and the other being 32 measures. folks, this is a VERY long time to stand up there waiting to continue singing.

so finally we went home, my mom stayed over on the couch, and was gone by the time I got up. I went to trent's double header baseball game, which took 6+ hours, and got horrible sunburn on my neck. I did some light gardening which included using my garden claw to completely obliterate the area of my front yard in front of my fence. and then, in preparation for sunday, I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed all the 50 million spots off our living room carpet. then I landed in a heap on the couch and was unable to move.

sunday came. my dad had called me earlier in the week to ask me if I would come down on sunday to hang out with my sister josie, who was coming with her 10 year old son albert. I said sure. I called on friday to find out when I was supposed to come down, and wound up talking to my stepmother Kathy instead of my dad, and she informed me that he had told her that the bunch of them were coming up to my house on sunday, because josie had never seen it. I calmly said "sure" while inside I was freaking the fuck out, because that meant major, major cleaning.

so they wound up coming up at like 2ish, so I had ample time to get ready and relax. duh. no. I did all the dishes (which is in my contract with sean that I DO NOT DO DISHES, but this was desperation) and cleaned up the house with help from trent, then I went into the back yard and....and this is hard to type, because my arms are still so sore...I weedwhacked the entire yard. I know I said the back yard is like a postage stamp, but imagine wetting a postage stamp (of course it would not be a self stick stamp...just go with me on this) with a toothpick. it took forever and looked like ass. but it was better than it was beforehand. seriously? the grass was up to my thighs. some of the biggest dandelions I have ever seen, like scary big. I had remembered that trent had taken a football outside but since I didn't see it in the grass, I wasn't worried about hitting it. I got 3/4 of the way in before I uncovered it in a 3 foot high clump of weeds.

so josie and Kathy hung out with bella while my dad attempted to fix our spigot out front, which apparently was made with inferior pipes (surprise! something in my house was made with something inferior!!!) and apparently cannot be fixed without pulling the whole thing out and starting from scratch. we may have had our differences in the past, me and my dad, but goddamn, I have no idea what I'd do without him now. I hope he lives forever.

then my nephew albert said "you know what? I wish we could all go back to pop-pop's house. it's more fun there." way to kill the mood. it was kathy's plan all along to go back, though, because she doesn't believe I can cook. whatevs, at least then I didn't have to cook. so we all went down to their house, had pasta with cream sauce made with jalepeno pepper (thanks, kath! and bella says thanks, too, at 3 am, screaming at the top of her lungs.)

we got home just in time to see tom win survivor, which means sean gets to pick the restaurant where we eat next since he pegged him from episode 1.

today I am tired, sore, and wondering what the hell happened to my 2 days of rest.