Ted Williams was the last major leaguer to bat .400 over an entire season. Batting 400 is impressive unless it’s the success rate in acquiring sister and brother in laws. I’m two out of five, and the catastrophe that is my siblings choices (and one of Shirley’s sisters) impacts me more than I ever could have imagined. Granted, had my brother and sister listened to me when I told them they were making a huge mistake (I’m not the type of guy who sits back and lets shit go wrong without trying to intervene) I could be batting 800 (there’s no way I was talking Shirley’s sister out of marrying her husband). Regardless, my brother came home this weekend from Seattle with his Debbie Downer of a wife and I realized why they don’t typically come back to Michigan together, because she’s a bitch and she can’t stand my brother, two things that don’t bode well for spending time together when visiting family members back home.

Where I am at right now, and some of you may know this some of you may not, is my mom has moved out of the house we moved to when I was in second grade and is living in my tv room on a hospital bed and the house has been sold. However, all of her shit is still there and I am tasked with getting it out of there prior to February 1. Since my brother was back from Seattle my other brother came up from Gary Indiana (yes, he lives in the butthole of Indiana) and the two of them along with my sister and I converged on the home of our youth (as well as when I was 30 and lost my job and had to move back in with my folks and share a room with my brother Andy, needless that was the low point, I had nowhere to go but up). My mom maybe the only organized hoarder on the planet, she collects food from Big Lots, clothes from everywhere that isn’t fashionable, as well as antiques and nick knacks. The good news is due to the fact that the house has two working toilets there were no five gallon buckets with human shit in them to dispose of. Every room, every closet, every cupboard was filled with something, and 99% of the time that something had absolutely no value. We moved most of it into the garage which from there it will be thrown into a roll off to be taken to the dump. As we emptied the various crevices of the house it became obvious we weren’t eradicating the home of everything that day and that the smart move would be to just make it a one step process for everything still in the house and get a roll off to place in the driveway.

My mom actually had a pioneer satellite radio adapter in her “craft room” that had never been open. It would have been fun to call the number first of all to see if anyone answered and then screw with them and tell them you wanted to hook up your pioneer satellite radio. Eventually we decided to call it a day and headed over to my sister’s new house for dinner. Like I use to do when every single Jansma family get together was at my house, I smoked some meat, this time I did baby back ribs and they were fall off the bone delicious. Shirley, my kids, and my mom had been watching my sister’s brood (4 kids 5 and under) so she could help with the dismantling of my parent’s former house, even though she showed up two hours late and claimed she had been getting diapers. When we rolled in to her house all of the kids were making a movie and my brother’s kids were also there, my brother Jesse from Seattle has a five year old daughter and a one year old son and my brother Andy has a 9 month old daughter. My kids are 7 and 10 and were the creative minds behind the movie. Jesse’s wife, we will just call her eeyore, came storming into the room where we were watching football complaining that my kids kept using the word murder. This upset her for some reason, not sure why and I responded to her that their dad is a criminal defense attorney so what did she expect? She responded that she didn’t want her daughter going to daycare when they got back to Seattle and saying she was going to murder her daycare mates. She poked the bear and I told her that my kids were awful and this was how they were. The reality was that when I was a kid my friends and I constantly played games where we pretend killed one another, as well as real BB gun wars where we shot one another. My kids mentioning murder really wasn’t that big of a deal and if eeyore thought it was she was bringing it up to the wrong person. I’ll yell at other people’s kids, so obviously I don’t have a problem when other people yell at mine or reprimand them. So, she was free to do so without any brush back from me.

The next morning my brother Andy came over for breakfast with his family and when Eeyore finally appeared around 10am Shirley made the mistake of asking how she slept, “Not good, it’s just so loud in your basement, you can hear everything!” It couldn’t have been that bad, she slept in two hours longer than anyone else did. On top of that, since I have never slept in my basement, I was able to seek out a third party to determine if Eeyore’s claims were valid, Andy and his wife have slept in our basement dozens of times, and they said it is quite peaceful and they have never noticed any noise. My brother Jesse, who has to plan things behind his wife’s back so that he can just take off and do it and deal with the consequences later, made the mistake of telling her about a Sunday lunch he had planned with someone that Eeyore flipped out about. I had made plans to go watch football at a buddy’s bar with a few guys and that also pissed her off, knowing that my brother would be off having fun with out her even though she doesn’t particularly enjoy being around him but seems to still want him around to torment him and have him help her with their two kids.

On top of how exhausting it is to be around Eeyore, there’s also a somewhat complicated dynamic between my brother Jesse and I. We are quite competitive and even more competitive when competing against one another. I have broken countless tennis rackets playing him in tennis and we have gotten into a number of knock down drag out fights over such meaningful things as corn hole, washers, and racquetball. The competitive gene was not passed on to Aiden, but Parker is a fierce competitor (asshole) just like his dad and wants to win at everything. Lexi, Jesse’s daughter, is exactly the same the only difference is my brother goes out of his way to stoke her competitive spirit where as I try to find ways to curb Parker’s knowing if he stays on his current trajectory he may be even a bigger A-hole than I am. Eeyore set up an obstacle course in the kids playroom and Sunday morning I spent a chunk of it timing Parker and Lexi as they went through it with a spoon with a ping pong ball on it in their mouth. Parker nailed it and his times continued to improve as he went through the course. Lexi, who is five, didn’t have much luck getting all the way through the course but was determined to beat her older cousin. Strangely, I could feel her pain because I always want to beat my brother and since it’s winter right now all I had was board games. Qwirkle is a game of shapes and colors and you need to get all six shapes in row or all the shapes of one color in arrow to get a Qwirkle. My brother had never played and I ended up getting out to a commanding lead, but then he caught on and started getting intolerable after nailing a couple Qwirkle’s, my heart started pounding and my palms began to sweat. Was I going to blow what I thought was an insurmountable lead? Was I going to be the Detroit Lion’s of board games? I managed to put together enough points at the end to stave him off and was quiet in victory. The next night I beat him in another board game and was quiet in that victory. Unlike him, who is a complete loud mouth gloating dick when he wins, I keep my mouth shut for the most part in victory. However, when I lose that’s an entirely different story. We ended the night with a rematch in Qwirkle, and while it wasn’t ideal to lose to Shirley in Qwirkle I am glad she beat my brother so I didn’t have to hear him gloat.

I guess the good news is that they are now on their journey back to Seattle and I won’t have to see Eeyore for quite some time. She is the person who always goes worst case scenario with everything, the chances of Lexi murdering one of her classmates seemed pretty minuscule to me. The good news is, being 3,000 miles away keeps her from hearing some of the truly golden nuggets that come out of my kids mouths like the other week when Parker, who is 7 almost 8, asked Shirley and I what it looked like when animals had sex. “Well, Parker there’s this thing called doggy style……..”