Airline Travel

 Back in the day, airline travel used to be kind of fun.  Now it SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I dread making plans to fly anywhere - even if it's first class, which is what the coach experience used to be.  

September - November are my super busy travel months for work.  Covid gave me a respite for a couple of years.  Now the Covid excuse for not wanting to see anybody is wearing thin, and people feel the need to jump up and down to draw attention to themselves; therefore, demanding my attention,  and blathering on and on how important and vital they are while holding us all hostage to their self-import grandstanding.  

I'm liking my hobbit hole better and better. 

Weddings, Weddings, Weddings

 The post-COVID eruption of pent up wedding plans is happening.  I forgot to blog about the one we went to recently where the couple had been living together for 8 years, and got married a couple of years ago.  Granted, because of COVID, they had a smaller wedding.  Now they went and re-enacted the wedding and went all out for it.  It was a huge affair and everything was done on a grand scale.  

The vibe just was not the same.  The energy was flat.  All the fancy planning did not make up for the ho-hum attitude of everyone there.  Everything felt forced.  The energy emitted by the wedding party and guests alike was, "What is all the fuss for?  They've been living together for years and they are already married.  Can we just skip this?  It all seems so artificial like we are all playing dress up."

The only giddy people were the bride, groom, and parents.  

I'm going to give the table we were seated at credit.  Nobody was a wet blanket and if they were feeling indifferent about the event they kept it to themselves. 

Cambodian Wedding

 Today was a first.  It's a long, drawn out story how we got invited to a wedding where the groom, who is a generations deep west Sonoma County Italian-Irish Catholic from Occidental, married a first-generation immigrant girl from Cambodia.  

No.  She was not a mail order bride.  How the bride and her family got to the United States is a story all unto itself.  Cambodia was a place they escaped from.  It's not a pretty story.

The bride and groom met while they were both in high school.  They were both in band class. 

It was very interesting and educational how they blended the two cultures together.  For starters, the groom's family is your typical west-county-red-neck-cowboy-clan.  Ford pickups with gun racks and NRA stickers is par for the course with the groom's family.  They also showed up in jeans, boots, and cowboy hats.  This is NOT a slam against the groom's family.  My own family resembles them quite a bit.  I understand them completely.  

The bride's family is from Cambodia.  Many of them did not speak English.  I have to admit that I am totally ignorant of Cambodian wedding traditions.  I got schooled.  For starters, Cambodian weddings have very ornate wedding clothing.  They change their clothes several times throughout the evening.  It was very interesting to see the red necks don traditional Cambodian dress.  It was clumsy but cute.  The Cambodian wedding garb was ill-fitting as Asian men are much smaller in stature than their American counterparts.  The groom's family of white men of European decent were busting out of their Cambodian shirts - literally.  The white honkeys were good sports, but openly admitted they felt like sausages and could not wait to get into clothing that fitted more loosely was more comfortable.

Then it was the Cambodian tradition of the couple coming around to each table.  The guests have either a red or a white envelope.  There is a little game each table plays with the bride and groom before the guests hand over the envelope, which is a cash gift for the couple.  

The dancing was also interesting.  The Cambodians all dance in a circle with very distinctive flicks of their wrists and hands.  It took me NO TIME to figure it out and join right in.  At first I thought, WTF are they doing?  After I studied for a few minutes, I got the gist of it and blended in on the dance floor. 

Then there were the party favors.  The mother of the groom is also a beekeeper, so each person got a little jar of organic Sonoma County honey.  The bride's Cambodian family came around with an item I was not sure of.  I openly admitted I was completely ignorant of Cambodian wedding customs - and that I was open to being educated on their culture.  A picture of the favor is below.  I asked about the meaning of the favor as I truly wanted to understand.  A VERY Cambodian lady with eyes of somebody who was so proud to share her culture with a dumb-ass white woman like myself told me to hang it from my rear-view mirror in my car.  I will never forget the look of pride in her eyes as she told me about Cambodian wedding customs.  

For me, it was an honor to be invited to such a diverse celebration of cultures.  Nobody would ever put several-generations-deep-west-county-red-necks with first generation Cambodian immigrants, but it worked.  Kudos.  What a blend.  

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids

 I'm a child of the 70's - teenager of the 80's.  Back in the day, Saturday morning cartoons were everything.  I recall setting my alarm clock for 7:00 AM to get downstairs before any of my siblings commandeered the television.  Funny.  Getting out of bed during the week to go to school did not elicit the joy of Saturday morning cartoons.  

Something jumped out of my subconscious memory.  There used to be a cartoon called Fat Albert.  The voice was Bill Cosby.  I don't know which causes more controversy:  The fact that there used to be a cartoon called Fat Albert that featured an obese black guy (the woke police would go nuts today); or, the fact that the cartoon was Bill Cosby's creation (a much beloved famous, black comedian who was accused of multiple accounts of sexual misconduct). 

Cracker Box Palace

I have soooo many things to blog about.  Quite frankly, I'm too tired to sort out all my emotions I'm feeling.  I have an upcoming trip to Minnesota in a couple of weeks.  It will be the first time where Dad will not be at the door to greet me when I get there.  I know I will cry.

To complicate things, my mother is being coy about spreading my dad's ashes.  The thought was to spread them at dad's deer stand up north, which was his happy place.  If you don't know what a deer stand is, I can't help you.  Just know that it is a sacred place for hunters.

Because I'm the banished daughter, I'm the last to know anything if anything at all.  I'm now getting questions from my dad's sisters as they also want to participate in spreading my dad's ashes at his hunting stand and my one aunt wanted to host a little get together at her cabin on the lake afterwards.

My mother said no.  She does not want any gatherings.

WTF?????????  Really??????  The only two remaining siblings of my father's are my dad's sisters who desperately want to participate in spreading dad's ashes??? Any my mom wants to shut them out?  

I'm devastated.  I have not had the chance to mourn my dad and having family around to acknowledge him would have been comforting and healing, at least for me.  I know my dad's sisters feel the same way. .......spread dad's ashes at his happy deer stand place....honor him with some rituals....go back to my aunt's place at her cabin on the lake to gather together and remember dad. 

I have no choice but to retreat to complete fantasy land with George Harrison's Cracker Box Palace.  I hope they are expecting me.  It's either Cracker Box Palace or the Looney Bin.  Which would be less damaging on my resume?  

Disneyland

 My sister-in-law, daughter, niece, and I just spent 5 days in Southern California.  We stayed at a hotel that I used to stay at when the kids were little 30 years ago when we would take them to Disneyland.  The occasion was my niece's graduation from high school.  She did not want a party.  She wanted the four of us to road trip it to Disneyland.  

The last time I was at Disneyland was 15 years ago???? I can't remember exactly.  There are always things you can pretty much count on making the trek to SoCal:

1.  Horrendous wrecks on I-5 (because people drive like idiots);

2.  LA traffic;

3.  Being shocked at how expensive Disneyland is;

4.  Being shocked at how crowded Disneyland is despite the exorbitant cost;

5.  Walking 10-12 miles per day.

I could not understand the number of people on scooters in the park.  How do they ride the rides?  Most of them were so obese that their asses dripped off the sides of the scooter like icing down the side of a cake.  My sister-in-law and I had a joke about how many scooters with liquid, dripping asses hanging off the sides we spotted during the day.   

These were not handicapped people.  They tended to travel in packs with other liquid, dripping asses and they would take turns riding the scooter.  Oh, I just found the below image on somebody's Twitter account.  Yup.  I nailed it.  Fat people riding on scooters don't have to wait in line and run Disneyland. 

Once you see this, you can't un-see it.