There Will Be Rum

I'm leaving very early tomorrow morning to visit my parents in Florida.  Alone.  MDH will be busy here with work and keeping Miami out of trouble, which as you will read below shouldn't be too difficult as the man doesn't appear to be up to much.

So yes, Miami is still here.  The real mystery is will he be here when I get home next week. 

Although I don't have much to complain about*, it has been a little weird being home all day while he's here all day also.  Except it's like he's not really here, except that he is.  He mostly has been staying in the guest room and I've mostly been doing what I normally do.  I ask him if he wants to join me when I go out to run errands and he usually says no.  I ask him if he wants something to eat when I eat and he says no.  I keep trying to engage him to join us in whatever it is we are doing, but he always says no.

When he first arrived I noticed that he didn't eat anything for breakfast or lunch, but he would have dinner with us if I cooked something, and not only eat everything I put in front of him, but also rave about how great it tasted.  Then he stopped having dinner with us too - so I wondered, is he eating anything??  Then Tuesday afternoon I opened up the microwave to defrost some meat for dinner and, much to my surprise, there was a 12" meatball sub in there.  I have no idea where it came from, when Miami might have left the apartment to go out and get it, or how long it had been lurking in my microwave.  I defrosted the meat and put the sub back where I found it.

So... yeah... there's a tiny, furtive, half naked brown man who has taken over a section of our apartment like a little chainsmoking vole**.  He comes out of his room (Wait.  See what I did there?  I called it his room.  It's not his room.  It's my guest room... anyhoo) and goes immediately to the balcony to smoke, occasionally he'll mumble something that I don't understand, but then he's gone so quickly that I don't have time to ask him to repeat what he said and frankly I don't really give a shit.

*Now instead of washing the paper plates he's apparently just putting the ones he uses back on the stack of unused paper plates.  The other day I grabbed a paper plate off the top of the stack and it was dotted with olive oil and bread crumbs from what appeared to be yet another submarine sandwich.

**MDH apparently told Miami to "stay outta her way", referring to me, while he was here with me and MDH was at work all day.  Miami was apparently also told that he was not allowed to consume any alcoholic beverages while MDH is not at home.***

***Ugh.  It explains a lot and makes me feel queasy and all the more happy to be skee-daddling off to my folks house in Florida for a few days.

Miami Vice Day 3

So far so good.  My brother in law Miami arrived Friday afternoon with very little drama or fanfare.  He has a designated smoking spot on the covered and smaller of our two balconies and an entire guest suite to himself and he seems to be pretty content.  Ten days has been announced as the length of the visit, after which time I'm not sure what is happening.  He will either move on to stay with MDH's other brother Las Vegas or visit his son Phoenix, currently doing time in Arizona.

Over the years I've never really spent more than a few hours with Miami and I talk to him on the phone occasionally, so I honestly don't know the man.  Here is what I am learning:

Miami is very self contained.  He brought his own ashtray, an enormous coffee mug that he fills up with slightly more than half of the 12 cup pots of coffee I have been brewing, and a 32" flat screen HD TV, which he wasted no time in hooking up to the cable outlet in our guest room.  All of this is fine with me, much to my surprise.  It's MDH that is running around apoplectic and constantly apologizing to me for what he perceives to be Miami behaving inappropriately.  Yes, that's a lot of coffee, but we can make more.  It's fine.

Yes, the covered balcony and parts nearby, are currently reeking powerfully of cigarette smoke and ashtray.  Also, the guest room has a strong essence of old-man-who-smokes-a-lot emanating from Miami's clothes, luggage and assorted belongings.  It totally stinks, but the smell will dissipate eventually and all of the linens will be washed.  In bleach.  That's how I roll anyway.  Not a biggie.

Yes, Miami has a propensity for walking around shirtless while wearing tiny shorts and rinsing off paper plates and putting them in the dish drainer, which is weird right?  I probably should have separated that last sentence into two sentences, but I didn't so I'll just clarify that his wearing tiny shorts is unrelated to the washing paper plates thing.  I mean, he doesn't specifically strip down to tiny shorts in order to perform the washing of paper plates.   Anyhoo... we all have strange habits and quirks.  He apparently thinks it's weird that I use paper plates.*

Miami often talks like a character from a 1950's gangster film, which I find quite charming.  He said that Phoenix "wood-na got picked up if some stoolie had-na dropped a dime on 'im".  He called me "dollface" the other day and I nearly swooned.

So it's day three and I'm here to report that there is nothing to report.

*The paper plates are a new thing.  The kitchen in this apartment is so tiny that I only unpacked the bare minimum of dinnerware when we moved in, so we only have 4 place settings.  It's weird to me too, but I sure as hell am not going to wash and reuse paper plates.  Miami washes them and sticks them in the drainer and as soon as he walks away I put them into the recycle bin.**

**OK.  That's a lie.  I put them in the trash.  We don't have recycling here and I haven't figured out yet where to take the recycling.  Or for that matter where the fuck to put it while it's accumulating.  This place is tiny and I barely have enough room for the things I want to keep, let alone the shit I want to throw away.  Sue me.***

***I have become an environmental terrorist and feel really weird and guilty about not recycling.  I used to love recycling in the Tundra.  It made me feel good, but the Tundra made it easy to recycle as it was just part of the city trash collection.  Also we had lots of space for the recycling bins.  Here they collect the trash twice a week, but no recycling.  I'll figure it out eventually, but until then I have recycling shame.

