Present: V-Day

Before continuing on to the regularly scheduled content on my site (Valentine's post), I should probably address the elephant in the room first: two months without a post?!

Sorry! I really am. Eventually, I want to make this blog a lot bigger than it already is, which, of course, wouldn't take much at all. However, I've run into a wall as of late. Do you have any idea how tedious it can be to draw paint images with a mouse? Let me give you a hint: it's tedious. Not good enough? Let me spell it out for you: T-E-D-I-O-U-S. There, that should do it. With that said, I want you to keep in mind that tedium isn't always a bad thing. The reward of having crappy drawings is always enough to get me back, but drawing would be a lot more fun with this baby.

All that, and I feel some shame putting time in to make a blog when I don't have the most glorious of jobs and I could be spending that time finding a better one. But before I bore you to death, I need to move on. That, and I probably will use the material down the road for a "past" post.

Valentine's Day is here again! At the moment, we are dead broke, so I will not do the same great job that I was able to do last year. We went to OKC for a whirlwind trip of love and romance. But wait! That's another "past" post. Present, Adam, present! Focus! Anyhoo, this marks our third Valentine's as a married couple. As I briefly mentioned, the last one was great, but I don't even remember what we did for our first. I'm afraid this Valentine's will be like our first. It's not like I'm not thoughtful or anything, and didn't have the foresight to prepare an adequate love celebration (It was going to be an island getaway, for those of you who are nosy).





















More like, I'm in the middle of quitting my current job, finding a new job, and not keeping our little son up way past his bedtime. Oh, yeah, did I mention that we're broke? Probably not, so here it is: we're broke.

This is silly, especially since one day I will have more money than I know what to do with, but at the moment, I can't whisk away my sweety to the secret, preconceived location. So instead, I guess I will make a tribute poem to our great love (and buy some Taco Bell later, or something, how romantic). 

Past: The Gum Thieves

Kids are conceited little wretches. Even before they gain rational thought, they try pulling stuff on their parents. A kid never suspects that his or her parents were once kids themselves and that they already know all the tricks.




As soon as my newborn son, Oscar, learns some basic English, I will explain to him that his plans won't work. I'm watching that little traitor. Always watching. Always.

     Anyway, this particular memory happened around when I was six or seven. It was a nice summer day; it was not too hot. Just the perfect day--FOR STEALING!


    My older brother, who is always full of mischief, reported that there was some bounty to be had in the kitchen. In the drawer full of everything (you know what I am talking about, everyone has one), behind all the twist ties and random junk, there was a giant pack of Wrigley's Double Mint Gum. I think it was a pack of like ten or twenty packs, but whatever the amount, it was a prize to be had.

Of course we were off limits to bad foods like candy and gum, but it was just too tempting. Forbidden fruit is the tastiest. In this instance, it's forbidden gum, but whatever, it's still off limits.

  What was our plan? Short version: flawlessness! Long version: We were going to take the spoils out of the package and sneak it outside where we would not be under the watchful eyes of our parents. In our little, but obviously ingenious, little minds, one of the biggest hurdles would be our minty breath. Surely the parents would guess that we took gum if our breath was minty. Solution? We were going to drink orange juice after we got done chewing our gum so that our minty breath would be concealed. As I said before, the plan was flawless.

 Everything went according to plan. We stole, we hid, we disposed of evidence, we drank the juice.

    THEY FOUND OUT ANYWAY.

    I was seriously perplexed as a kid as to how my parents were constantly on to me. I couldn't pull a thing off. This plan was no exception. Somehow my dad figured out that we got into the gum, and both I and my brother were punished accordingly.

    I thought about this incident throughout the years (you will find a long running theme in my blog that I don't easily forget stuff) and some time later I figured it out. The flaw in our seemingly flawless plan was we opened a pack of unopened gum. Wow. We were dumb.

     While I know that the end result of our caper could have been successful, I'm kind of nostalgic of the fact that it didn't. Going way back to what I said at the beginning of the post, now I am the parent. I might be flattering myself here, but now I know all the tricks! HA! 

Present: About the Halloween Candy...

We ate it all. All of it, we ate.

Past: Prayers, Peter Pan, and Perturbed Parents

Without a doubt, I loved the Disney classic Peter Pan  when I was a kid. Ha! What am I saying? I still love that movie! In fact, I actually bought a copy on DVD a couple years back with my wife. That is to say, there were no kids around at the time, which means that it was for our viewing pleasure as adults. The movie is hilarious and somewhat captivating.
   The particular memory that I want to go back to takes place when I was about seven years old or less. Let's see here, if I am not mistaken, this was around 1992, and more specifically it was winter. I just looked it up, and it appears that it was released during 1990 for VHS, and I watched that movie dozens, if not hundreds of times, so I would say anytime between 1991 and 1992 winter is accurate. Sorry to bore you.
    It was a mid-evening, and Peter Pan just ended on our home entertainment system for the one millionth time.

I thought about Peter Pan and his miraculous flying ability, and I was not happy. Why is it that Peter Pan could zoom around the sky, but I had to make do with walking around?

