Sorry it took so long for the words portion of my post. It has been so long that I thought it required an entirely new post instead of inserting new words into a 4 day old post.
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Well, we were "up-north" for a week, and it was fine. My wife and children had a blast and I was ok with the whole thing. I don't normally like the woods, or the out of doors, but I was really happy to see my kids laughing and having fun and I got to hang out with my best pal Eggs everyday (he lives in northern Michigan in the woods), so that was nice.
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We rented a cabin on a lake in northern Michigan and my wife's best friend and her family rented the cabin next to us. They have 2 kids relatively the same age as 2 of our kids, so that worked out great for all the kids.
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Aside from randomly running into my wife's best friend at my house sometimes when I come home for lunch, I really only see these people once a month when 4 couples get together for a monthly dinner party (all the wives know each other and are friends). So once a month, for about 6 hours, we hang out, and its always a decent time...but spending an entire week with them in relatively close quarters (their cabin was about 15 feet from ours) was a completely different story.
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First off, this couple is British. This has no bearing on me, but it does on this little story. The husband is a traveling salesman of sorts for an automotive supplier, and the couple has moved all over the world and lived in Mexico for years before coming to the USA and both of their children were born in Mexico (which technically makes them Mexicans, right?). The wife is a stay at home mom / runway model...I shit you not. She is 6' tall, about 110 lbs and admittedly very attractive. Both have heavy British accents and this week showed off just how British they truly are.
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That thing that brought out the snobby, better then you because you're an ugly American attitude was the 4th of July holiday. Apparently this is a sore spot for the Brits. The husband asked me to explain what exactly the Declaration of Independence was, and when I did, he explained that it was an illegal document that no other nation should have recognized, was treasonous and that all that signed it would have been hanged if the USA would have lost the revolutionary war, which by the way, we only won because the French helped us in an effort to further hurt the British empire. WOW. Um...ok. I couldn't really argue with most of what he said, but so fucking what? This couple with his apparent disdain for our American attempts at creating "quaint villages in order to mimic the towns of Europe" (he stated on more than one occasion how horribly we've failed at this) and the temper tantrums unleashed on unsuspecting shop owners in northern Michigan when they didn't understand such common "English" words as, "iced-lolly" (Popsicles) and "serviette" (napkins) suddenly turned from friendly to unbearable. At one point an angry lecture to a 58 year old female 7-11 cashier included such fun questions as, "I feel like I'm in a third world country where no one speaks English...aren't Americans SUPPOSED to speak English? Do you speak Spanish possibly?" (she didn't).
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This was all too bad, because this woman IS my wife's best friend, and even my wife felt like she had spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME with her, and it had possibly damaged their (up until now) good relationship. In the British lady's defense, she seems to become more snootily"British" when her husband is around and she is pregnant, so her hormones are all whacky. There is no excuse for the husband, turns out he's just a pompous dickweed; who knew?
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Regardless of how much fun we did have up there, we were glad to leave the Brits and the fold out beds behind and travel back to the urban jungle...well...the suburbs.
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