Underwear and 2 year olds (a guest post story)

So, my dad has many funny stories. Here is one of his from my parents' recent business trip to Canada which they brought my two year old little brother, J, on:

So, we got here to Canada, Vancouver, BC, and we checked into our hotel. It's a little past Midnight - we're pretty tired. I had already gotten undressed when I realized that I forgot my toothbrush, and Suz, being the wonderful wife she is volunteered to go get me one. J was unhappy about his mom leaving, and was crying. 

I went into the restroom and then heard the hotel room door opening. I ran back around the corner, just to see J run out into the hall way. Not thinking about my current state of undress, I ran out into the hallway and caught him about 15 feet from our door, only to hear our door snap shut behind me. 

Yes here I was in the hallway in my undies with a crying 2 year old.

I was OK until some people came by. I smiled and nodded. One guy paused to talk about my predicament. He was very amused. I was out there for like 5 minutes. Then here came Suz. She wondered, "Why can I hear my baby crying?" then as she came around the corner, "Why is my husband standing in the hall in his underwear?" 

Ah. I know what happened.

Romanticisms. The Song: Part 1 (a story)

So, I want to tell a cute story, but I feel that the funny prelude to it needs to be told first.

That's this post.

My dad is rarely the romantic type. For example, when he was dating my mom and they were talking seriously about marriage, he took her ring shopping. Not too bad, right? So they're looking at rings and things and she points out one that she likes.

The ensuing conversation went something like this:

"So this is the ring you like?"

"Yes."

"Ok."

 *my dad buys the ring with cash right there.*

"I'm not going to wear that out of here you know."

"Well you can't. I haven't asked you."

And so they walk out, my mom with perfect knowledge of the ring she is getting and that he has it.

The next step, of course, is for him to propose. He wants her to take her to dinner somewhere nice and ask her there. He wants her to like the place they go to. He asks her, "So where do you want to go to dinner when I propose to you?"

Very subtle.

My favorite piece is how he asks her. She gave him the name of a restaurant. They go there. They're sitting at the table. At some point, my dad reaches into his pocket and brings out the ring box. He slides it across the table to her and asks her to marry him.

She asks, "Aren't you going to get down on one knee?"

So he gets out of his chair and gets down on one knee and asks again. She says yes. Everyone who hears the story says its a miracle that she did.

That's my dad's reputation for being romantic.

So here we are 23 years later. My mom and dad are still very happily married, and my dad has a crazy idea. A crazy romantic idea....

Hawaiian Dream (a story)

So, funny story. OLD funny story.

Something like four years ago:
 

Going to Hawaii was my dream ever since my parents went there for their 10th anniversary. People made such a big deal about them going there that I figured it must be the land of the gods where the streets are paved in gold and ice cream grows on trees. 

We went as a family when I was about fifteen. 

We drove all over the island of Maui in an immaculate rented van. It is a beautiful place and the ocean was nice, but my favorite feature was the dramatic green jagged mountains. It’s everything I imagine when I think of a tropical rainforest paradise. It rains every few minutes, there are rainbows often, the greenery is stunning and it has incredible variety. It was overwhelming and I couldn’t stop gaping at it all. Green is my favorite color. As far as I was concerned it was the land of the gods, coming from Utah where the summers are yellow, the winters are white, and green is the color of pine trees. I didn’t even think it strange when we found that stray cats tend to wander all over the place.

My family has never been athletic or adventurous like me so I was thrilled with the prospect when my mom announced to everyone else’s groans that we were going on a small five minute hike to a waterfall.  We started out alright.  The sun was shining, it was slightly downhill, and things looked wonderful. We crossed a rushing river filled with boulders that made natural stepping stones. Then we came to a place where there seemed to be twenty different paths we could take all fanning out in front of us and none of them looked like the straight and narrow. How could we know which one was right? There were no signs to mark the true path.

We deliberated as a family and chose the most likely one. We called my little sister back over from where she had wandered as we calculated. She came without complaint as we began our trek anew. It seemed to be a peaceful walk through a rainforest of bamboo. Little mini waterfalls ran in several places--probably the runoff of rain from higher on the mountain. It is always raining somewhere in Hawaii. My six year old sister would run to each of them, almost as excited about them as about the real one we were hiking to.

