post 43 funny stories from my life

On the same 4th grade trip, I would go to the falls as often as possible. We would have to wade through the edge of the river to get there if the banks were too muddy.

Wading through the water had its problems as well, you had to watch out for any fish you might step on or surprise holes that maybe covered by the mud kicked up as you walk.

About half way to the falls my friends had gotten ahead of me and my attention had gone toward the view around me and not of my path. I fell through a hole in the river and my entire body disappeared into the river. It was only a moment before, as it seemed, the river had spit me back out into the cold morning air.

My friends had turned around in time to see me vanish into the water and see my body pop to the surface and land with a splash in front of the hole.

As I climbed to my feet, in a daze soaked to the bone and wondering if the river really had just swallowed me whole and spit me back out, my friends looked at me and asked…”where did you go?”

It was by far the most amazing yet odd thing that has happened to me in my short life. I don’t however want it to happen to me again.

When I was in the 4th grade my class went on a trip to a camp somewhere up north. (I don’t really remember the name of the camp)

At some point during the trip my friend and I had followed a couple of wild pigs up the river toward a 40 foot waterfall about a 1/4 of a mile from the camp. Near the edge of the fall my friend noticed some mint had grown. He began to pick it and chew it. What I failed to tell him was while he was looking out over the falls I saw on of the pigs pee on the mint he had been chewing on.

To this day I make it a point not to eat mint I find growing in the forest…it might just have been the bathroom for many a wild animal.

My memory isn’t too clear on this one, I was a very young child, but I will tell what I remember.

My mother took the family to the mall one fine day for…beats me all I know was I had ice cream on the brain. I asked my mother if we could stop for ice cream but she said we were in the wrong mall for that. Well, I wasn’t going to have any of that so I went on my marry way in search for ice cream.

I was and still am very quiet when I want to be so slipping away was no problem. As I walked through the mall I found no ice cream of any kind, not that I looked very hard I got side tracked by one of the stores.

My memory gets very fuzzy after that but the next thing I know I’m being questioned by police, refusing to reveal my name and holding two batman action figures. One of them without a head, to this day I have no idea where that head went.

Now that I think about it, I do feel bad for worrying my mother in such a way. My mind often took hold of interesting sights and told my feet to move toward them. I guess thats the reason she put my on a leash at a young age. haha.

I was just thinking about this one today. One day some time ago my family took my grandmother out for dinner. Things were going well as we all looked through the menu discussing what looked good.

I had noticed my grandmother with a very concentrated gaze at her menu. After sometime she leaned over to my mother and said “Can you read this?” My mother looked at the menu for a moment and said “No I can’t it’s in spanish.” My grandmother breathed a sigh of relief and said “Oh I thank god. I thought I had a stroke.”

This story isn’t exactly from my life but so much in my family, and it is very funny but very short. Very much something that someone in my family would do. We’re full of natural comedians.

My great grandfather had been putting installing a new doorbell. He took a step back to admire his work, completely forgetting he was on a latter, and fell off. He was alright but had to clean up the mess he made falling from the latter.

Every now and then we will poke fun at the idea of my great grandfather stepping back to admire his work but all in all he was a good man. I wish I could have met him.

We’ve all had those moments when cooking goes wrong. No matter how good a cook you are you have an accident now and then. When I was just a wee bunny lass my mother decided that she was going to make chicken for dinner.

Now this would have been an easy task but the pan in which the chicken sat in had a small hole at the bottom. No one ever noticed it, and our oven at the time was very old. We had to put a piece of aluminum foil in the door in order to keep it shut.

Well all was going well until we noticed the smell of smoke filling the kitchen. When my mother opened the oven door to inspect the problem flame burst out of the oven right into her face. Scared me to death when I saw it, my mother flew back and screamed “get the flour!”

After long battle between my mother and the grease fire in the oven the flames were finally out. She had knocked over a jar of honey when she had tried to find some floor in the cabinets next to the stove. Flour and honey was spilled all over the floor. The chicken was black and covered in flour.

