I have just come back from a week of visiting some of my husband's family in the Palm Beach area.
That t.v. show thinks it captures desperation, isolation and bizarre behavior "Under the Dome"? Oh, Stephen King, you know not what of you write, you poor innocent.
For starters, no vegetables, no fruits. Ever. One relative who went to the grocery store to supply us, knowing that my husband and I ate oddly, came back having "bought out the store," in his words.
A box of sliced mushrooms and a bag of shredded iceburg lettuce. That follows a family rule of always having the one least qualified do the job. Who always picks the restaurant, and here I have to interject that they eat out every single night...so... The restaurant picker? Steak and potatoes man. Always, Except, wait. Sometimes Italian, as long as there is plenty of breading and sauce. And then back to steak and potatoes.
And I am sorry to sound ungrateful, because I was able to eat well on someone else's dime. Scallops a couple of times, salmon once, and my horde of fruit and veggies from the local Publix which I visited within minutes of hitting the house. The good news, I lost weight. I didn't have to pay for a comfy room. Like the rest of the house, our room was apparently magically transported from Connecticut, their residence many, many years ago, with all the furnishings completely unable to be touched by anything that might be damp, sandy or beach related. Not quite as dramatic as the former house which had pale marble floors that spotted if so much as a single drop of water hit them, where I ran behind two little kids, in from the beach, leaving God forbid wet footprints on the floor. The beach was literally right outside the door. And the sofa was suede. Suede for God's sake!
So, I took, along with a lot of eating-out type clothing, a single muu-muu. A muu-muu sweats up fast and has to be removed and laundered immediately before it touches a piece of furniture, which limits comfy, sit around type clothing. A muu-muu is never worn outside of the house, except when I wore mine to the beach and on a hike through the nature preserve next door, home to many enormous spiders ("You should see them in another month. That's when they are really big.") so one muu-muu would have seemed enough, but next time, two. The other two female members of this ensemble, wore skirts to dinner and at all other hours of the day, and in one, perhaps both instances, nylons. I have always been the only female among all the family extensions, to wear slacks, for anything, ever. The late patriarch did not approve of women wearing slacks, but because he so deeply disapproved of me for so many reasons, adding slacks did not seem as if it would matter. Now his portrait just gazes down from the wall disapprovingly.
And yet these are really nice people. I like them as I tastelessly criticize them, and forgive them for not noticing that I have lost sixty pounds since I saw them last. And as for my venting in this blog, I promise to come back with a wonderful recipe for lentils. I made it tonight, and it was better than anything I had in any restaurant that had the words "steak house" in its name.
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