She was a big pain, yes. I'm just at a point where the martyr stuff makes me want to punch her. She has to make everything difficult and horrible so she can complain about it. I invited her to breakfast and she told me that she had to go to a sale and that she had plans with someone else for lunch. I found out from one of my brothers that she had lied about her lunch plans, so I have no idea what that was about - I didn't invite her out for lunch anyway.

It took a lot of persuading to convince her that we would take her out to eat for dinner rather than her cooking for everyone. Then she kept picking out restaurants that were closed. She picked out one, we agreed to meet, and then I get a message that she's changed her mind.

She wound up picking out this awful place that's extremely popular with tourists with young children. It's not the kind of place you want to go unless you have a screaming kid that can't behave in a normal restaurant. Since no one was under 30, I have no idea why she wanted to go there. We had to wait 40 minutes for a table, which meant 40 extra minutes talking to her.

My brother and boyfriend kept talking to each other, so that left me and my other brother to amuse my mother. Afterwards, we went to her house to celebrate my boyfriend's birthday early (I wanted to cram all the misery into one event). She had baked him a cake, which was nice, but kept saying that the cake was not good. Over and over. And you know what? The cake was AWFUL. She is a good cook, but this was a new recipe and it was not a good cake.

And the problem isn't that the cake wasn't very good. It's that she is still emailing me about how bad the cake was two days later. What am I supposed to say? I'm just ignoring it, but, really. Give me a break.

She made a face when she opened one of her presents, too.