I wanted to share some more of my expereince in going on a short vacation with my wife, her brother, her friend (Dee for difficult) and myself at the beach over a long weekend.  For those who have not read my already leangthy account of my wife's freind (I am calling Dee)...you can go and look up my recent post that I made that gives more details of this person and what I observed about her (and the problems we all faced with her) while we were all staying together and communing so to speak and just trying to get along. 

I just spoke to my wife about our experience and she enlightened me on a part that I had not been privy to until now.  I thought this was so telling that it would be a good case in point in how sometimes bizzarre and irrational behavior does have a source or reason for it if you can trace it back to it's source.  Here's what happened at this particular juncture  (there were many of these but this one was the strangest one of all)

So...it was the last evening of our stay and the weather was beautiful and what sounded a perfect compliment to our stay was to start a fire outside and roast hot dogs, have some beer/wine and watch the sunset over the water.  I scrounged around and found one metal devise made specifically for this purpose that my sister and her husband had avaiable by the fire pit (their house is on the beach...nice! ) As I was building the fire....my wife and Dee helped prepare eveything inside and and bringing it out for us all to enjoy.  Going back to the hot dog scure thingy.  This was as basic as it gets......a piece of wire twisted together until it came to the end where it terminated forming a fork with two prongs about 6" long each, with a wooden handle on it.  It doesn't get more basic than that.  As I built the fire with my wifes brother, I told him the one thing I didn't want to do was sit and cook two hot dogs at a time instead of trying to cook them all at once so we could all sit down together and watch the sunset and eat.  He agreed especially since we were the ones in charge of fire and dogs.  No problem.  I found a wire coat hanger inside and formed another hot dog thingy to put more dogs on and as it turned out....we were able to cook an entire pack all at once by laying the dogs sideways (perpendicular) to the forks and stack them along side of each other  (4 dogs per thingy).  That was the plan at least but we ran into a problem with this.  When I went inside to get the dogs to cook....I found the first thingy with two dogs on it with them running side by side ( parrallel to the prongs)  one dog per prong that is.... with the prong running the entire length of each dog.  The ladies were off in another room so I quickly grabbed the two that were there and the rest of them and proceeded back outside to do the dirty work.  Actually....my wifes brother M and I were having fun making the fire, joking around and drinking a couple beers.  This is what you do at the beach right?

So now, here we are.....sitting there getting ready to cook and Dee comes out to see what we are doing.  She imediately starts telling us that this is not the way you do it ( you stupid men...sheeesh!)  Cleary, she had been the one who put the two dogs on running legnthwise to the thingy and we had them running the other way and stacked all together.  I wasn't about to get into it with her and tell her that we didn't want to stand and cook two at a time while they sat there eating....I already knew better and so did M.  But here's the deal.....I've been camping and cooking hot dogs on fires since I was a little kid.  This is cave man technology.....fire, meat, good.  There is hardly any way you can screw this up aside from completely losing your dog off your stick, fork, wire, enlongated rock...or any other devise you can find that allows you to do the same thing without burning your hands to do it.  Nothing outside of dropping your dog into the fire and not retrieving back out fast enough before your hot dog completely burns to ash is going to make any difference to how it tastes.....all smokey and fire roasted and all.  I don't even mind a bit of black charr on the outside unless it's completely black and burned over the entire surface.  It's all good and part of cooking on an open flame made from drift wood at the beach.  Nothing wrong with a little "trail spice" added for good measure. (dirt,ash and or sand)  In this case however.....I was cognizant of the fact the "trail spice" would probably be frowned upon in this particular crowd.....I was way ahead of the curve in that department plus.....we actually had authentic actual hot dog thingies to work with.  This was luxery at it's finest! lol

