In which I relate the story of the holiday.

Wednesday night it was dead as hell at work, but nine o’clock eventually arrived. I closed up, set the alarm, and once in the parking lot jumped into my brother’s waiting truck.

We went to a bar. We went to another bar. We went to a third bar, where we sat in with the band and completely shredded a blues chart. Then we went home and hung out in my room, playing my guitar and being drunk. I finally went to bed around four-thirty, but Jay-rob Jethro stayed up all night.

When I got up around ten-thirty the next day, Sue & Blue and Kathy & Gale were all here. (Sue and Kathy are my aunts and were raised in this house.) At a quarter after one we headed over to Dave & Reva’s (Dave’s my uncle) for Thanksgiving dinner. The mashed potatoes were amazing; Reva used to own a catering business and can cook. (She also made a spinach salad just for me, the family’s only vegetarian.)

Eventually Jethro and I came home to Gramma’s house, where we both went to bed early. Well, he went to bed early; I had to eat more mashed potatoes first. Mmm, garlic.

Friday I had to work. Again, it was dead, and I was lucky if I took four calls an hour. Nine o’clock took forever to arrive, so to pass the time I not only upgraded WordPress (you may have noticed the ‘box was down for awhile last night) but got Jethro to buy himself a domain name so he can start blogging about beer. I can’t wait ’til he gets some content happenin’!

Since it was Friday night, after he picked me up we went to The Mill and had a couple of drinks. I also had a Gardenburger and fries. We stood outside near the fire. We talked about geek shit, working in call centers, and about being the support deities we are. Then we went to Safeway for a 6-pack, and then we returned to the house where we spent the next few hours in the front room messing around with Gramma’s computer.

First we put in a NIC card so she could use my DSL rather than the long-distance dial-up she’s been using. Then we downloaded drivers for the card off the ‘net onto the laptop, but I had to go find a floppy (I only had one – an old ’98 boot disk) to transfer the files. Gramma’s machine decided it wanted a Windows system disk before it would deign to install the NIC card drivers, but of course I have several of those.

Then we updated AVG but that was a nightmare; the thing has only has 32 mb of RAM and sounds like it’s grinding coffee because everything has to be written to disk. Even with 256k DSL connection it took an hour to download the virus app update; the thing simply doesn’t have enough memory to do anything.

Eventually Jethro decided he’d just move Gramma’s hard drive into my old rig (the one our dad sold me several years ago). I’d pulled the hard drive out two years ago (I use it in a USB enclosure as auxiliary storage for my laptop), so the rig was just sitting in the attic being full of Iowa dust. I went to bed at two-thirty and left him to it.

At four-thirty, the little bastard woke me up from a dead sleep to show me a photo he’d found of our grandfather. The image looked like it was of Jethro himself: he looks exactly like Grampa did in that picture. Pretty neat, but I didn’t get back to sleep until the sun was fully up. (Brothers? Are evil.)

At nine-thirty this morning, Gramma woke me to tell me she was headed off to the clinic and to the grocery store. Ten minutes after she left I finished waking up and thought, “Well, I’m a total shithead. The woman’s headed to the doctor on a Saturday, which means she’s not feeling well at all, and I didn’t even offer to drive.” When she got back she had groceries and a ten-day supply of antibiotics; apparently a little vein in her calf had ruptured and the area was infected. She says it feels like a deep bone bruise, and she’s taking Advil for the next ten days along with her anti-Bs.

We put the groceries away and I made broccoli-cheddar soup and she made a lunch meat sandwich and we sat and ate lunch together. Then I did dishes, started laundry, and broke down the cot in the stateroom and put away the bedding. I helped Gramma wrap a Christmas gift. I cleaned my room. I transferred laundry to the dryer. I went into the front room (where Jethro is still asleep) and retrieved my laptop. Did more laundry.

Now I’m thinking I’ll watch a DVD. I have four borrowed from Reva and one from Netflix that all need to be watched. Later, we’ll all have breakfast for dinner: eggs, hash browns, and sausage (veggie sausage for me, natch!) because that’s what Gramma has a hankerin’ for.

Jethro says he may hang around for a few days because Gramma needs X-mas lights hung and her gutters cleaned and he’s currently unemployed so doesn’t have to rush back to PDX. Yay! (Brothers? Are awesome.)