The day started out not so pleasantly with an unpleasant discovery. The night before I'd written what I thought was a whole danged lot on the Palm while on the train, and I added some more during the morning. Then I decided to go install all my Palm stuff onto Mom and Dad's computer so I could upload the novel into their computer.

Well, it turns out that the program I've been using (which converts Word documents back and forth from one machine to the other) WILL NOT LET YOU use two computers with one Palm. Oh, sure, it'll ERASE whatever you put on the Palm and replace it with whatever you had on the desktop, no problem, but the other way around? Hell no.

You can imagine the meltdown I had at that moment.

Then I tried to cut and paste the new stuff on my novel into MemoPad (which automatically syncs) and then maybe I could paste it onto my computer disc! Hah! Cut and paste on small screens just doesn't work that well, and I ended up deleting text, pasting it into the wrong places...

Thus I ended up doing Plan C, retype EVERYTHING I typed already and saving it onto my computer disc. So much for adding new material THAT day. And it turns out I'd only gotten a thousand words down the other day. Wah.

Also adding to the fun, something was wrong on their virus program, and therefore the computer gave me shit and/or crashed every time I tried to save anything new to my computer disk. Saving took about 10 minutes and 2-3 tries and renaming the document

Dad also spent the rest of the weekend throwing a BIG SHIT FIT that I'd *gasp!dared to unplug something on his computer so I could plug in my sync cradle. And I mean, he yelled at me about this Every. Single. Day. that I was home. Even after he'd thrown the big fit and I replugged whatever the hell it was back in again on Thursday.

Would you believe that was the most I got done on the novel the entire weekend? Dad decided that HE wanted to use the computer pretty much the rest of the time I was home. Plus my mom wanted to go shopping nearly every single day (but more on that later).

I will definitely not be trying NaNoWriMo again next year. People are decidedly uncooperative with me about this, especially now.

I'm disappointed, but I shoulda known better than to sign up this year.

As for the dinner itself, I am sooooooo glad Dave was not there. You have NO idea how glad. It wasn't as bad as I thought it might be- at least, I kept my temper and nobody got hit- but still, yeesh, people.

Pretty much the entire gathering was "Let's Interrogate Little Jennie About Her Boyfriend A Lot." I was shocked to hear Tammy say "Huh? I never heard anything about this. Where have I been?", as apparently the rest of the family has been gossiping about this no end.

Here's the highlights of the evening for me personally:

* Ron asking for Dave's full name and wanting to know if he has a police record. (Thank god, no)

* Everyone wanting to know if he has a job yet and what his field is and what his degree is in. Ouch. That didn't go over well.

* Everyone wanting to know when I'm getting engaged.

* Auntie Dolores going "Don't you just want to have a baby right now?" to me. My answer was an immediate "No." Geez, what is it with people when they see you holding a baby (Jessica, nearly a year old and grabbing whatever she can) and they immediately think "She must spawn now!"?

* My cousin Amanda (11 3/4) putting dibs on a bridesmaid position. Fine by me. However, I wasn't so thrilled with her later going on about how old I was and how thirty is just around the corner. You just started shaving your legs, and you're going on about my biological clock?

* D&B wanting to know when they were going to meet Dave and when I was going to bring him to a family gathering. I said "Ask Mom." She deflected that one.

* Auntie Dolores throwing a shit fit when I said something about Dave moving to the same town and she thought I said we were moving in together. Boy, did she lose it about that.

* Every time I have to be around my relatives, there's always one really bad remark that just comes out of the blue and blows my mind. This year's shocking remark was a surprise entry from my cousin-in-law Les- "Did you sleep with him on the first date?" Right during Thanksgiving dinner. In front of small children ranging from 11 to under a year old, my Catholic relatives, and my parents. Even his wife (Tammy) was like "Asking that in front of these people was just wrong."

Les is normally not that tactless, and we may be able to blame that remark on him coming off of prednisone for an eye infection. Apparently that had turned him into a raging asshole for a few days. (Dave said upon hearing this story that the same thing had happened to him and it took weeks for the effects to wear off.) At one point he claimed that he was asking questions like that to beat Ron to the punch, but yeah, right.

Oh, and behind my back, Auntie Dolores was telling my mother that I'd gained weight. For chrissake, HER of all people saying something like that to me is just ridiculous! The woman's a walking dumpling, and she thinks I'm fat? The HELL? This is why I'm glad Dave wasn't there- he said if he'd been there and heard that he would have told her off but good. Argh. Not a good idea...

And I haven't even gotten into mentioning stuff like Justin farting during grace (hah!), or Uncle Bruce asking Laurie when she was going to have more babies and stay at home with them already. I'm amazed she didn't slap him right there- said "Ask your son."

previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry