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and my pile of sisters
via https://ift.tt/3y7jPtf
ok i accidentally held down the a key there but i like it so i’m leaving it.
meandering travelogue behind the cut, nothing exciting has happened yet
so we set out yesterday, sister 4 (Farmsister), sister 3 (Middle-Little), Farmkid, and me, in #4′s minivan, with all kinds of stuff in it, crammed full. Dude had shared his location with me when he left Buffalo; he had a 5-hour drive so he left ahead of us, planning to arrive later than us. So I shared my location back, but IDK if he could see it.
(We started off well; I had to hide to let 4 and her husband pack the car, as I’m quite good at it but, as BIL said in his kind-but-intense way, too many cooks, so I went out and washed and packed eggs to be out of the way. But then 3 was supposed to show up at noon, and had said she’d probably really show up at 12:30, and at 12:47 she rolled in insisting she wasn’t late. Ha! And then she had like six huge boxes of booze we had to cram into the van but we managed perfectly well.)
I rode next to the kid, and had 3 doing navigation while 4 drove. It was only 3 hours, and I hadn’t realized until now how extremely used to driving 4.5 I am.
We left with just a little water sprinkling the windshield. 3 had already seen a convoy of National Grid trucks heading south as she’d made her way about on errands that morning. We saw another collection of them once we got on the highway toward New York City.
Soon it began to rain, and then to pour; we were driving along the leading edge of Hurricane Henri. It was slow going at times, but we kept making steady progress. 4 had intended to switch off driving with one of us others, but never got around to it. We crossed into Pennsylvania and lost cell service, having lost track of Dude somewhere around Binghamton.
But 3 hours passed faster than we thought. Kid demanded near-constant snacks, and drank a liter of water, but did not need a potty break. 4 needed the potty first but swore she could make it. We all contemplated that sense of urgency where you’re like ‘if I get in a traffic accident i will definitely have a separate little accident of my own oh no’, and the frisson of danger that adds.
The last bit of road was quite narrow and winding. “Don’t wreck,” 4 said. We made inquiring noises and she said “oh I’m just giving myself a pep talk.”
“I should check in with the others,” 3 said, and sent a message to the groupchat. Both my phone and 4′s eventually dinged, once we got a bar of cell reception back (and I found that Dude was nearly in Scranton, huzzah), and after a moment 3 looked at her phone again to see if there were any replies, and started laughing. “I just sent that to the groupchat of just us,” she said. “The only people who got that message are in this car.”
She re-sent it to the larger groupchat, and noticed on 4′s phone, which was in the dash holder with navigation on it, that she came up as Probable Spam. “Hey am I not in your phone?” she demanded, offended.
“Look closer,” 4 said, and 3 did, and realized the name Probable Spam was accompanied by a photograph of her holding a can of Spam, and remembered then that she’d done this herself, added herself to the contact list under that name because she’d thought it was funny. 4 has an Android phone anyway so actual suspected scam calls come through as Spam Likely. The only downside is when she’s searching for 3 in her phonebook 3 of course does not come up under her first or last name.
Somehow despite Mom having left Maryland (with Other Niece) on track to arrive before us, she had not arrived yet when we did. So it was up to us to figure out the gated community’s entrance.
The GPS was correct about how to get there, and we managed. It was pouring rain. We pulled up to the garage door and 4 sprinted up to the combination lock front door, intending to come down and let us into the garage, but there was no way out there. So we had to unload the car up the wooden front steps in the pouring rain. Farmkid fell twice but being seven, she bounced and was unhurt. The tile entryway was a bit of a nightmare in the wet and the rain, but again, Farmkid was the only one who slipped on it. She was– she’d been so quiet in the car, she’s used to long car rides, but as soon as we got there she was YELLING and RUNNING and SO EXCITED and THIS IS GONNA BE MY BEDROOM and MOMMY AND [other niece] ARE GONNA SLEEP HERE WITH ME and LOOK HOW MANY ROOMS and all of it.
The first thing we unpacked was the cooler. The last thing I’d done before we left was run out to the picking garden and harvest huge handfuls of herbs; I put them all into drinking glasses and set them on the windowsill by the sink. We’d also brought last week’s leftover flowers, so I put them into glasses and pitchers and vases and set them around. It was extremely bougie but I’m rather delighted with the effect, and glad I did that first. I’ll take a photo later, I took no photos yesterday really.
We’d completely unloaded in the pouring rain and moved the van out of the way when we got a call from Mom, who’d made it in the gated community entrance but then her GPS wouldn’t tell her where to go. Fortunately the AirBnB rental had included step-by-step directions and 4 had printed them, so she read them off and talked Mom in. When she arrived, we unloaded her car in seconds flat, and then BOTH little girls could tear-ass around the house bossily informing all of us who was sleeping where.
“We are not making a decision on bedrooms,” 4 said, with great authority and patience, “until Sister 1 arrives, because she may have some conditions we don’t know about, so we have to let her look and cast her vote before we make any permanent arrangements.”