You Complete(ly Annoy) Me

I don't know why I insist on watching any romantic comedies made after whatever year When Harry Met Sally came out*.  Don't they all mostly suck?  They meet cute, one or both parties carry out some ridiculous lie  or humiliating bet and most of the story and supposed-to-be-hilarious stunts are all based on support and cover up of the ridiculous lie or humiliating bet.  There's usually some kind of lip synced into a hair brush dance number performed in pajamas or underpants and a convoluted "hey I was only lying to you all this time and making both of us look like idiots because I really, really love you and isn't that the most important message in this movie?" 

The pivotal moment of the modern American romantic comedy says, "Hey, I'm not a jackass, you're the jackass if you can't forgive me for loving you so much.  Aren't we both douchbags who deserve each other?" 

As often as not there's a separation period where they show the guy disheveled and living amongst pizza boxes and beer can pyramids, and the girl is doing her best to carry on with her life amongst vignettes of her in pajama pants (again with the pajama pant shame), shoveling ice cream into her sad mouth, or of her wistfully eyeing the PDA's of other couples while moping around Central Park.

I know the drill and yet whenever MDH is out of town damn if I'm not getting my fill of horrible romantic comedies on cable.  It's like a disease.  They always make me mad and yet here I am again bitching this time about the drivel I just watched called "Something Borrowed".  Maybe I should just avoid any movie with Kate Hudson in it (except she was so freaking awesome in Nine!).

I indulged in a desperately needed cleanse of my psyche afterwards by watching a fine documentary film called Bill Cunningham New York.  You should watch it if you get the chance.

In other news:

• Apartment life kind of rocks.  If something breaks I make a call and someone comes to fix it.  Like, that same day!  Not even that - if a light bulb goes out someone will come and change it.  To take it one step further I called maintenance to have them remove the dark freckly pool of dead bugs at the bottom of one our ceiling light fixtures - and they actually came and took care of it!!  Schweet.
• As cool as it is to have an entire fleet of maintenance workers and grounds keepers at my beck and call there is a downside to apartment living in the form of annoying neighbors.  In particular some douchbag with the noisiest truck I've ever heard that he seemingly rumbles around the apartment complex in wide circles (puffed with pride at the sound of his loud, loud big man machine, no doubt massaging his very tiny cock the whole while ) stopping periodically under our dining  room window (because it's near the security gate) and then revving the engine several times before peeling out to terrorize the larger world with his horrible tranportation choice.  We literally have to pause the TV and stop all conversation and then peel the cat off the ceiling after the inevitable engine rev.  We know his schedule as if we lived next to a train station.  I loathe this person.
• A week or so ago some of my family came to visit in form of my crazy aunt Libby, her daughter (who is my cousin, but I refer to her as "my sister" quite a bit on this blog) and her daughter (who is my second cousin but I refer to always as my niece and she has always called me Aunt Lady).  Aunt Libby is the one that came down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast in her housecoat (she called it a "dressing gown". I don't care what you call it, housecoat, dressing gown... inappropriate.) and no dentures in.  Anyhoo... we had a lovely visit.  We worked out when would be the best time for their visit and planned fun things to do while they were here.  It was glorious and I couldn't have asked for a better visit.
• In two days my brother in law Miami is coming to stay with us "for awhile".  I don't know much more than that.  It's all news to me because I just found out a few days ago that he's coming.  I don't know exactly when he will arrive and he has not been forthcoming with the exact date of his departure.  "For awhile" is all I've been told.  I'm frightened.  MDH is frightened.  Miami is a goodfella type who will ruin my life for the duration of his stay.  He got angry when MDH told him he had to smoke outside and I consider this a bad start.  Best case scenario - he'll dominate the TV and I'll miss the last few episodes of Project Runway.  Worst case scenario - he will be here for weeks and weeks and bring well dressed criminals and prostitutes into my home and they will smoke cigarettes together in my guest room and I will have to burn my 600 thread count Egyptian cotton bedsheets.  Worst-worst case scenario - someone will get stabbed and I will have to burn my fancy guest towels and somehow I will end up in prison because nothing, nothing is ever Miami's fault.

Please note that this post does not contain the word "fuck" or many other of my most favorite swear words and swear word combinations.  It was not intentional, which makes the absence of these words all the more intriguing, no?

*There are some that I really like, like for instance Fever Pitch with Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore.  I don't know that it's technically a good movie necessarily, but that doesn't stop me from watching it every time it's on.  I also loved 500 Days of Summer.