When my mother pulled the chicken out of the oven she tuned to me with a bright smile and said to me “well…the chicken’s done. Look! The popper came out.” We shared a good laugh and ended up ordering a pizza.

To this day every time I have a cooking mishap I think of the time my mother burned the chicken and feel much better knowing that everyone makes a mistake now and again. I also know that its good to laugh off those mishaps, it loosens you up to begin a new.

THANK YOU MOM, FOR TEACHING ME THAT…AND KEEPING FOOD ON THE TABLE. WELL DONE AND POPPER OUT!

No this is not one of those coming of age losing the virginity stories…that one, although funny, will stay with me and only me. No this story is about the first time I saw snow. When you live in Phoenix all your life you see snow as a big deal for the first time.

I think I was about 12 years old at the time. My friend’s mother had taken my friends and I up to the mountains to play in the snow for the first time. You could have offered me all the money in the world and it still wouldn’t have been as exciting as seeing snow for the first time.

The trip started out great, on the way up we played in snow banks all along the way. At the hotel we had a snowball fight; we even did a bit of sledding (if you could call it that) down a steep hill just a ways off road. It wasn’t until we were on our way back to Phoenix when we begged for one more romp in the snow. “Just one more hill.” We begged.

After some searching we found what had to be the perfect hill. The snow lay untouched by any living thing. It was the most surreal thing I’d ever seen. We made quick work about getting tracks all over that virgin hill. We rolled, sledded and fought all over the hill and at the bottom. It wasn’t until I had come down the side of the hill at an alarming speed (well alarming for me) and crashed into what I thought was a rock. It wasn’t until I brushed off the snow to reveal I hadn’t hit a rock but a head stone. I was at a loss for words for what felt like an eternity. Suddenly the words came barreling out of my mouth like a bullet. “It’s a cemetery!” I yelled at the top of my voice.

If you’ve ever watched the discovery channel and come across the scene where all the gazelle look up in time to see the loin charging toward them, then you would know that at the exact moment my friends had taken on the characteristics of those gazelle. Everyone charged up the hill screaming and calling for the car to be started. Everyone had been too hysterical to say exactly why we all suddenly wanted to leave after all the begging and pleading.

It wasn’t until the hill was long out of sight before we finally calmed down enough to say we had just played in a cemetery. To this day we all laugh about the snow covered cemetery, you’d think that after that I wouldn’t like the snow. But I love it.

I wake up to ripples of automatic gunfire outside and helicopters vibrating overhead. My head reels a bit, and it takes a moment before I remember where I am. No, I am not in a war torn, third world country. I am laying in my bed in Minot, North Dakota, and it’s just the security forces firing range I’m hearing, along with the daily helicopter detail that peruses the neighborhood, babysitting the nuclear weapons peppering the landscape of ND.

Living on a military installation is not for the faint of heart. Not because of the gunfire, but because it’s like being perpetually babysat by Big Brother 24 hours a day. Don’t forget to shovel the driveway, or there might be nastygram in the mailbox from the housing office. Forget to mow your lawn one week in the summer? Expect a “warning.” The housing office functions as our very own homeowners association from hell. Without the whole home ownership thing…
Talking on a cell phone while driving will land you a ticket. When the national anthem plays everyday at 4:30 (yep, everyday), you better pull the car over. Don’t leave your porch light on for a few days in a row, or you might get…you guessed, a ticket. Rules, rules, rules. Life on a military base is governed by structure and rigidity. Big surprise, right?

Adjusting to this has been difficult for a tree-hugging, Bush-hating liberal. I like my privacy. I like the idea of civil liberties. I like that in the real world I won’t get a ticket for doing 17 mph in a 15 zone. I miss academia, where everybody snickered when Bushie made up a new word, where it never got old to have a hearty laugh when he said “nuc-u-lar.” I think that might be illegal here.

