Rudimentary representation

One of my all time favorite people is a school teacher.  I went to school with my dear friend to help her out for a day.  One of her students parents unexpectedly stopped by to talk to her about the most recent homework assignment.  The concerned parent brought the assignment in with her and put it on the desk.  The assignment was to draw a picture of your parent at work.  In the drawing I saw a woman vaguely resembling the parent standing before me.  In the picture she was standing next to a long thin stick with her arm raised and hand holding the stick.  Below her, the child drew about 4 or 5 people holding up little dollar bills.  Across the top of the picture the child wrote, 'My Mommy loves making people happy.'  I sat there stunned, trying to determine if I could look up at the parent without laughing.  My friend came back and the parent began to explain the picture.  She said, 'I work at Home Depot.  There was a big snow storm coming and everyone wanted to buy snow shovels and we quickly ran out.  I went to the back to just in case there were any more and I found 1 last shovel.  When I brought it out there were people crowding around me waving money at me to get the shovel.  I am not a stripper, I don't think there is anything wrong with being a stripper.  I just wanted to clear that up.  Also, I will definitely make sure to look at my child's homework from now on.'  My friend was quick to put the troubled mommy at ease, assuring her she receives a lot of homework that appears questionable at first glance.  After the parent left I quietly told my friend the child deserves an A+.

Intoxicated salutations

Last year on the 31st day of December I went to my middle brother's house to celebrate the New Year.  We began drinking a little earlier than we normally do and my tolerance to alcohol is quite limited.  I am proud to say that I did manage to stay awake until midnight.  Right at midnight each year I typically send a 'Happy New Year!' mass text to my friends, however this time I sent majority of the contacts in my phone a mass text that read 'Happy Birthday!' As you can imagine my friends had a very good time teasing me. 

Scared straight (into the wall)

Late one night while laying in my bed I was thinking about the movie Paranormal Activity and how it would be if we had similar haunting occurring in our home.  My imagination is pretty vivid so it wasn't long before I realized I was kind of scared.  I decided to go downstairs and ask Bernie if she wanted to watch a scary movie.  Bernie just finished folding her laundry & ready to take it upstairs heard me coming.  Instead of coming around the corner, Bernie stood just a few steps inside the family room and waited for me to enter. I came down the stairs and around the corner to see Bernie standing there kind of slumped - now remember, it is pretty late at night and we are both in our pajamas, with our hair disheveled, and pretty tired.  I walk around the corner to see Bernie standing there and she looked very similar to the scary girl in the movie.  I screamed and turned to run, unfortunately I turned the wrong way and ran right into the wall.  Bernie is now laughing so hard she is in tears, she said, 'I heard you coming so I stood here so I wouldn't scare you.'  I said, 'Well you are doing a crappy job NOT scaring me!' 

Pow pows

One night my best friend Lexi agreed to babysit a rambunctious little 2 year old.  This child's behavior was less than desirable.  The child did the exact opposite of everything Lexi told him to do.  At one point during the night the child thought I was his own personal human jungle gym, climbing and jumping all over me.  I held the child in my lap, looking very closely at his scalp I moved some of his hair to the side, sighed and said, 'Oh man, so close' then let the child go back to his running and jumping.  Lexi saw me do this and asked, 'What was that?' I said, 'I was looking for 666 on his head' she laughed and said, 'What did you see?' I said '665 which is very close and explains a lot'.  Finally, the hellion's bedtime came, Lexi put the child in the bed and 2 minutes later he was out of the bed.  Lexi picked him up, carried him back to bed.  Of course the child was right back up.  This routine repeated itself about 5 or 6 times.  Lexi's patience had now run out, she picked him up, put him into the bed, tucked him in, looked down at the child & said 'If you get out of this bed one more time (she balled 1 hand into a fist and punched it into the palm of her other hand) POW POWS!'  I proceeded to laugh hysterically because I know Lexi would never ever harm anyone in any way, especially a child, but she did make it sound convincing.  I asked my poor flustered Lexi exactly what chapter in the good parenting handbook she found her tactics.  However we did not see him again the rest of the night.  Lexi also never agreed to watch this child ever again. 