Then the ground began to climb upwards. It became more and more difficult. Mosquitoes ate us mercilessly. The rain that I had guessed was higher on the mountain found us and turned the soft dirt into mud. The minutes stretched into hours and another family council was held. My father and my older brother turned back. I refused. I was filled with determination. We would reach that waterfall. We trudged on.

Then, we crested the mountain. 

Seriously.

We could see for miles out to the ocean and far away, down below, we could hear a waterfall. We dared to hope. We slid down the steep muddy decline feet first as fast and haphazardly as penguins on ice. We were ravenous for the water like we'd been lost for days. I imagined my clothes being ragged in places where tree branches had caught on them. My sister really had split the knee of her jeans. When we stumbled into that oasis of beauty we probably looked good enough for a Hollywood remake of our story.

The water was precious gold to us. We played in it like the Swiss Family Robinson and were immune to the cold. There was no way this was the waterfall we had set out to see, but that made the find even better in a way. We felt so secret and secluded. We didn’t allow ourselves to think of the hike back or the predicament of being lost in the bamboo forest. Then people appeared over one of the ridges of our private sanctuary.

We froze and stared at them like aliens, rather than a sweet old couple, were helping each other clamber over the boulders. There is no way they made the trek that we had. With only a hint of madness in our voices, we asked them how, where they had come from. They happily said it was a rather easy five minute walk. It was the same waterfall. We had just climbed the mountain and come down the other side in one wide sweeping circle. It was barely five hundred feet back to the place where our path had divulged. The boulders had obscured the waterfall, and the sound of the river masked its noise. 

As we walked back we recognized the area that my sister had been playing in during our first family council. She had found the right path and we had called her back from it. The sun was shining and couple of stray cats followed our sodden forms in the five minute hike back to the car where we found my brother and dad waiting for us, locked out and equally sodden because of the rain. We told them the rest of our story and the horrible irony weighed on us in the silence as we scratched our mosquito bites and wiped at the mud, trying to make ourselves clean enough to sit on the beautiful white interior. As the car door closed automatically, I made eye contact with one of the cats. 

Stop mocking me, you.

Drinking Fountain (a happening)

So, funny story. I just barely posted maybe two minutes ago, but I have to record this experience.

After posting, I got up to fill my water bottle from the drinking fountain down the hall. It has one of those water bottle filler tap thingys on the back of it. Convenient. So, I filled my water bottle.

....

It was yellow. Does this particular water bottle refiller give you lemonade??

I had gotten a drink from this same drinking fountain just a few minutes before. It had tasted rather normal, but then again I hadn't seen the color of the water I was drinking... o_O I looked at it, nervously examining it from arm's length. It looked like it was full of air bubbles. Maybe it was just highly oxygenated and the bottle was slightly yellowish.

I flicked  the neck of the bottle a couple of times and little mists of smoke, gas, brew vapors, whatever it was floated off of the surface. 

I was freaking out just slightly as I walked back to my chair in my well lit, solitary little lounge off to the side in the English building. As I walked through the doors, the color changed from yellow to white. What sorcery is this??! I walked through the doors again towards the drinking fountain. It turned yellow once again. I wrenched my gaze from the bottle for the first time in minutes and looked around.

The lighting in that hallway is very yellow.

I figure it really was just highly oxygenated water reflecting the yellow light of the fixtures.

Crisis averted.

Awkward. The Date: Part 3 (a happening)

So, funny story. Two weeks after the events of The Date, I got a text from Frisbee. He had just seen me at the institute and wondered if I had a minute to talk.

We met up at the same place in the student center that we had always met before. There, he proceeded to quote a couple of bits of my blog post to me. o_O

This piece: "like being the editor of a fishing show." and then "I'm going to use that as an expletive."