BUT, even with Big Brother over my shoulder, there have been some positives to living on base. There’s never a neighbor that drives by when I’m out in my yard without slowing down to wave. I perpetually keep my door unlocked (for the first time in my life!) because I know beyond all doubt that I’m safe here. I can go for a walk or a run alone after dark—also something I’ve never done before in my life. We can leave my stepdaughter unattended in the yard to play. My neighbor pops in anytime she has information to share about our housing situation (our houses are being demolished in a few months to pave the way for new houses here). There is a bond of community among military families, forged by the unique, shared circumstances of living in total uncertainty all the time. They are good people that make a not-so-good situation better. They make the early morning gunfire, lawn patrol and nastygrams a little bit more bearable.

A few years ago, after many late night confidential diatribes concerning lazy husbands, my best friend and I decided to engage in an experiment. We had frittered away months and many gripe sessions about the lack of domestic involvement with our respective husbands, and had decided the time for action was upon us. Both of us had waited until our mid 20’s to get married, and we had found men who had been established personally and professionally prior to meeting us. This was highly attractive in the beginning: both of our husbands lived alone, cooked and cleaned for themselves, had great careers—they were virtual paragons of masculine maturity.
And then a funny thing happened. We got married. And one day not long after, I woke up to find myself folding his tighty-whities, ladling his meals onto our wedding china. I started feeling a whole lot like my mother, and less like a woman of the new millennium, a woman in an “equal opportunity” household I had envisioned creating.
Ironically, my best friend seemed to be suffering from the same fate. This wonderful man she had walked down the aisle with mere months before was now what she referred to as a “couch slug,” an amoeba-like organism incapable of picking his smelly socks off of the floor, and prone to grunting requests for meatloaf dinners and beers out of the fridge. We pondered how we found ourselves in such stereotypical marriages. We fought, begged, cajoled with our husbands for more help around the house, only to find ourselves picking up the laundry or cooking a meal at the end of a work day. We initiated and staged insurrections, rebellions from housework, only to find that our husbands seemed relatively unfazed by the laundry piling up and the ring around the bathtub.
And then, one crisp autumn day, my best friend and I attended an Ohio State football game, and stood around tailgating in our scarlet and grey before the game, lamenting our usual litany of marital grievances. Maybe it was a moment of clarity, or maybe it was the six-pack of Coors Light we shared, but we had an epiphany. We were going about this whole domestic help thing all wrong. We hatched a genius plan, and experiment of sorts that would be sure to result in domestic bliss. We decided that each of us would try a different approach to getting help around the house, and we would report our level of success to the other, and make adjustments accordingly. It went something like this: I would try a “honey-do” list of sorts. I would take a bright and colorful piece of paper, and write down some household tasks and tape the list to the fridge. The logic here was that my husband, being a type-A personality, couldn’t resist the sight of a list of tasks confronting him on our fridge, and would cherish the accomplishment of crossing things off that list. My best friend’s approach would be a bit different—positive reinforcement. She would ask her husband to finish a few tasks around the house (no begging, no pleading), and whenever he finished that task, he would be “rewarded” (use your imagination here). We decided that our great experiment would be one of unlocking the secrets of the male persuasion: would our husbands savor a sense of accomplishment more, or were they simpler creatures, tantalized by sheer bribery?
The first days of our experiment were met with great success. I cleared off the fridge of all of its mosaic patchwork of pictures, leftover wedding shower invitations and random recipes. I printed a list of household tasks needing some serious attention and it became the sole inhabitant of the front of our fridge, blazing its message of domesticity gaily across the room. I printed it on lime green paper in a cheerful font, and excitedly pointed it out to my husband when he came home from work one day. He seemed amenable to his honey-do list beaming from the fridge, and the first few days he threw himself into the tasks with gusto. He did revel in a sense of accomplishment, and I plied him ample praise and appreciation for his help around the house. Our house was a virtual beacon of domestic equality…for a while.
Back at my best friend’s house, she reported similar results. She had asked her husband to help with a few select chores around the house, and the first time he capitulated and participated in cooking dinner with her, she handsomely rewarded him with a romantic evening for two. She called a few days into our experiment to tell me that her husband was now rushing home after work each day, and actually inquired as to what she might need help with around the house. “It’s amazing,” she whispered conspiratorially, “he’s vacuuming, he’s doing dishes, he’s folding laundry…all with a smile on his face!”
My best friend and I felt vindicated, and quite clever, actually. We now had achieved working models of equality in our homes, and we were less exhausted and put out in the remaining household tasks we engaged in each day. Life was good.
Alas, time changes all things, and a mere month into our experiment, things took a quite different turn. One day, I noticed the number of tasks on my honey-do list that were being crossed off was rapidly diminishing. I prodded my husband gently, asking him if he had noticed there were still many things on our list that needed attention. He diverted his attention, temporarily, from ESPN and grunted a response akin to “I’ll get to it later.” I sensed trouble brewing.
Conversely, over at my best friend’s house, she was reporting signs of fatigue. She called me one afternoon, and sighed distractedly, “He comes home every day now, and when he takes out the trash or picks up his laundry, he asks what he gets for it. I’m starting to feel like a hooker. I have to pay up for the smallest tasks, or he becomes impossible…I’m not sure how long I can keep this up.” Her voice had taken on the pitch of a desperate woman. I reported my similar troubles. We were beginning to have doubts.
Tragically, within a few weeks we had to brand our experiment a failure. My honey-do list had, somewhat symbolically, fallen off of the fridge a number of times, and was now wretchedly tattooed with grease splotches and most disturbingly, a boot print resembling my husband’s foot size. It no longer resembled its former cheerful self. After weeks of inattention, I put the list out of its misery and into the recycling bin.
Similarly, my best friend had abandoned her positive reinforcement system out of sheer exhaustion. She felt that, in the end, it was less energy to do the work herself than have to “pay” her husband for it. She dramatically declared her days of prostitution were over.
So, years later, I still have no good answers in my fight for domestic equality. I am still the primary cook, laundress, and toilet scrubber. I do however win the occasional battle for my husband to clean the cat litter or unload the dishwasher. I’m only slightly ahead of where my mother was at my age, but progress is progress, right?

