Boxing Day at Oates Manor, Part I

By Tuesday Nancy was starting to get bitchy.

Tammy Oates believed it was because Nostrils had opted out of a planned visit to an ailing aunt’s house in Philadelphia, scheduled for Wednesday. Originally all of us were going to go, but I made it crystal clear that I was staying home (I mean, seriously), and Nossy apparently saw it as an opportunity to do the same.

Nancy doesn’t much care for people making up their own minds about things, so she was walking around playing the Ice Queen.

At one point she went into the kitchen and couldn’t find her water glass. Nancy believes dishes should only be washed when absolutely necessary (once there's a threat of contracting a chronic disease), to help save the Earth’s natural resources. So when she found out Nostrils had washed her glass, and placed it in the drainer, she completely lost her shit.

“Why would you do something like that?!” she screamed, like a howling maniac. “Why would you wash a glass?!”

She was saying all this in the tone of a person who’d just stumbled onto the scene of a mass murder. Nostrils began begging for forgiveness (click! goes the sound of the testicle lockbox), and I just stood off to the side and took it all in. What a grand gang of weirdos.

After the water glass meltdown, Nancy stormed downstairs to the family room. I was watching TV and suddenly there was loud snake charmer music blasting throughout the house. The crap??

I took a peak downstairs, expecting to find someone sitting cross-legged in front of a basket. But it was just Nancy doing her so-called exercises. She was wearing some sort of black leotard with her arms stretched above her head, her pit hedges glistening and swaying to and fro. I thought I could hear something that sounded like a field of wheat blowing in the wind, but I could be mistaken about that.

I decided it was a perfect time to take our dog Anthony for a walk, and got the hell out of there. I can put up with a lot of stuff, but when that fur comes out to play, I need to find an exit. It looks like she’s smuggling a Doobie Brother under each arm, and I can’t have that.

Anthony and I took an extra-long tour of the neighborhood, and when we returned I thought we’d walked inside, literally inside, a human colon. It was a full-on house of funk, and I immediately identified the culprit: Nancy was in the kitchen “cooking.”

Tammy Oates called me to the side and was clearly at the end of her rope. She told me Nancy was being a “complete bitch,” and had turned the TV off while our kids were watching it. Tammy Oates turned it back on, and Nancy sneaked back in a few minutes later and clicked it off again. In our own house.

It never stops.

I went into the eye of the funk storm to get some water, and Nancy was chasing one of the translucents around, trying to get him to eat a “segment” of clementine. As far as I know they’re called tangerines, but that’s far too common for Eninen. As is, apparently, the word “piece.”

Nossy entered the room and wanted to know if the youngest translucent had anymore clean underwear and pants. Nancy asked if he’d had an accident, and Nostrils said no. “There’s just some light soilage,” he announced. WTF??

Bill Oates is a very busy man, but I’ll try to update this site more often. Things came to a crackpot head later that same day, and I’ll tell you all about it next time.

Until then....