Full house

The Boy came back last night. The half-empty nest has gone back to being a little crowded.

Events precipitating his return were just a little more dramatic than I'd expected. Big V has been checking his grades online, and he's doing OK in all his classes except for one. She got all huffy, made him sit down and do the homework for that class, with her breathing down his neck. Unfortunately, there wasn't that much to do for that class that evening, so he wrapped up before Big V got bored and walked away. She told him he needed to do more, he said that was all there is, so she decided to finish tossing his girlfriend out of the house.

He walked out with the girlfriend, and Big V grabbed him and pulled him back into the house. (How she did that is a question to answer... despite her moniker here, she isn't that big — and he is.) His temper, not the most amiable under normal circumstances, got away from him (again) and he punched a hole in an interior wall.

All this is going down while I'm on my way home from work, held up because I have to make a PDF of a manual before I could leave and this sucker has lots of bitmap graphics (meaning it takes over a half hour to build). After a couple of botched attempts and clearing some old files off the hard drive, I email the PDF to Mr. Anxiety Attack and get on my way. I'm supposed to meet the wife and Daughter Dearest at a local Mexican joint, but the wife was gone before I could get there (without telling anyone what was up, and forgetting to leave $$$ to pay for the chow).

So we had the four of us that make up the core family, plus Lobster, plus The Boy's girlfriend. She stayed with us last night, and probably will again tonight, but she knows she can't stay much longer than that. As big as FAR Manor is, it's kind of crowded for six adult-size people. So between trying to blast a PDF out at the last minute, and all the other stuff that was going on, I got kind of stressed out last night. Wife noticed it, and said, “I don't want you getting sick.”

“I doubt I will,” I said. “If I was going to get sick from stress, it would have been when we bought the house.”

“You did, don't you remember?” said she. “You got the shingles two weeks afterwards.”

Oh. Then she gave me a hard time when I wanted to get some milk to settle myself down and sleep. She probably thought I was going to head for the rum bottle. Nope... that's tonight!

But The Boy seems amenable, at least at the moment, to try counseling. We need to get to the bottom of what it is that's giving him a short fuse on a nuke.