This did not deter the girls, who kept turboing around as we unloaded the coolers and set up the kitchen and tried to clear the foyer of all the luggage. Poor farmkid was a bit overstimulated, bright pink and agitated, but she did manage to calm herself down a little instead of having a meltdown. (She’d been so excited to see her cousin, who is just a year and a half older than her, but in the moment it was almost too much, as cousin was also QUITE wound up and slightly aggressive. Mom had accidentally given her free run of the snacks and there’d been chocolate covered espresso beans in there, but fortunately she’d stopped after three or four of them. Still, a mildly-caffeinated 9 year old who was just cooped up for three hours is not the most rational of actors.)
It was another half an hour until Sister 1 arrived with her sons. Her husband had just bought a big esoteric new piece of equipment he’d needed her help and the boys’ to set up, and had gotten it working just as they’d been planning to leave, so they’d had to delay their departure. That BIL is… not great at considering other people and their plans, but 1 seems contented enough to work around this tendency of his, and he is a decent dude apart from that. At any rate, they got their father squared away and then piled into their van and we all helped unload, and the boys joined in the No THIS will be MY room Discourse until 4 finally said “NO ONE IS MAKING A DECISION EXCEPT SISTER #1 SHE IS THE SOLE AUTHORITY”, so the very first thing that happened when 1 finally set foot in the house is that all the children presented themselves loudly to her.
“I,” she said, with great poise and grace, being a newly-minted colonel (just on Thursday! we haven’t drunk our champagne about it yet) and quite used to this sort of nonsense, “am taking a tour of the bathrooms first, and then I will hear your petitions, view the scene, and make my determination.”
So we left her to that, and I got the fridge stocked, and in the midst of that, my dude arrived, just in time to be told where to go and what to do, which delighted him (he loves a good decision already-made).
The house is…. well the development is lovely, they left it very very forested so the houses are crammed in but don’t seem to be. This house would benefit greatly from having someone live in it, because the rental is set up to look good in photos and be easy to clean. There’s a cathedral ceiling in the main room, and with no rugs or soft furnishings it is so echoey as to be unusable for conversation. As it was pouring rain on the skylights, we couldn’t hear one another at all, and then the children yelling made it absolutely unbearable.
We did get them calmed down, and had a pleasant dinner at the ridiculous table– it’s four narrow IKEA tables pushed together, with capacity for 16. We removed several chairs.
All of 1′s kids, and 1 herself, are in the basement bedrooms. Me, 3, and Mom are in a small hallway on the main floor with three bedrooms and two baths, slightly isolated. And then there’s a master bedroom upstairs where 4 and Farmkid are, which 4 is slightly embarrassed at being the nicest room in the whole place, but like– it’s only sensible to stick 1 and her kids together and she is not fussed at being in the basement. The boys wanted to each have their own rooms but then recognized it would be a bit much to stick 1, 4, and both girls in a single room together, even though the master bedroom is big enough that they could do that. The awkward bit there would be that the husbands each possibly might show up for a couple of days and it’d be weird to try to find places for them.
(Farm-BIL will be lucky to make it for one night. They just can’t leave the farm unattended with no staff. Other-BIL is also genuinely rather busy. So yes, my dude is the only adult male to show up, so far. He is utterly unfussed about this, as he’s quite used to my family. Though he is finding the noise distressing; we need to figure out how to muffle that cathedral ceiling. The kids are mostly old enough to be able effectively to be reminded to keep their voices somewhat down, but they’re also all old enough to be capable of making some serious noise; the teenaged boy’s voice hasn’t changed yet so he’s like full power but all of the shrill. Not an ideal acoustic situation.)
4 managed to cook dinner even though the electric range had all the markings worn off so there was no way to tell whether the burners were on or, if so, how high. THere was one incident with a very hot frying pan, but no one was injured. 3 found the vent fan on the range hood but that had the incidental effect of putting 4 into a cone of silence so she could not participate in any conversations while cooking, which was faintly hilarious.
There are several huge TVs in this house. We turned one on briefly, in the basement, after several (but not all) of our phones buzzed with tornado warnings and told us to seek shelter. The weather channel told us there were flash flood warnings but mentioned nothing about a tornado. So we waited in the basement briefly– no hardship as the kids had already been down there playing pool and ping-pong– and then went back up.
To make the living room usable we had stolen all the extra bedside lamps from the bedrooms and put them around in the room. The only lights are all in the ceiling, which is some 20 feet high or more; you can’t read by them. Obviously the room is designed for watching television, but that’s not something we as a family enjoy doing as a matter of course. I have a suspicion we wouldn’t have been able to hear it; the rain on the skylights was fierce by then. So really I’m not sure what that room is for, except looking great in photos. Probably good for reading by daylight because the roof’s all skylights, at least.
I of course have slept like shit, I’m writing this at 4am and I can tell you it only stopped raining a few minutes ago. But it’s supposed to be sunny the rest of the week. I am hoping that exhaustion will get me down for a nap later, and that there’ll be time, because I am in a fine state of not having slept really at all. Ugh. Oh well. (Your picture was not posted)
