Living behind enemy lines

Here's my living situation. This past December, knowing I was wanting to live in Kalamazoo to be close to my fiance I asked some of her very distant relatives (whom we had known only a short time) if I could stay with them for the couple months leading up to our wedding. After a week or so of thinking about it they said I could. An answer to prayer right.........little did I know.
I have experienced a number of occasions where I just shake my head at what I am having to go through just to occupy a room in these peoples house. The latest such occasion happened a couple days ago.
On this frigid day the wind chill was so extreme that the county had closed all schools in the area keeping the wife of where I'm staying home for the day since she is a teacher. I'll call her Marsha. After getting up and going to the bathroom I went back to my bedroom where I have made it a habit in the mornings to get a little exercise before I shower. I had completed my push-ups, sit-ups and was almost done running on the spot (trying to get a little aerobic workout) when there was an aggressive knocking on my door.
"What's going on in there?" Marsha sternly demanded.
"I'm just doing some exercises." I replied
"In my bedroom!!!" She shrieked as if she had caught me shooting heroine in her house.
"I'm just running on the spot." I tried to explain through the still closed door.
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! You can not do that in there, that is not safe! You must go downstairs if you are going to do anything like that." She stated very definitively.
"Uh, okay." I responded
I stood there in shock for a few moments. My heart was pounding, but not just from the exercise. I was getting tired of these types of interactions.
I went and showered, and afterward made my way downstairs to eat breakfast. And this is when it got even more interesting.
As I entered the kitchen, before I even knew what kind of cereal I was going to have, I was enduring an intense lecture from this obviously angered woman.
"You have to respect my house if you're going to be here. You cannot do things like that in my bedrooms. What were you thinking!"
"I'm sorry" I replied. "I've done little exercises like that in every place I've ever lived. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong."

To clarify, she must have heard me running on the spot. The funny thing is that it was only for a few minutes and it's not like it's even noisy cause I stay on the balls of feet. I've done this in apartments even, never once getting a complaint from the tenants below.

"No." she said scowling. "We didn't go over the rules when you moved in here but maybe we should have."
"I apologize." I said again. "I didn't realize that what I was doing was wrong."
"Well you should know!" She quickly responded.
My heart was pounding as I was furious inside. I wanted to tell this woman where she could go but I knew that wasn't going to help the situation.

"We're not going to be living in this house for more than 5 or 6 more years, we need to take care of it. You need to respect my home. You're going to damage my house doing things like that." She said as she continued to lecture me as if I was some 14 year old troublemaker.
Many thoughts crossed my mind. Did the little pig who built his house out of straw build this woman's home? I must have run on the spot in my parents living room thousands of times. Literally thousands. Was my parents home suddenly going to collapse without warning? Should I call and warn them?
Did this woman really think I could cause structural damage to her home by running on the spot? I wanted to ask but I knew from her mood that she was probably not capable of having a rational conversation at that moment. And this woman is the type who knows everything about everything and doesn't listen to other's points of view anyway. I probably wasn't in the most Christian frame of mind either so I decided to take the high road and I apologized again and assured her it wouldn't happen again.
Later that day I wondered if I was perhaps wrong in my thinking and called my dad. A man who has 40 years of construction experience and has built homes himself should know a thing or two about damaging one. Without telling him what had happened to negate any possible bias, I asked him if he remembered how I used to run on the spot in our living room at home (which is on the second floor, like the home I was in). He said he remembered. I then asked if I could have caused any structural damage to our house. "No." he replied as if I was asking a silly question. I then proceeded to tell him what had happened to which he laughed in amazement at Marsha's ridiculous idea.

The thing is, had Marsha calmly asked me what I was doing, politely asked me to stop, and told me that she would rather me do that somewhere else, I would not be writing this entry. And I wish this were the only experience like this that I've had. I must say though that the husband of the home is very nice. He is very accommodating and polite. Unfortunately his wife is one of those people who dominate their mate, interrupting him when he's telling stories, correcting things he says and barely letting him get a word in whenever I'm trying to ask him a question.

My other adventures with Marsha have included: Being accused of not flushing the toilet after using it. Then after further investigation Marsha realizing that the toilet in the bathroom I use does not flush properly, which she then nagged her husband that they need to get that fixed. (And another point is that I have a separate bathroom and I'm the only who uses it. That means Marsha comes into that bathroom and looks in the toilet every once in a while.......and you thought people like this only existed in movies).
I opened the vertical blinds of the picture window in the living room one Sunday morning to let the sun shine in but when Marsh came downstairs she went to the window and said condescendingly, "We don't do this in the winter." And closed the blinds with a frown.
I have left things, like a duffel bag on the floor in my room, and when I return in the evening the bag is in the closet and other things are cleared from sight (like my slippers) with the closet doors shut. Apparently she wants an uncluttered room. Even though she insists the doors be shut to the bedrooms.
I could go on, moving in was a whole other story, but this is a long post. I will be sure to mention any other extremely entertaining situations.
I can wait to move in with my fiance in just over a month. I will appreciate it all the more.