God Bless you Happy

I don't go to Church as often as I should but when I do go, it is definitely time well spent.  The services at our Church are typically quiet and reserved.  This week I observed a very cute Autistic man, he had a big smile on his face and it was obvious he was filled with the love of God.  For the purposes of telling this story I will refer to him as Happy.  At various times during the service he shouted AMEN!  His father continuously did his best to quiet him down.  At one point during the service there was a fussy child that was getting louder by the minute.  Happy knew just how to quiet the child, he stood up, looked directly at the child and said "Hey! Knock it off!"  His father quickly sat him down and politely apologized to the child's mother.  In Happy's defence, the child was now quiet.  So I say - mission accomplished.  When the time came to share the peace, simply saying 'Peace be with you' and shaking hands was not enough for our Happy.  He gave as many people as possible a hand shake, hug, and kiss on the cheek.  There was one lady that he was very eager to share the peace with, she received a hand shake, 2 hugs, and three kisses.  I guess Happy thought she deserved an extra piece!  My favorite part of 'The Happy Show' was when we came to the end of a rather extensive and very quiet prayer, most of us said 'Amen', Happy very loudly and enthusiastically shouted 'I'll drink to that!'    

Yuletide message

If the fact of the matter is your children are ungrateful and not the most well behaved children.  Yet you can not bring yourself to refuse to buy them gifts for Christmas, I think you should buy them swim suits and pool toys.  After they open all the summer fun (wrapped in Christmas cheer) you should remind them that Santa is always watching and knows exactly how they have conducted themselves.  While it is true they haven't been completely horrid, they came very close but did not make Santa's naughty list.  He thought they deserved to think about their actions before being able to enjoy their gifts.  Then spend the rest of the day singing 'He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've be bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.'

Cat lady

While washing my hands in a public restroom I happened to look over at a lady standing at the sink looking at herself in the mirror.  She leaned closer to the mirror to look at her hair, clicked her tongue, licked the palms of each hand, smoother back her hair, rinsed her hands wiped them and left.  I was puzzled as to why her saliva was a better option than the water the sink had to offer.  I know this ultimately doesn't mean anything and is merely my own personal irrational conclusion, but she was wearing a long denim skirt, a red sweatshirt with kittens on it, and had her hair pulled back into a bun.  So I am pretty sure she probably has a few dozen cats at home.  

Latrine laviere

My friend Stacey always has a smile on her pretty face, and something witty yet sarcastic to say, she is truly amazing.  One weekend she invited me to join her and her two beautiful daughters on their out of town girls weekend fun trip.  Full of shopping complete with a stay at a nice hotel that had a pool and game room.  We checked in, put our bags in our room, then headed back out to go to dinner at Hard Rock Cafe.  We stopped to look around the nicely decorated and rather large lobby.  We saw bathrooms in the back corner and thought it would be a good idea to stop there before our journey began.  I was the last one out and remembered there were not that many people in the lobby.  In an effort to make Stacey laugh I grabbed one of the thin toilet seat liners from the box and gently placed it around my neck with the little flap facing forward.  I emerged from the bathroom, they were waiting for me right outside the door, I said, 'Wow this hotel is really nice they even give us these super cool necklaces just for using the bathroom!'  Stacey and her daughters immediately break into laughter.  A man comes round the corner to use the men's room, this surprises all of us, I reach up to rip off the flimsy liner.  All of the sudden this once flimsy liner now seems to be made of industrial no rip paper because I could not get it off.  Embarrassed getting close to panic I reach up with my other hand an start clawing and pulling at the paper, at this point the paper is ripping in sections and clinging to me for dear life.  Stacey and daughters are laughing hysterically, the man looked at me in disbelief, started laughing, and walked into the men's room.  It wasn't until after my face was hot and red from embarrassment, was I able to get out of my self made noose.

Bernie's Holiday Ha-Ha-Ha

Bernie came home from her company Holiday Party with the greatest iPhone accessorie I have ever seen!  It is the hand held part of the older model home telephone.  The handle is U-shaped, has the old school long curly cord, and is bright red.  It looks exactly like the red phone Batman used to answer every time the Commissioner called. We went to the mall knowing it would be packed with holiday shoppers, to publicly try out her fun new toy.  She plugged the accessorie into her phone and put it into her purse, luckily Bernie carries a rather large purse, so she could easily carry and conceal her fun new toy with her.  We went to Starbucks to sit and enjoy a treat, pleased to see there were quite a few people there as well.  We sat at a table in the middle of the busy area, I waited a moment while keeping my phone out of sight then called Bernie's cell phone.  Bernie being a genius, thought ahead to change her ring tone to a very loud and annoying ringing sound, she pretended to fumble through her large purse for a moment as if she couldn't find her phone.  She then said, 'OH HERE IT IS!' and pulls out the large bright red receiver with long cord trailing back into her purse, casually holds it up to her head and says, 'Hello?' At this point I was laughing so hard I thought I was going to fall out of my chair.  The people around us began watching her as soon as they heard the annoying ring tone so they were already laughing as well.  We had people from two tables come over to us to high-five her, and another came to ask where they could find the super fun toy for themselves.