I’m just sitting down to recap:
Well, my first annoyance was, “Who has a frigging cookout at 11AM on a Saturday?”
We’d have had to have left the house at 9:30AM to make that time, so…no breakfast, then? We do
not skip weekend breakfasts for anyone or anything (“Hold your horses there, Jesus, the bacon’s just about done…can you do your apocalypse thing in, say, an hour? There’s a good fellow!”) - it’s our favorite meal!
I let them know we wouldn’t be there until 12:30PM-1PM, so of course, that meant when we’d arrived, all the food had been picked over and had been sitting out and gotten runny, and he’d, for whatever reason, had grilled all the burgers, brats, and dogs in one massive grilling, so all of that was cold and old.
That made me rushed to get over there, and then super-rushed to try and fix ourselves plates while things were halfway edible, plus get our stuff set out, so yes, I was a bit irritated at the whole thing, but not my house, not my rules.
Visiting went fine, though my sister can be a lot to take in - one brother, Dean, commented that he’d had to turn his hearing aid down to its minimum because she was so loud and…enthusiastic with everything. She really can’t help it, no more than any of us can change our personalities much, but she’s a lot to put up with, and with all her brothers there, she was really overstimulated, sort of like one of those little tree monkeys who’d just found a gallon of coffee, a bucket of speed, and five pounds of cocaine.
All that means it really wasn’t much of a visit - we got there about 12:45PM, and by 3PM, we’d already left and headed up to look in on my folks, which (and yes, I know it sounds bad) is pointless, because they don’t know me, and they’re not really the same people I knew, so I’m not getting much out of it and (more importantly) neither are they. Dad slept the entire time, and it was pretty obvious Mom found us to be intrusive, in a “Who are these people and why are they in my room?” way - obviously, that’s where I get my social anxieties from.
One funny bit - we’d fixed them a plate of some things from the cookout, and I had to walk back down to one of the entertaining rooms to get some plastic forks, which meant going through the day room, where a lot of the residents were sleeping or watching TV.
“Young man, young man,” one very aged woman warbled as I walked past, “Kin y’all hep me?”
“Sure, whaddya need?”
“Wheel me ‘way from ‘ese people, they all’re hurtin’ mah feelin’s!”
“Well, that’s no good, here we go…,” and I pushed further out by the nurses’ station.
“How’s that?”
“Thank ya, honey, it’s allllllll right. ‘Em’uns was scarin’ me somethin’ awful!”
That was about it.
has a 
