While not a whole lot actually happened, activity-wise, it turned out to be Yet Another Soap Opera Weekend.

On Friday, I ended up seeing Nikki's apartment for a brief period of time. It actually wasn't quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. The place is a mess (anywhere they have lived has been a mess. Dave thinks I'm bad?), but has a fairly roomy kitchen and bathroom for its size, even if Dave seems to think the stove has cooties- "They cleaned it and it still looks like that!" The holes in the walls got fixed, though the back window still looks incredibly nasty. There were a ton of people over there, as Nikki has apparently given permission to people who need somewhere to boink to come on over. I saw the cat, which is a tiny, sickly little kitten. She was supposed to be going in for a feline leukemia test on Monday, though last I heard the kitten had eaten the ingredients in a bug trap and might not have survived that. There's also a rat and a frog, which I guess are the property of their third roommate, who I didn't see.

Dave called Scott and found out why the heck he made that late night call. Demma was in some kind of VERY bad depressed mood that day, and was going around alternately yelling/nagging Scott and vacillating on the wedding. She doesn't want him to propose to her dad, she might call it off, she might not, she wants to change the wedding theme but doesn't know to what... yes, she was going on about that as well as talking about bailing out of it. She apparently wouldn't let up all day or all night, so he called Dave as a distraction. What a mess. I fear she needs her medication upped, or that she's going bipolar or something. The whole "don't tell my dad so I can back out of this if I feel like it" thing is just... oy. I'm wondering if a wedding will go on after all.

Dave was working both days this weekend, so I spent most of mine lying around the house looking at the jewelry catalog. I've decided to forego ordering stuff until I can figure out what the hell I need to get. Apparently ordering gold and copper pieces is VERY complicated and makes my head split open.

It turns out that there is going to be a family reunion in town on Sunday, which coincidentally turns out to be on Dave's lone day off next week. (His work is moving to a larger location in a week or two, and things are zooey.) Large numbers of relatives will be pouring in. And surprise, surprise, his grandma asked me to go. I'm still in shock over that one. So I'll be going up there Saturday night and hanging around until Tuesday night or Wednesday morning (if Dave has his way about it, it'll be the latter), since it's not like I'll have much to do before then.

Eeep. Meeting TONS of relatives of his all at once. Ai yi yi. Excuse me while I hide under the bed...

I don't know if I've said much about Teri's mom in here before, but she's known as "The Nazi." For good reason. She's in a similar profession to the dad in Ten Things I Hate About You, and seems to be even crazier when it comes to her child. She cannot be reasoned with, and she is in a constant state of pissed off at Teri no matter what Teri does. Okay, so some of you are reading this and thinking "And she's different from your mom, how?", but my mom is quite sane and normal compared to her.

Anyway, here was the situation on Saturday night: Teri's car had died a few weeks ago, and she was borrowing her mom's car. It had been a hell of a week, mom-wise, and she was already on edge. That morning, her mom said, "NOTHING better happen to that car." Mom had to go get something for her job done on Sunday, and Teri had work then.

You know where I'm going with this, of course.

Teri had been forced to go to a family birthday party that day, but was allowed out for a short period of time to go pick up Jeremy and Dave from their jobs. (This is allowed by The Nazi because they pay her gas money.) After dropping Dave off, they got about two blocks from the house when the car died. Teri actually disappeared for a while to go off and scream, which freaked Dave out that she'd disappeared. She returned by the time we got over there, though. The guys pushed the car back to Dave's, and his dad said he'd try to fix it after dinner.

I certainly don't understand the details of car maintenance to be able to explain what happened, but I did get that The Nazi hadn't been doing regular maintenance on the car and that's why it had died. Not Teri's fault, but we all knew that since Teri'd been driving the car, The Nazi was going to consider it her fault no matter what anyway. She was too afraid to talk to her mom, her boyfriend Gabe ran interference and made The Nazi promise not to blame Teri. Who knows if THAT actually happened, though. Anyway, the damage was too bad for Dave's dad to fix without parts, and the car had died too late for anyone to make a run to a store, but he worked out a temporary fix that would hold the thing together until it could make it to a mechanic.

While he was fixing the car...