I guess he thought I had been a little harsh. I was only trying to make it funny. *insert awkwardly embarrassed smile* Maybe he'll blog about me and our awkward encounters. :P

We talked about it for fifteen minutes or so where I felt awkward and embarrassed but also rather comfortable in his company which made for a really odd combination. Eventually we got over the initial awkwardness  of the situation that I had crafted and talked about other things for another two hours.

We seem to do that a lot.

I wasn't really bored. I never get bored. I just thought my readers might think that my situation was funny because they probably would have been bored in my place. They also would have said something though. (As Frisbee in this latest encounter told me I should have done.)

Oh well. I really rather wish I had met Frisbee before my current boyfriend and I started getting serious. It would have been fun to get to know him. He's really quite an interesting person and I enjoy talking to him. Maybe I'll set him up with my cousin. They'd probably have fun together.

Time (a quick story, musing, and another quick story)

So, really quick funny story. I have class early every morning. 8 am. Anyone who knows me has their jaw on the floor right now. Yes, I do actually go to class. Its really quite the miracle.
I am, however, always late.

Again, anyone who knows me knows that late is the nickname most professors, dentists, and boyfriends give me. I once had a boyfriend break up with me because I showed up two hours late to our date. I did give him warning. I even told him to go home and watch a movie or something. Its not my fault that he sat at the skating rink (five minute walk from his house, really.) for the whole two hours being really bored. He really had no other reason to break up with me. Petty. Granted, I am slightly worried that I will someday show up late to my own wedding.

Today, I had a paper due. Last time I had a paper due, despite planning an extra half hour for unforeseen circumstances, unforeseen circumstances caused me to be half an hour late.

I was late today.

I was only maybe seven or eight minutes late. That's really not terrible, right? As we were leaving class however, one of my classmates confided in me that they took bets on when I would show up and that she had won.

They took bets.

So now I would like to muse on this concept for a little while. Some might be confused as to why I would be worried about showing up late to my own wedding. Its really my choice whether I'm going to be late or not, right? Based on the other choices I make? Well, you could always get up three hours early to show up two and a half hours early to be absolutely sure you will not be late.

I understand this.

There is a limit to how much you can do this before it starts interfering with the rest of your life. I figure if I want to show up to my wedding on time, I will simply have to plan everything out far in advance and triple check everything to make sure that on the actual day I have nothing to do but get ready and show up.

I still plan on getting married in the afternoon.

Somehow I think I would still manage to be late to a morning one.

Regardless, there must be a happy balance between planning well in order to be on time and having enough time for all of the other things you have to do in your life. I certainly have not found it. Some people seem to be effortlessly good at it. They are always on time and they're doing things ten minutes, five minutes before they need to be somewhere.

When I plan it, there is nothing in between being  two hours early and five minutes late. If I happen to show up at some time between those two, it is a fluke. Nothing I plan ever works that way. I must have some sort of incompatibility with the space-time continuum. A time weakness. Anything. Maybe the rest of the people in the world are all super heroes laughing and playing a trick on me. Its starting to seem plausible.

Yesterday, my alarm went off to warn me that my class started in fifteen minutes. The walk over there is five. Three times as much time to get there should be enough, right? I was hungry though, and I knew of a vending machine three minutes away that had my favorite cookies. Three minutes there, a couple getting the cookies, three minutes back, and then five to class. I should have been able to do it and still get to class a couple of minutes early.

I didn't want to risk it. Things go wrong for me in situations such as those. Somehow, I would be five minutes late if I tried it. So I went resignedly down the stairs on my way to class. My path happened to go through the school food court. There, I saw one of my classmates from the class that started soon. My eyes followed him as he walked in the opposite direction with intent. I was slightly confused but turned back towards my goal...

...

where I walked into another classmate from that same class. I greeted him with "hi, what's up." and he told me that he was going to the food court to get something to eat. In confusion I asked him if class was cancelled or something. We only had a few minutes to get to class, right? He looked at me weirdly and said, "I've got time." as he began to walk away. I mumbled something about having seen another of our classmates heading the wrong way, that it had made me wonder, and that I'd see him in class.

Then I walked to class.

