What an utterly crappy Sunday we had. First of all, it was raining, and I overslept ( though, The Hub feels that it is not really possible for me to "oversleep". His theory is that any time I actually am asleep he ought to let me sleep since I have such bad insomnia. Thus if I ask him to wake me up for something he considers "optional", like church, he often "forgets"). Then, the minute I got up, I had a huge asthma attack, which upset the dog terribly. I think he felt that he had been "sleeping on the job", that he didn't detect me wheezing during the night. So I had to figure out how to take my rescue inhaler while calming a 175lb mastiff, who really truly believes that, if he could just lick my lips and throat when all this was going on, I'd be cured....

The Hub brought me a cup of tea and I lay in bed sort of rattling and wheezing for an hour while flipping through a Glamour magazine. Did you know that you can create a virtual model of yourself and have it go around the internet and try on clothes for you? And it really did look like me, except for the hair. Nothing looks like my actual hair. And that's a good thing.

Anyway, it occured to me that I had to make an appetizer to take to the family dinner which was at my brother's house. I really wanted to go and see his new furniture. Plus, other members of the family had invited us to come to their beach house next month, and I thought it would be terribly rude to skip the "organizational meeting" about that...but I might as well have taken a Banaca Blast for all the good my inhaler did me. I staggered around, rumaging through cupboards for something promising but there was no luck. Finally, I called my sister-in-law and told her I was going to bail.

After awhile, it seemed like I felt better, so I decided to go by the market and pick something up and also pick up my schedule. The Hub drove, we stopped by there...and naturally they had scheduled me to work during the only times I had told them I could not work! No word of a lie, I had a 45 minute discussion with this dude about my availability.

"I don't have a very good memory" he said, by way of an explanation.

"You'd better write down your availability" said the cashier supervisor looking at me in disgust.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I thought you still had the one I filled out with my application, and the other one I filled out yesterday." I said innocently

She looked at the floor then walked off. "We have to send those in to corporate." he said.

"Okay, that makes sense. Here, I'll write it out for you again."

That's got to be a record for me making an enemy at work: I haven't even freaking started the job yet! But how many people do they really have in there who are applying for part-time work at almost minimum wage who don't have any other kind of job or obligation?! Oh well, I figure I'll just show up on Tuesday, take training, and if this woman still finds me objectionable that'll have to be her problem.

Finally, cheese and crackers in hand, I made it back out to the jeep. We drove in to Pennsylvania and promptly got hopelessly lost. There followed an argument about getting lost/ going to the beach/ me taking on the supermarket job/ whose job it is to feed the dog/ why nobody ever brings the laundry up from downstairs/ whose job it is to feed the fish/who broke the vacuum cleaner/whether or not getting a food grinder attachment for the kitchenaid mixer has anything to do with my father/ why the cat hasn't been fixed ( and whose job it is to feed her, while we're at it)/ why the screen door is broken/ and Bob, who is the guy who broke up his relationship with his first wife. He's also dead. Suffice it to say that this was a long drawn out, and ultimately pointless argument that was probably about something else anyway.

Next time we can argue about whose fault it is that the cheese melted.

Anyway, we finally found our way back to Frederick and made up. We hadn't had any lunch and we were starving so we stopped at the first place we saw, which was The Red Horse Restaurant. "A Frederick tradition for 35 years" the sign said. Inside, it looked like nothing had changed in 35 years!

The Red Horse Inn used to be my brothers and my favorite landmark on the trip to Cumberland to visit Gram and Pop-Pop. Not only did it have a huge bright red horse out front, there was also one on the roof of the inn! The inn is now a Comfort Inn, but they kept the horse on the roof.

Naturally, the restaurant was way too pricey for us, but we were too hungry ( and too wary of getting into another quarrell) to care. So we just sat down under the wagon wheel chandeliers with the flickering orange glow electric candles, shut up and looked at the menu. Lots and lots of steak. Seafood = crabcakes, lobster tails, and stuffed shrimp. There was a basket of crackers on the table, with real butter and a "cheese product".

"This is really good." The Hub said, munching, "What is it?"

I leaned over and whispered in his ear, "I'm pretty sure it's Cheese Whiz"

The waiter brought out bread. Salads, almost entirely iceberg lettuce, were served with the meal. You could tell that dressing "on the side" was a new thing for these folks. I'm pretty sure they never heard of the Atkins diet...or indeed any diet. I'm fairly convinced that this was a place where, if you said you were a vegetarian they would hear "communist". Not only was it one of those places I always wanted to visit when I was a kid, it turned out to be one of those places unchanged SINCE I was a kid.

On the way home, we stopped at the market to try to find an automatic cat feeder. The Hub fed the dog. I fed the fish. We threw the cheese out.