Jeremy had been asked by Nikki to be "civil" to Dave. Apparently he defined civil as "ignoring his presence completely, even though I'm at his house." Seriously, he hugged me upon seeing me, chatted up his grandparents, etc., but ignored Dave whenever he said anything to him. Dave especially got annoyed when Jeremy started showing me the barely legal "college girls" porn mag he'd bought. He seemed to think Jeremy was pushing his buttons by doing that, though in all honesty Jeremy and I make stupid sexual jokes like that fairly often anyway and Dave hasn't usually been bothered by it. We know it isn't going to happen and nobody's serious (unlike some other people I could mention...), so between us personally, not a big whoop. Anyway, Jeremy'd be flipping through the pages and saying stuff like "You know, they don't actually make anything for young guys to look at, they make this stuff for 45-year-old men." I looked on and snickered and made comments like "Oh yeah, we SO did that in the dorms at college. And we always stuck our popsicles up there." I just cannot take that stuff seriously at all.

Eventually, Dave snapped. Being ignored REALLY bothers him, and he decided to make Jeremy pay attention to him. Naturally, this soon erupted into yelling and the two of them looking like they were about to start beating each other up.

At this point, Teri started crying. Not only had she had the week from hell, not only was the only car in the family dead, not only was she going to be blamed for it, but two of her friends were fighting to boot. At this point, Gabe started walking her away from the scene, and I went along with them. I know better than to get in the middle of that kind of argument. We wandered down the next street over and Gabe got a burrito. Teri just sat there and cried, while Gabe tried to comfort her. I have to say, he is an excellent boyfriend. I sat there and watched the street to see when somebody would eventually come looking for us. I didn't realize until we'd gotten over there that none of us had any cell phones on us. Mine was in my purse in the house (I hadn't thought to go get it while a fight was going on), and it turned out Gabe didn't have Teri's on him like I thought he had.

I don't know how long we were there, maybe 45 minutes to an hour? It felt long, anyway. But eventually I saw Dave and Jeremy coming up the street, and I smiled. Hey, if they weren't beating on each other, good sign! (Nobody got injured, btw.) Eventually they spotted us, and Dave ran over and practically tackled me while I sat and yelled "Never go off without your cell phone again!" Teri took off running, but Jeremy caught her. The three of them ended up in a big group hug and the boys were apologizing up the wazoo for the fighting and the bad timing.

As I heard later about the fight, they basically just yelled a lot. Dave was apologizing for everything under the sun, and Jeremy kept saying that wasn't what he was mad about. Finally, his dad (who was still fixing the car) got up and yelled "Then what the fuck ARE you mad about?" Turns out the thing that was cheesing Jeremy off was that Dave had left a message saying he was bailing out on the voice mail. He wasn't necessarily mad that he bailed, but he didn't like it being on voice mail! (Dave's response: "You weren't answering the phone!") Oh brother. At any rate, they are currently at a truce. I don't know how the friendship's gonna go from there, but it's at a truce.

Speaking of truces, I found out last night that Demma returned from her dad's and things are "back to normal- or as normal as those two get, anyway." I guess Dave was on the phone with them and with J&N and they're all about to reace a truce as well about the whole thing. Maybe all the fighting will finally stop now.

One of the people at work nicely printed out the new job description for me when she posted it online today. What a sweetie. I finished updating everything and rewriting the cover letter- I had to think of various ways to say "I did this job before!" to get past the HR people (my boss obviously knows this stuff)- and e-mailed it in tonight. My references all wrote back to say "Bureauracy sucks, doesn't it?" I will pretty much be all set when the time comes. All I'll have to do is pick out an outfit. Though I am going to have to get off my ass and fill out new unemployment papers again. Joy. Though I'm not exactly sure if it counts as being "laid off" when you knew the job was going to end anyway. Oh well, no harm if I file, right? And now they even put the form online so I don't have to shell out to fax it.

After hearing about this whole temporary-layoff thing, my mom has been nagging me to find an official permanent job. However, I'm not eligible for anything I've seen lately. No real clerical experience, nothing else but clerical being looked for, as usual. I'd rather stick with this if I can anyway. At least I don't spend all day on the phone (especially since I spend all night on the phone now)!

Went back to the pompous doctor today, who after five minutes pronounced me ready to hit the monkey bars, I'm cured. Whee! Not that I didn't already know that, of course. I'm feeling incredibly smug because despite all his crap about how I had to cough up stuff, I never felt the urge and yet the fluid or whatever was down there disappeared on its own. Hah.

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