Mission Impractical

Sunday afternoon, we were eating lunch before going to the cinema… and Daughter Dearest’s phone rang. Her (now ex-)boyfriend Sasquatch has another friend (call him Ananias, he’s not a liar but you’ll understand shortly) whose dad is a USDA Prime Asshole™. For reasons unnecessary to detail here, he decided to eject both Ananias and his wife (i.e. Ananias’s mom) from the premises. He was working Sunday, and told them to be out before he returned home. As I understand it, this is not the first such eviction notice; she would basically beg him into changing his mind. But Ananias had as much as he could take a while ago, and this particular weekend his mom felt the same way. She grabbed her essentials and bailed to a hotel, leaving Ananias to pack up his stuff. He called Sasquatch, who called Daughter Dearest, who asked me if I would also help. Having heard about this guy before, I figured it was more important than sitting on my butt in a theater… but DD and I both told him that we’d help him move out, but not move back.

So we went home, grabbed a pickup, and Daughter Dearest navigated while I drove. We arrived in good order, seeing Sasquatch and a very young-looking female whom I didn’t recognize (and feared that it was one of Sasquatch’s not so wonderful female acquaintances)… she turned out to be a neighbor and the same age as DD, Sasquatch, and Ananias. His girlfriend Saphira was also there — she’s black, another thing that Ananias’s dad doesn’t like (welcome to Planet Georgia, where it’s still 1957 in what passes for the minds of the pod people), and six months pregnant. However, she barely has a belly bump, where Snippet looks like she swallowed a basketball… but I digress. Ananias’s room was just off the garage, and we went in and found that he’d barely started — and they were all mostly standing around. DD and I grumbled, got everyone grabbing clothes on hangers, and stashing them behind the seats in the truck. I sent Ananias upstairs for garbage bags, and stuffed all his loose clothes in them. I had to break up a smoochie session that looked like it was going to turn into something a bit more than smoochie: “You get started,” I said, brandishing my smellphone, “and I’ll get pictures.”

“For blackmail?” Sephira grinned.

“Nope, I’ll just put ’em online.” There were no more smoochie sessions after that.

Less than half an hour later, we’d filled the truck with boxes and bags and had lots more to go — including a dog pen and two large dogs. We sent DD and Sasquatch to his place to unload stuff in their shed, and began loading boxes in the two available cars (one for Ananias, one for Saphira). I did my best to keep things moving; Ananias expected his dad home at 7 but I figured it being a holiday weekend, he could leave early and have little traffic, and I wanted us to be loaded and gone by 6. At one point, Sephira picked up a box that was much too heavy for her, and nearly hurt herself — I fussed at her about that, and I’d been reminding all the kids to lift with their legs anyway, then told her to stick to smaller boxes. Well before the truck returned, we had everything but the dogs and their pen in the cars. The neighbor girl (who had also been helping with lighter boxes) was in a chatty mood, so I talked with her for a while. I had thought she was maybe 13 or 14, complete with acne and a rather flat chest, but she said she had been in school with Ananias and was now at Piedmont (Daughter Dearest considered going there before settling on Reinhardt)… so she was also 19 or 20. I wondered if we should bring her with us, but her dad was home so I figured she’d be safe enough from any Wrath of Asshole.

We started breaking down the dog pen shortly before DD returned with the truck. As we were loading the panels into the back, someone asked, “how are we going to move the dogs?”

“One dog in each car,” DD suggested. I thought that was a great idea, especially since it was now past 5 and I was getting really antsy about the time. With the panels loaded and bungee’d as best as we could manage, DD and I got rolling and told the rest of them to do the same. As we were rolling, DD called to see how the rest of them were progressing, then hung up in disgust. “Sasquatch’s mom is coming with her Explorer to get the dogs,” she said. “There wasn’t enough room for them and Sasquatch in the cars.” Oh, great. The truck notwithstanding, if DD and I hadn’t been there to get them moving, they would probably have all been there at 7. Now they have to start throwing wrenches. What. Ever. We got to Sasquatch’s place without incident — I stopped in town to check the bungees, and even the rotten one was holding up fine — then we put the pen together (finger-tightening the brackets) while waiting for the rest of them to arrive. And arrive they did… not as soon as I’d have liked, but soon enough.

I would like to have been a fly on the wall, though, when Ananias’s dad got back to find his family cleared out as requested. Who is he going to push around now?