National Lampoon's Xmas Holiday Reunion
Dec. 29th, 2017 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrj(I've kind of gotten out of the habit of posting links here to the blog on my website. I write lots of interesting stuff there. You should follow it. There's an RSS feed here at Dreamwidth--see the pinned post at the top of my feed.)
If you ever want to make a darkly comedic movie about a winter holiday family get-together, there is some useful starting material in the recent Jones Family adventures. The basic plan: we all congregate at Randy & Lisa's place in Maine, which has the dual advantages of having lots of space and providing appropriate winter scenery--especially when Christmas Day delivers a blizzard. So the plans were for eight of us to hang around for most of a week, with a shorter visit from my nephew and his lovely girlfriend (who had multiple family obligations to tour through) and a slightly longer visit by my dad and Earl (who drove out and wanted to wait until after NYE to get back on the road). A fairly standard plan for the Joneses, with a sufficient supply of snacks, great food (Randy does some kick-ass things with large chunks of meat), lots of tabletop games, and whatnot.
The first inkling of disaster came when the Keurig machine in the kitchen inexplicably crapped out. Like terriers with a tattered scrap of chew-toy, after online customer assistance was of no avail, the machine was disassembled on the kitchen table to attempt to diagnose the problem. (There was some acknowledgement from the beginning that successful reassembly would be unlikely even it the problem was diagnosed.) But fortunately there was a second coffee maker in the upstairs office, so consequences were not dire.
The second inkling of disaster came when the kitchen sink--which evidently had been draining sluggishly for some time--decided to stop draining entirely. Disassembly of the sink piping itself found no assignable root cause. The plumbers came the next day (a Christmas miracle!) and after two diagnostic visits identified a collapsed drain line under the concrete slab in the basement.
Ah, but fear not! The kitchen drain line was a separate connection to the sewer because that part of the house was an add-on, so the collapsed line was located upstream of where it joined the other outlets of the house plumbing. So there was no possibility at all that the drain issues would spread to result in raw sewage backing up into the basement from eight people's occupation of the house, right?
That would be: wrong.
Whatever was going on in the sewer lines, the initial kitchen sink prohibition was expanded to any and all use of drains. So now we have eight people in a house with no functioning plumbing and raw sewage in the basement. Water can be drawn from the taps but not put down the drains. Cooking can be done, but dish washing is out. Bathing is right out. I suppose that, in theory, the male members of the household had the option of using the woods back behind the garage for certain functions, but there was a definite chance of frostbite involved.
Some rapid (perhaps even precipitous) executive decisions were made. The nephew+girlfriend relocated their base of operations to one of their other local family obligations. Two nearby hotel rooms were rented. And the remaining stay involved a great deal of shuttling back and forth between Randy's house and the hotel, more restaurant meals than anyone had intended, and--in the end--the curtailment of the visit for those whose travel plans did not involve nonrefundable airline tickets. Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, the microwave also decided to go on strike.
But presents were opened, Settlers of Catan was played, a fabulous roast was served, snow was enjoyed, and in a year or two (or three, or four) we will all look back on this as one of the amusing family stories. For now, I'm still recovering from the mental exhaustion of turning lemons into lemonade. (Oh, and I'd somehow gotten the flight dates confused when I booked to match Seth's flights, so I'd told work that I'd be back yesterday. And I was...if "back yesterday" includes driving in to work at 3pm after dropping off my suitcase and picking up the car at home.) I'm sure we'll all laugh about this some day. I keep telling myself that.
If you ever want to make a darkly comedic movie about a winter holiday family get-together, there is some useful starting material in the recent Jones Family adventures. The basic plan: we all congregate at Randy & Lisa's place in Maine, which has the dual advantages of having lots of space and providing appropriate winter scenery--especially when Christmas Day delivers a blizzard. So the plans were for eight of us to hang around for most of a week, with a shorter visit from my nephew and his lovely girlfriend (who had multiple family obligations to tour through) and a slightly longer visit by my dad and Earl (who drove out and wanted to wait until after NYE to get back on the road). A fairly standard plan for the Joneses, with a sufficient supply of snacks, great food (Randy does some kick-ass things with large chunks of meat), lots of tabletop games, and whatnot.
The first inkling of disaster came when the Keurig machine in the kitchen inexplicably crapped out. Like terriers with a tattered scrap of chew-toy, after online customer assistance was of no avail, the machine was disassembled on the kitchen table to attempt to diagnose the problem. (There was some acknowledgement from the beginning that successful reassembly would be unlikely even it the problem was diagnosed.) But fortunately there was a second coffee maker in the upstairs office, so consequences were not dire.
The second inkling of disaster came when the kitchen sink--which evidently had been draining sluggishly for some time--decided to stop draining entirely. Disassembly of the sink piping itself found no assignable root cause. The plumbers came the next day (a Christmas miracle!) and after two diagnostic visits identified a collapsed drain line under the concrete slab in the basement.
Ah, but fear not! The kitchen drain line was a separate connection to the sewer because that part of the house was an add-on, so the collapsed line was located upstream of where it joined the other outlets of the house plumbing. So there was no possibility at all that the drain issues would spread to result in raw sewage backing up into the basement from eight people's occupation of the house, right?
That would be: wrong.
Whatever was going on in the sewer lines, the initial kitchen sink prohibition was expanded to any and all use of drains. So now we have eight people in a house with no functioning plumbing and raw sewage in the basement. Water can be drawn from the taps but not put down the drains. Cooking can be done, but dish washing is out. Bathing is right out. I suppose that, in theory, the male members of the household had the option of using the woods back behind the garage for certain functions, but there was a definite chance of frostbite involved.
Some rapid (perhaps even precipitous) executive decisions were made. The nephew+girlfriend relocated their base of operations to one of their other local family obligations. Two nearby hotel rooms were rented. And the remaining stay involved a great deal of shuttling back and forth between Randy's house and the hotel, more restaurant meals than anyone had intended, and--in the end--the curtailment of the visit for those whose travel plans did not involve nonrefundable airline tickets. Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, the microwave also decided to go on strike.
But presents were opened, Settlers of Catan was played, a fabulous roast was served, snow was enjoyed, and in a year or two (or three, or four) we will all look back on this as one of the amusing family stories. For now, I'm still recovering from the mental exhaustion of turning lemons into lemonade. (Oh, and I'd somehow gotten the flight dates confused when I booked to match Seth's flights, so I'd told work that I'd be back yesterday. And I was...if "back yesterday" includes driving in to work at 3pm after dropping off my suitcase and picking up the car at home.) I'm sure we'll all laugh about this some day. I keep telling myself that.