So as Dee stood there telling us how this was all wrong and I told her "No....it will be just fine....trust us on that much will you?"  She turned around and marche inside (the part that I didn't know about) and preceeded to tell my wife how we were doing it all wrong and how the dogs were going to be cold in the middle and burnt on the outside and she was goind to have to recook hers the right way after we were done.  My wife apparently did not appear to be too fazed by what we were doing and didn't seem to care about Dee's concerns.  Now Dee comes back outside to us as we were about to apply the dogs to the fire we had made that had nice coals going and the sun was just about to start going down.  Without saying anything other than mumbling about how she was going to have to recook hers....she reached out and tried to grab the hot dog thingy (and the dogs) away from M as he was standing there next to her.  He pulled his hand away and prevented her from doing this.  I ignored this and started cooking my dogs.  A moment went by and she did it again....reaching and grabbing at M's thingy and M did the same things again and told her to but out....."we've got it handled."  Dee remained and watched intently as the two us began the process of cooking our dogs and turning them while Dee hovered over us in silence.  In my passive aggressive way.....I even stuck the dogs into the fire coals a couple of times and screamed as if the dogs were being burnt to death.  At least it was funny to M.....Dee wasn't laughing but did tell me not to do that again.  I figured I wouldn't presh my luck and just ignored her some more.  Eventually.....she left M and I to do the rest of the cooking but not before she told us not to charr hers and burn the outsides for the third or fourth time duing this process before she felst it was safe to leave the cave men alone to finish the process.  M looked at me and said....."since when do you cook hot dogs on an open flame without getting them a little black around the edges?  That's the best part of doing it this way.....they get all smokey and charred."  I told him I agreed with his take on it but in this case...."we should probably try our best not to burn them especially since we had proffessioanl hot dog thingies to use instead of sticks of wood like I have used the other 1,000 times I cooked hot dogs outside on a fire."  We both laughed and were relieved that our cooking supervisor had found something better to do. lol

As it turned out....the dogs came out about as good as a hot dog can get.....they were hot all the way through and not burned on the outside.  What more can you ask for right?  As we were all sitting there enjoying the sunset and eating our food, Dee gets up and goes inside.  I didn't realize why until my wife told me just this morning.  Apparently...Dee took her hot dog and put it into the micro wave despite the fact that we all agreed that they were all hot to the point of having to cool just a bit before we could take the first bite and stop spitting before we did.  This was so bizzarre even for my wife the control freak. lol  My wife had even said to me that the dogs were cooked as perfect as one could get as far as she was concerned and she is as picky a customer when it comes to food as you could find.  We both were looking at each other going .....what the hell?  That's when I said " yeah...they ought to incude hot dogs to the saying that it's close enough for horse shoes and handgrenades as far as being good enough to eat.

So tying this in with the other things I do know about Dee in a compasionate way.  She was raised by a single mother who ran both of her husband away.  Apparently...her mother use to tell her how stupid she was and criticize her constantly growing up.  Nothing was ever good enough and she could never get any approval from her for anything she did.  Dee is an articualte intelligent woman by all regards and has a moutain of education and background to go along with it.  That doesn't preclude a person from being in denial, OCD, self centerd (probably NPD) and completely controlling in every way. She also lives alone and appears to have repeated the sins of her mother in the same way from the sound of it.....as these things can tend to go at times.

This whole epidsode reminds me of a really good accounting of a man telling a story to his therapist (a true story)  Apperently....the man was talking alone with his therapist about his wife being extremely rigid and problematic and very controlling in her ways.  Whenever his wife cooked ham, she would cut the entire end off before she cooked it.  The man was curious about this but wasn't about to question his wifes motives since his past expereince with this was part of why he was there in therapy together with his wife even though his wife had told him that this was the way my mother did it.

  So, on one occassion....he had the opportunity to ask his wife;s mother why she cut the end off the ham when she cooked it.  His mother in law told him because that was the way my mother did it.  In this particualr family....his wifes grandmother was still alive and he later had the opportunity to ask her "why do you cut the end off the ham when you cook it?"  The grandmother told him it was because she only had one baking pan that was too small to fit a whole ham into.  And yet......no one ever seemed to question this for nearly two generations before even though it was a strange things to do that made little to no sense for no apparent reason what so ever?

And they say I'm a little wierd sometimes?  lol

J