I have to explain what was happening up to that moment. Weeks before the gathering I had spent days working on a garage sale, believing that decluttering the house would help make the house more comfortable for everyone when they arrived on the Fourth. As we neared the end of the month my husband was completely immersed in closing business for the quarter that I was on my own tagging everything--and there was quite a bit since we hadn't cleared the house of the kid stuff, even though my children had already graduated from college and were on their own living their lives outside of Florida (Gracias ha Dios)
I didn't make much in the garage sale, but it was a tremendous success just to get rid of things that I would never miss, or thought I would never miss. I didn't even have a full day to enjoy my triumph when my daughter arrived a day ahead of everyone else and asked where her childhood Teddy bear was. Oh my God. I must have accidentally pulled it into a batch of other stuff toys when I dumped a sack of the toys on the floor of her room to tag them. She would later apologize for OCDing about her loss, but my OCD was worse as I did nothing but focus on the screw up, and I still had to focus on last minute clean-up of the house.
Let me just say, there is no such thing as a last minute clean-up of a house. By around this time I began to feel my age as all the standing around, tagging items, started to wear on my knees. I did two four hour shifts cleaning the house and I could swear the cartilage in my knees had worn down and I could feel bone rubbing on bone.
Then, just fifteen minutes before my son was to arrive with his new girlfriend, I tried to relax and get on the internet. It was down. The one job I had left for my husband was to make sure the router was plugged into a backup battery system. I had asked him to do it a month ago, and he had finally had time to do it an hour before my son arrived. But, apparently, something was wrong with the connection. So I called the cable company and tried to get them to walk me through the process to fix it and realized I could not answer his questions. I was completely brain dead. I just told the guy I couldn't do this at this time and hung up before he heard me break out into tears.
Ten minutes later everyone arrived and I realized I had worked too hard for this moment to succumb to exhaustion. Everyone was hungry by this time so we began to get the food together. We asked my son's girlfriend if she would be okay with grilled steaks and she replied she was a vegetarian. It was a fact my son failed to tell us.
Well, this is what happens when you're brain dead. I went into the refrigerator and looked for something suitable and pulled out breaded chicken tenders. "Will this do?" I asked.
She was on her way out of the kitchen about the time and politely let without answering.
It took me a month to recover from that poor planning of putting a garage sale and hosting a family gathering back to back.
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