Thanksgiving Breakdown II

Part of my motivation for spending Thanksgiving with my mom in her Norwegian husband's home was to help her set up her first real computer. A Macbook that my Mac-dizzy sis and her husband had ordered for her.

For those not in the know, my mother's Norwegian husband is an old fuddy-duddy she met while ballroom dancing about a decade ago, perhaps. They were just dating forever but officially tied the knot (name-change and everything) about a year or two ago.

I've never been the biggest fan of "Arne" (ARR-neh). He is a cartoonishly grumpy old man who always seems to be complaining.

When the Time Warner guy was in and out of the house trying to set up the cable modem, Arne kept bitching about how "this idiot keeps tracking his dirty shoes on the carpet!".

The technician was having some difficulty setting up the Macbook because he rarely ever saw them. "Most people around here have PCs." (And YES, the operating systems are in fact different enough such that the Mac OS is NOT FUCKING INTUITIVE, thank you EVER so much, you Apple-Cultists! Say it till you're blue in the face, it won't fucking make it so.)

Arne hovered unhelpfully in the background, occasionally spouting off dumb queries. ("Is it working yet?") When the tech was finally done, Arne held him up at the door while he bitched about tv commercials. ("There are too many commercials on tv! We're paying good money for these channels, they should be paying US to watch them!") To the Time Warner cable guy, he's telling this. As if this guy was going to drive back to Time Warner HQ and speak to the Grand Wizard of Television about decreasing the amount of commercials on television to fucking placate this old Norwegian fuck up in Goshen!!!

Then I helped my mom cook the Thanksgiving feast...

I mashed these...

The stuffing, I improvised from scratch, thanks. It had apples and sausage in it. Big hit among the extended family of Norwegian hoople-heads who trampled in.

Mom carving up the roast beast...

While we were waiting for company to arrive, Arne tried to have a chat with me...

ARNE
Have you seen Reli... Relij... Religulous...?

MALICE
(surprised at the contemporary reference)
No, I haven't, but it looked interesting. Do you like Bill Maher?

ARNE
Not particularly but I think... people who are super religious are funny. Like deez Muslims who blow themselves up. I bet that's not part of their religion but they just take it too far!

MALICE
Extremists...

ARNE
You know I got nothing against Muslims. Like I got nothing against gays. So long as they leave me alone. When I was on my first marriage, we went on our honeymoon in St. Thomas and there was this hotel nearby that was filled with these gays. This one guy kept trying to talk to me even though I was married and he knew that I was married! He just kept following me!

[Please understand that I am not making this up. This may not be verbatim but this is the precise trajectory of the conversation: Bill Maher, religious extremists, gay guy hitting on him. Zero transition.]

Thanksgiving night, I tried my best to show my mother some of the fun things she could do with the internet. Here she is watching some YOUTUBE videos of Tina Turner and Cher appearing on OPRAH. Good times, good times...

Here's me and mom video-chatting with my sister's cats in Oregon. HAAAAY!