I had to do something about this problem, but I was somewhat limited in my options for resolving it. When faced with an impossible-to-solve problem which no one around can do anything about that needs to be done immediately, where is one supposed to turn? Of course, God himself.

   Time for serious prayers! I ran to my bedroom and launched myself into my bunk for a fervent prayer in which I never knew the likes of ever before. Ten seconds later, I knew that the Almighty Lord honored my selfless petition, and I was ready to fly.

As quickly as I ran into my room to gain access to solo human flight, I rushed out and into the living room to test my skills. I reared up and took off to the other side of the room. I don't quite know why, but I thought it would be great to jump into our wood stove. Perhaps I was so confident in my ability to fly that I didn't think that I would get burned or knocked out.

 Thankfully, neither of those things happened. My mom grabbed me in mid-jump and cancelled my short flight.



I remember mom scolding me in a loud manner, "what are you doing?" I seem to also remember some arguing back and forth between my mom and dad for a minute. I think they were discussing how dangerous the stove was to little boys that were trying to fly.

   Man, was I ever disappointed with my lack of weightlessness. However, I learned a very important theological truth that night. It seems that God is very stingy with cool powers. I'll never know why God decided to withhold flight from me, but I'm sure that he has his reasons. Probably because I was a bad boy.

Present: Why Some Old People Shouldn't Drive

I've always thought that it would be a good idea for states to require driving tests for the elderly. I would think that after age fifty-five there should be some way of determining whether a citizen is able to get from one point to the other, or endanger the lives of everyone in a thirty mile radius. I hate to pick on the elderly, and in no way do I think of fifty-five as old, but look, people, there are some real human deathtraps out there in the shape of little old ladies.

If I were in charge of this test, I would only check on a few minor things.
    1. The person in question is strong enough to perform all mandatory functions of driving.
    2. The person in question is not crazy.


Now then, on to my tale. I was walking into work the other day, when I heard the faint voice of an elderly woman calling me to her vehicle. "Excuse me," she wheezed," can you help me with something?"



I walked up to her window, and she motioned for me to go to the other side of the car. As I approached the other side, she asked for me to open the door and help her with something that I don't think I've ever helped anyone with before. She asked me, and I'm not kidding, to help her put her car into reverse. The trouble? She needed to push the button in to release the shifter, and pull it back into reverse. I think a fair comparison of the difficulty of this task would be akin to pushing one's thumb through warm butter. For those of you that haven't a clue about the texture of warm butter, let me tell you this, it's not tough.

    She thanked me, and slowly drove off (somehow she was able to shift it into drive). I hope that through my kind actions I didn't end up killing a bunch of people. Maybe through the deaths of many, there will be legislation passed to keep certain elderly folks off the road. In honor of the example I made, they can call it a "melted butter" law. You're all welcome.

Past: Grandma's Interesting Gesture

The time? Let me think. I had to be about nine years old at the time, so we are looking at roughly 1996ish, give or take. My grandma and I were heading into the village district of the town I grew up in. I don't remember the case, we were probably going for groceries or something like that, but I remember we were turning left on to another street, when somebody did some traffic maneuver not to my grandma's liking, and then she stuck her arm out the window and made a gesture that I had never seen before.

 
After we came back to my house, Gram (which is what we called her) and I dropped off our recently purchased goods and settled in. If I am not mistaken, I don't think the mysterious hand gesture ever came up in discussion at all that day. However, a few days later, it came up in conversation. I believe that my grandma was baby sitting me and my siblings, and she overheard me make a reference to it. Oh, wait, was it my older brother who happened to bring up the gesture and I said something to the effect of, "Gram did that the other day when we were going to the store!" I know that I'm a little hazy on the details so far, but after I said that, I remember the next part really well.

   "WHAT?!," exclaimed my shocked grandmother. I was confused. In my mind, I simply relayed facts of what happened. It wasn't anything more scandalous than talking about cartoons, or making fart jokes. From there, my grandma went into hysterics. She was literally crying and telling me that she would never speak to me again. I'm telling you, I was confused, if not completely blindsided by the way she acted.

Eventually, my older brother, who was petting my defeated, weeping grandmother, convinced me to apologize to her. She scolded me and told me that she wouldn't speak to me if I was going to say such horrible things about her. I made a promise that I would never say anything like that about her again, and then her attitude subsided. I don't believe that I ever spoke a word of this to anyone ever since. This does not mean in any sense that I didn't think about it ever again. No. If some experience sticks its big traumatizing foot into my bear trap of a memory, I will never let it go. This was a bear of an experience, let me tell you what.
    What made this memory so hard to forget? In a word: overreaction. I stupefied by how badly my grandma freaked out. I wasn't the kind of kid to disrespect adults, and I was a very truthful tyke to boot. So here is the big question: did I make up what I saw, or was grandma's act a big, fat cover up? Was she such a lady of character that a minor tarnish threw her into a rage, or did she not want my little lips repeating what I said earlier? Either way, she got what she wanted. You decide, I'm done.