Worst Vacation of My Life (So Far) - Part One

I’ve written here before about the fact that my blog isn’t an Option 1 blog, so I’ve got to say nice things like, “Thanks for the awesome sweater, Aunt Loraine!” even though I don’t even have an Aunt Loraine, because one of my prying family members might come along and read the post and think, “He seems upset that he doesn’t have an Aunt Loraine. I think I should confront him with this observation, intervention-style!” (For those of you who think I don’t have prying family members, my father just became a Twitter follower of mine; and for those of you who disbelieve the piddling level of crap my family can turn into an intervention-style confrontation, I need only remind you of the question, “Is this your black thong?”)
JT recommended, in comment-form back then, and since then in face-to-face-form, that I ignore all my potential readers and just write what I want. At the time I dismissed his advice with a well-reasoned, “If he knows so much, why isn’t he a doctor?” Then I realized he IS a doctor, and now that I've become so enraged at all things familiar to me, I don’t care who I piss off. If they don’t like it, they can kiss my black ass.
I am not exaggerating when I say this past vacation was the worst I’ve ever been on. (Positive sidebar: that last sentence was the first time in my life I ever spelled the word “exaggerating” correctly on the first try. Usually it’s so mangled that SpellCheck can’t even help at first.) Everything about this vacation went wrong, in increasingly horrible ways, reaching a grand crescendo of crapulence when we spent an hour in a roadside ditch, listing 15 degrees to port.
Firstly, three years ago my work made me go to part-time instead of accommodating my school schedule, so all of my time off is unpaid. When everyone else gets a holiday, I have to work 10-hour days the rest of the week if I don’t want to pay money for the privilege of not working. That means that a two-week vacation is thousands of dollars more expensive for me than for the average person. So already I was in a position where every day needed to be pretty awesome to be worth its price.

Packing the night before we left, our parking space battle with the new neighbors came out in the open. We’ve lived in the same place for nearly four years now, and are on our fourth set of neighbors. The first set moved in after us. They were a childless married couple with two cars, and we had one car and two kids. They continually parked in the closest parking space, and other neighbors further west used the other spaces in that row, leaving us to load kids in an out of the car in the parking spaces that filled with rain and snow. Crazy Jane was the age to ask loud questions like, “Why are they parking in our space?” and I am the type to give loud answers like, “Because they don’t think of anyone but themselves.” They finally stopped parking in our space, and we never got along afterwards. The second set was two college girls who treated the spot as first-come-first-served, even though my wife had two little kids and was visibly pregnant. When the baby was born in the dead of winter and I spent an entire morning shoveling out the space for my wife and then one of them came home and took it, I went next door and asked them to stop. They were great about it and we got along well for the rest of their tenancy, even though for part of that time they owned an indoor goose. The third neighbor was a crazy lady who hung blackout drapes, tried to let herself into our place once because she was looking for her niece, and moved out suddenly one afternoon in the middle of the month. She fought us for the space at first, but after a few times saying hello to her, she grew frightened of us and started parking several spaces away. Now we have two guys who fight for the space more than anyone before them. Although we only have three weeks left as their neighbors, we have a lot of loading to do. Most of our packing (and unpacking) for this trip had to happen in the intermittent lakebed because they need to park 15 feet away from their front door.
Another thing that made packing horrible was the volume of stuff we had to take. Persephone’s sister is a bit of a clotheshorse (like Lenin was a bit of a radical) and has amassed a collection of children’s clothing not seen this side of Children’s Place factory explosion. Since she only has one daughter, she has been lending girl clothes to us as Crazy Jane’s been growing up. After nearly seven years of it, several boxes of it were on our hands. Persephone asked if we should move them with us in case we have another girl, or if she could sell them on eBay for her sister, possibly keeping some of the money for her troubles. Instead, her sister wanted them all back so she could give them away to friends. Therefore, the entire roof container was filled with borrowed girl clothes to return, so much so that, when tightening the straps, one of the clasps broke.