I was ten minutes early. I dropped my stuff off and decided I had enough time to head to the bathroom really quickly. I couldn't have taken more than a few minutes. When I got back though, there were the two classmates I had run into sitting there eating their food like it was no big deal. How did they do that?? Did they take their enchilada on a plate, hold it down somehow, and sprint back here? Every time I had tried to get food fifteen minutes before class, no matter how simple and easy the food, (once it was a freakin' slice of bread) I was five minutes late.

The only possible conclusion is that they are superheroes, or it takes me a lot longer than I think to use the bathroom.

Maybe that's the answer to all of my time conundrums.

Living in the Ghetto (a top ten list)

Funny story. After much toil, trial, and strife, I have finally managed to buy a cheap little house to serve as my shelter through the rest of my college years. I really have quite the set up here since my parents paid cash for it and so I am paying rent to them and theoretically not losing anything on it as I rent to own.

The problem is, this house is ridiculous.

Here are some of my favorite features in no particular order:

First, the roof. It seems that the roof will need to be replaced simply because much of it is no longer guaranteed to keep out the ice and snow. In fact, if we were to have a random snowstorm in July, I would probably be buried here with little hope of rescue and nothing to eat but canned chili and spaghettios. (The current staples of my college diet. I hope to add peanut butter and banana sandwiches soon.) In any case, just the fact that the roof needs repairing is not really very funny to me. What I love about it is that there are eight different types of roofing on my tiny little house.Yes, eight. Nine if you include the duct tape. Yes, duct tape. On my roof.

Second, the wiring. The wiring itself of this house is a little dated. Not surprising since the house was built in 1916. My favorite example of it though, was found by my older brother after I'd bought the house. He led me to the office area and pointed to a wire sticking out of the wall and then coiled and hung on a little hook. Ok, a little crazy, I know, but not the insanity he was making it out to be.

"Do you know what it is? Did you follow it? All the way to the end?"

It had looked to me like it was just a regular tv cable, added much later to the house so it ran around the outside instead of in the walls. I'd already shown him this on the front of the house so I didn't know what was so insane about finding another area that did that.

Only, it was not a tv cable. The piece that stuck out of the wall was a small black conduit for the extension cord that was permanently wired into the house at that area. An extension cord being used as permanent wiring. Following it outside it had two junctions where you could plug stuff in, all held together with electrical tape. I am not entirely sure it is fire safe.

Third, the plumbing. Ok, its an old house. I knew I would have to be gentle with the plumbing. I forgot to tell that to my friend (does he have no common sense?) who proceeded to clog my toilet. I'd even just finished telling him about how crazy the plumbing was and how my outdoor tap that my hose and sprinkler were hooked to refused to turn off unless I just shut off water to the whole house. (Yes, my lawn is beginning to look quite green again.)

Fourth, the wall. Between the kitchen and the living room is an inch and a half thick wall.
I just measured it. You could probably break it easily, dear reader.

Fifth, the water heater. We had to replace it. It takes up an eighth of the kitchen. It can't be mounted because its next to the inch and a half wall which can't support the holdings.

Sixth, the fridge. There is no room in the kitchen for a fridge, so I stuck it in my bathroom where there is space for a laundry unit.

Seventh, the...something. All the drawers and half the cabinets in the kitchen were covered with wallpaper featuring chickens and roosters on a beige background. I took it off. Lovely wood underneath, but its all sticky.

Eighth, the bugs. You'd be surprised at how agile box elder bugs are while they're mating. They can still sometimes outrun my fly swatter.

Ninth, the window-now-AC-unit-holder. There was a window that was made from slats of glass. It opened and closed like blinds. I don't know how to describe it beyond that. We took the slats out in preparation to put my AC unit there. It didn't quite fit. We took out the whole frame. It fits now. I'm not sure what we're going to do in the winter or about the eight inch gap at the top. Also, until I got a chain today, it was being held up by packing tape and a piece of my bunk bed frame.

Tenth, the random cement pourings. My favorite one is in the back at the base of the Apricot tree. I guess it was in danger of falling over or something and there was no dirt.

So that's how I ended up here--laying on my futon on the floor, typing, and eating popsicles that I'm pretty sure are made from watery Hershey's chocolate syrup.