So, my parents just called me...

... and told me they were in Las Vegas!!??

"Yeah, we decided to come out here with some friends for a week. We're driving 5 hours to the Grand Canyon tomorrow."

I guess when you get older, retire and you have friends that own timeshares and stuff you can do stuff like this... I mean, when you think about it, newly retired people just sit around with nothing to do! So they end up creating work for themselves. They're so used to just working all the time, to just sit still and do nothing drives them nuts!!

My father for example, has the house on a painting schedule. The outside gets painted every few years, and he knows when each room is due to get painted. As the time to paint each room approaches, it creates a whole ordeal where he goes through everything in the room to see what he can throw away or get rid of. This usually results in my father doing things like gathering all of the hats I wore as a youth, having them dry cleaned then sending them to me in an airtight sealed container.

What in the HELL am I going to do with a Top Gun hat (with the wings on the bill and all) or a styrofoam 1985 world series hat?? Now I am in posession of a bag of hats that I'll never wear, but since he put so much effort into this whole hat delivery, I can't get rid of them now.

So he'll take like 3 weeks to go through every piece of paper, my high school love letters from my hoes, (yes, I even had hoes back then!), and put it all in a box marked "Curt", so the next time I go home, my entire vacation time home with my family will be spent being reminded of how young, immature, and stupid I was as a youth. And every time he goes through the shit, I never throw anything away because I know he wants to get rid of it. So I keep everything, I have book reports on Charles Drew from 3rd grade, baseball cards, and all kinds of shit I keep at my parents house.

Finally, he paints, after meticulous preparation to make sure the only thing exposed to air is the area to be painted, it takes him one day to actually paint, but he somehow managed to extend this process into three weeks. And during that period, he's very "busy". Really, I understand this though. If he didn't do this, then my mother would find things for him to do. This way, he is in control of his own time, so he creates these little three week windows where my mother can't ask him to do shit. Quite genius actually...

So my parents are in Vegas, and my dad is mad because he is now behind on his painting schedule. The joys of retirement.

~C

CD of the moment: Morcheeba - "The Antidote"