The Events Leading up to This Picture

I’d planned to take my visiting family out for some teppan yaki when they came down this weekend. Because who doesn’t love a gigantic high-sodium meal prepared with unfunny jokes that we’d all heard a hundred times already? So on Saturday night, we piled in the car.

I entered the restaurant and went to the hostess stand. I asked for a table for seven. I was told the wait was fifteen to twenty minutes. Then a man tapped my shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. The expression on his face was that of a person with his panties in a painful twist. “You just cut in line in front of us.”

“You were just standing there,” I said. He was. He and his family were just mooning about in the lobby. Just as if a family might do if they had already put their name on a list.

He huffed and puffed and blew up with righteous indignation.

Meanwhile, fifteen minutes became forty-five as the restaurant hosted The World’s Slowest Eater Contest. We left. “SAYONARA, STUPID RESTAURANT!” Caleb yelled as we pulled out of the parking lot. On the way back to the house, I called a pizza place to order two large pies. They were not making pizza that night.

Caleb was starving. My niece Amara had fallen asleep at the bar and woke up, angry that she would not be getting McDonald’s. Brandon called another place. We got the last two pizzas they had. They were not delicious.

So, with impending indigestion, we made the best of it, as is the Niesslein way. We played Blokus. We made a house of of cardboard boxes. We sang some karaoke. We had some drinks.

We found some lipstick I’d purchased under the delusion that I could pull off clown make-up. We applied it. We gave each other big smackeroos in the cheeks.

We took pictures. This is Jill and I.