Last year, the Bear set up a big family dinner for my Happy Fucking Father’s Day. This year she hosted a giant fucking party for 60-100 people. Before you get your hopes up… none of them were there for Father’s Day.

One of the Savage nieces asked her to host her wedding reception in our backyard. They got married in Mexico last month, so I thought it was going to be low-key party with mostly family. Maybe 30 people. We have that shit down to a science.

Holy fuck, here comes the music, people getting dressed up and inviting a bunch of their family and friends from both sides. A bunch of people we don’t know drove or flew in from a bunch of other places.

Shit — they are going to expect something good.

The Bear rented tables and chairs and brought in a 2-ton margarita machine that was louder than a 747 landing at Sky Harbor.

They did the cake smoosh, then tossed the garter and the bouquet… (The Bear was miffed because both the Boy and his girlfriend avoided the bouquet and garter like the bride was flinging fresh cancer cells).

We got lucky. Mid-June in Phoenix is somewhere between pre-heated oven and the surface of the sun. But a freak storm rolled through the day before and dropped it to a little less than 100-degrees.

We told people the party was outside, but they wore pants and dress shirts, and some dude showed up in a sweater vest. WTF?

On Saturday (the day before the holiday) the Bear woke me up with, “Happy Fucking Father’s Day. You are going to need to help me trim the tree.”

She set up a “photo booth” and there was a “perfect” branch to hang a frame for the photos. The branch was perfect, but everything around it was dead.

At first I thought it would be a little snip of a few twigs. Took a look. “I better get the chain saw.” I cut down about 5 branches with 3-inch diameter to clear away the dead stuff at the bottom of the tree.

“You’re just a regular Paul Bunyan, aren’t you?” The Bear said with that sneer that can make any penis within 50-feet shrivel.

I planned to cut up branches and add them to the our small woodpile from the last time I trimmed this tree.

“We need to move that woodpile,” she said. “It’s attracting roaches.”

I’m not moving that shit. That’s what fucking woodpiles do…

I said nothing. I turned and dragged the last branch close to the woodpile where I could cut it up.

I turned back around, and she had already moved the wood pile 20 feet to the north. Sometimes I think that women is a god damn Time Lord. But instead of saving the universe from the Daleks, she uses her Tardis to finish these kind of waste-of-time fucking chores before I can even ask “why”.

Rinse and repeat for about 100 different tasks before the party. And I wasn’t the only victim. She sent out a mass text to every Savage, great and small, that all had to be ready by 9 a.m. for the 6 p.m. party.

“I’m not slapping this shit together right before people come,” she said. “It’s too fucking stressful. My house, my rules.”

The Savages grumbled a little, but they all showed up on time and pitched in. Maybe they followed directions a little too well.

At what looked like the end of the party, they started stacking all the chairs. But the party persisted for another hour and people were leaning on the stacks like homeless people in doorways.

The millennials eventually lined up their Ubers to go out for some real drinking, while us “old folks” finished the clean up. By 11 p.m. my “Happy Fucking Father’s Day Party” was over.