A Hot Mess

So, my mother-in-law has a house out in the country, built during the Great Depression, covered in asbestos siding, lead paint, and 70 years of insect poisons. (Carpet cleaning? No, she's not uppity like that.) I'm not sure how my husband managed to grow up there and not grow an extra ear or something. Well, about ten or twelve years ago, when she married her second husband, she moved to his house and basically abandoned the old country house. The entire extended family now uses it as a storage building for crap we don't use but aren't willing to part with yet. (Dadgum spoiled Americans.)

My brother-in-law lives in a town about 45 minutes away. And he's about as crazy as a circus clown on crystal meth. He hordes, but he had to move a couple of weeks ago. To a smaller place. They moved what he needed & told my mother-in-law to have someone move the rest of his stuff. So my husband drove down there in our van, all of the seats removed, and packed it full of his brother's junk. The man had a wardrobe big enough for 4 people, and that was just what they left behind! Then the hubs took it all out to the country house and unloaded it all. It took like 6 hours.

Did his mom or brother thank him? Ummm, no.

His brother wasn't happy that he didn't have all his stuff. And my MIL wanted all the stuff brought to her house so she could sort through it. She wants to donate some, but she really wants to put most of it in her guest room so it's there when her son visits. Not because she's being nice, but because having two loonies under one roof is guaranteed to be too much fun. (And by "fun", I mean clinical insanity sprinkled with dangerous threats and loud fights.) His stuff distracts & calms him so they don't actually have to deal with each other.

Did I mention she didn't tell him where to take the stuff before he unloaded it all? The storage house seemed like the logical place.

So she started calling our house three times a day to fuss at him for not bringing the junk to her house. Every day. For 7 days straight. Saturday after he unloaded to Friday morning. In addition to all her random other calls. Because she has to tell me, tell him, and tell our voice mail in case we forget. And if I answer when she's intending to leave a message, she keeps calling back and tells me about random bullcrap (like her latest racist observations) until I stop answering.

He finally relented and told her he'd get what she wanted from the country house on Saturday when he was off work. So Friday, she got tired of waiting and went out there herself.

There's no power or water, so it's reeeeeally hot in that house. She got a few things, then decided it was too hot, she'd just let the hubs get the stuff as planned.... after she did one last thing.

Once she got home, she called me (again, for the 3rd time that day, and it was just 10:30am) to tell me she'd only gotten a few shirts. It was too hot. And she had to use the toilet. In a house with no running water.

So she took a dump and left it in the 110 degree house. Then she called me to tell my husband  (and I'm quoting exactly here), "to take a bucket to flush it. There's a big mess."

Seriously. Have you ever gotten a phone call telling you to go flush someone else's big hot mess for them? That's why she left, I bet. She didn't want to smell it. The heat was secondary.

And, God love him, he did it. He rolled his eyes, filled a bucket, went & flushed her giant poo, and moved much of his brother's junk to her house.

And she still didn't thank him.