Thursday, May 15, 2008

and you thought I was crazy ...

I know my last post was rather somber, but life is like that sometimes. You take the good with the bad. And since all ten of you that actually read this page suffered through it for my sake, here is a spirit lifter for you.

So we all have that crazy relative, right? Well I have several. But the leader of the pack is by far the matriarch of our family, my grandmother. She is a loving, chain-smoking, slightly off her rocker kind of grandmother. And I know she means well but so very often misses the mark. The prime example of this is her gift-giving skills.

With 8 children, 18 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren (not to mention spouses) she has a lot of people to purchase for. I'm sure she realized this and came up with a method of buying that made sense for her. And from what I can gather it works like this. She divides people into groups based on gender and age and all the people within that group get the same thing. I guess it could work, but usually we all end up with things we are not thrilled about. Plus, once someone else in your group (and we all know who falls where) opens their gift, all the excitement is removed for you. So not fun!

In addition to buying identical gifts, she often wraps them WAY in advance and forgets who gets what. Over the years, many gifts have been opened by the wrong people and/or people have received duplicates. Two years ago, I opened four gifts from my grandma. Every last one of them were candelabras. Seriously, four candelabras. I still can't figure out why she thought I would even need/want one!

But as funny as that may be, she topped the cake with a gift she gave my soon-to-be 18 year old sister on Mother's Day. My mom and G were at Grandma's celebrating with some of our family when Grandma told G that she came across a gift that she had gotten for her a few years ago. (Really? Where had it been for the past "few" years?) Anyway, when she brought it out it was a mud mask. The container was faded and not exactly in pristine condition, but not wanting to offend our grandmother, G said, "Thank you." Then Grandma asked if she thought she could still use it. G, thinking, "Are you crazy? You want me to put that on my face? How old is it?" instead said, "I think we should check if there is an expiration date." So Grandma took a look and couldn't find anything. So G passed the container on to our other Grandma (OK she's not really my grandma. She's my aunt's mother-in-law). But enough digression. Grandma F looked at the bottle and found the date. Are you ready for this?

1995!! Seriously!! How did she not come across this "gift" in 13 years? And what's crazier is that G was 5 in 1995. Did she seriously think a mud mask was a good idea for a 5 year old?

OK, OK. I know you are peeing your pants right now. Go ahead. Take a second to clean it up.

Are you good? Great. Well at least now you know where I get my craziness from.



Run Log, Day Three: 4.03 miles. 38:10. Outside with the girls in tow.

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