101 ways to kill an annoying Japanese Grandma...

#34- Wait until New Year (if you can hold out that long) and give her a huge piece of undercooked motchi. Make sure to confiscate all vacuum cleaners in case someone tries the old 'suck the motchi stuck down the old geezer's throat with a vacuum cleaner' trick...

Grandma is pissing me off beyond belief these days. Who'd have thought the oldest member of the in-laws would be the one to cause me so much grief!? MIL can be overbearing, but I can deal, SIL is a flat out weirdo, but at least keeps to herself (or the dog) most of the time, BIL sleeps the days away and FIL is usually all good as long as he isn't getting his dangly bits out. How is it that an 83 year old woman can aggravate me that much I would even be inspired to let out the feelings of frustration on a blog??

#48- Take away all non-slip and old people proof hand rails from the bathroom...

There have been a few things this past week. The first has been her disapproval of me taking Ash out. Anywhere.
I hate staying home with Ash, he gets bored, he trashes the house, pulls the cat's tail, wants to watch nothing but the wiggles all day... It really is a disaster to spend a full day at home with him. I guess because he gets so much stimulation at kindy all day every day, he needs that all the time, but it's very draining and I'd much prefer him be stimulated at a toy shop so he can trash someone else's work place instead of my house. Harsh, but true. (Apologies to all toys r' us employees who have had to clean up his mess...) But every time I take him outside to get on the bike to go to the car park, without fucking fail, the 'gara-gara' noise of the in law's door will go and Grandma will say "Ooooo where are you going?! It's so hot! You should stay home!! Always going out somewhere! Tut tut fucking tut!!"
Errr, yes Grandma, unlike some people, I choose not to rot in my house all summer. No thank you, not with a small potentially ADD affected child anyway. It's like she has some radar and a little light and alarm goes off whenever we leave the house!

#98- Just give her a little shove when she's hanging out the futons...

Another point of contention this week has been the fucking red shoes. Ash has a pair of fake red crocs that are really good, nice and light and easy to put on. His shoes are usually scattered between our house and Grandma's house so it's not unusual for me to not be able to find them. Grandma also has some kind of shoe radar too, because they weren't at her house, and she came sniffing around our shoe rack, when she couldn't find them there, I swear to God, at least 5 times she asked me "Where are the red shoes, they're the best ones!?" After about 5 times of me answering I didn't know, she escalated the shoe attack into "Where have you lost them?! They can't have just disappeared you stupid stupid gaijin!!" (OK there was no gaijin attacks specifically but I definitely got an old angry J-woman vibe.) I have a feeling they're in the car but I feel like telling her to fuck off and that we'll find the red shoes in our own damn time! I think she seriously spends a good part of the day thinking about the elusive red shoes.

#72- Slip some rat poisoning into her miso soup, she'll just think the taste is a bitter vegetable of some description.

And the final straw was 'the T-shirt labelling' incident. Ash's kindy clothes all have to be labelled clearly with his name. Pain in the arse, but what are you going to do, it stops shit getting lost. At first she criticised how I wrote the "ya" in our name, and I told her straight out to get bent, it really didn't matter, he was the only kid with a katakana name anyway, they'd get the drift. Maybe because it's her name, she thinks it should be written with a friggin calligraphy brush by some old dude in a kimono, who knows. But the real problem came when she spied Ash's T-shirts. If they have a big tag, I'll write his name on it, but most of them have a tiny, pissy little tag that wouldn't fit a short name, let alone the katakana and kanji novel that is Ash's full name. So, I usually just write it on the inside back of the collar. Nobody can see it if he's wearing it, but even if they could, it's a fucking kindy shirt, and he's fucking 1 year old, don't think the fashion police are going to come knocking. I simply want to write it somewhere where both the kindy teachers and I can see it clearly. She kept going on and on and on that 'in Japan' "we usually write it on the bottom inside of the shirt" and other such crap, I tried to ignore it with lots of "soudesu ne's" but in the end I just needed to bitch about it to someone and I regrettably chose Ryo-chan. Of course I'm pretty sure he's already told her off despite me making him promise not to, because the t-shirt and shoe lectures have mysteriously stopped. Which is good, but will only fuel the 'Grandma hates the gaijin fire', which is really something I don't want to have to deal with.

#65- Smother her with an incorrectly labelled children's T-shirt.