A Lesson I Will NOT Forget

The second semester of my Freshman year of college, I took a course in Vector Calculus. The professor was a rather nice guy with a fairly soft-spoken demeanor. As such, a few of the other Physics majors and I - whom the prof would later label “The Physics Mafia” - would sit in the back corner of the room and draw stupid pictures making each other laugh. To give you an idea of what kind of idiots we were, one of the other members of the mafia once passed me a note with the inquiry, “what are all the words for the theme song from Shaft?” I’m proud to say that I answered him accurately and in full.

One day we were discussing some of the finer points of the Divergence Theorem and singularities within the domain of integration. For laypeople, the best way to put this is: in order to deal with the fact that the quantity you’re looking at is infinite somewhere where you care about it, you dissect the ever so smallest area around the infinity out to remove it and proceed as you would normally. And yes, this is relevant. Trust me; you’ll see.

The prof then said:

“This reminds me of a story. My brother used to have a job with a company that would rent you out a helicopter along with a pilot to fly it for you.”

Talk of helicopters caused me and the rest of the Mafia to perk up and listen.

“He told me about one guy he rented several helicopters out to that flew them over somewhere in Central America. One day, the helicopter this guy is renting goes missing somewhere over a jungle, and my brother was called up to go on the search mission.

“Eventually, they found the wreckage of the helicopter. They never did find the passanger who rented it, but they found the pilot one mile away from the wreckage with his head cut off and his heart cut out. HAHAHA!”

The prof started genuinely laughing. None of us laughed with him, as we all looked at each other with totally mortified expressions on our faces. The only thing missing was a cricket blissfully chirping in the background.

It is now several years later and this is the ONLY lecture of Vector Calculus that I remember attending.