Sunday, August 29, 2010

Retreat Prankster Unwittingly Strikes Again

So, the infamous fake cockroach got me again. (http://wlenmusings.blogspot.com/2010/01/retreat-ramblings.html)  I took one to school after the retreat last fall, with disappointing results. My sometimes annoyingly level-headed co-worker was not fooled by it when she moved a paper and saw it on her desk. But I was cleaning out a drawer last week and felt something strange when I grabbed a stack of paper. I turned it over and screamed when I saw...a cockroach!!! Why can't I be annoyingly calm and level-headed? Oh well, once my panic attack was over I enjoyed a hearty chuckle.

Also, I'm wondering how many other people have done this. I'm pretty sure it is perfectly normal to forget that you have a little straw in your coffee and bring it up to your mouth to take a sip, thereby inserting the straw straight up your nostril, where it sticks for a moment, dribbling coffee onto your new off-white sweater just before you have to go up in front of the whole church and sing on worship team. Everyone has probably forgotten about that little straw at least once, right?

Monday, August 02, 2010

How Not To Travel, Part 3

When you are  camping in the forest at the Grand Teton National Park near a the gorgeous Jackson Lake and its' Lakeside Trail just a few minutes away from your campsite, it's like living in a dream. Get up in the morning, walk along Lake Jackson with mountains bordering the opposite side and wildflowers growing everywhere around you. Of course, such a walk will take awhile, due to all the time spent gawking around at all this beauty and trying to capture it with your camera.

Although your steps do speed up when you hear some twigs cracking in the woods off the trail and you recall overhearing a poor woman in her car at an overlook yesterday, crying "But you just don't understand how afraid I am. We've already seen one bear!"  You are all alone, because the dog and therefore your husband are not allowed on this part of the loop.

Nearly two hours later you finally return to camp, worried that your husband might have gone out anxiously looking for your remains. But no, he's calmly drinking coffee and having breakfast without you, with no fears that you have become a victim of bears or anything else.

So you hurry with the preparations to get on the road, and you don't notice where the kitchen hand soap ended up. Its' spot is on the countertop behind the sink, which extends out to divide the living room area of the RV from the kitchen. Normally, you put the hand soap in the kitchen sink along with the morning coffee cups just before you hit the road.

So you go merrily down some narrow winding roads in Yellowstone National Park, uphill and downhill, enjoying the views but not getting out a lot since you were here a few years ago.

When you stop for the day in a shady RV Park outside of Livingston, Montana, you come in to get your house in order. When you are pushing the button for the last living room slide-out, your hear an unusual crack but don't think too much about it. You get your kitchen ready and wonder what happened to your hand soap. You peek back behind the sink in the living room and stare in stupification. What???

Small pieces of plastic have exploded everywhere, and there is a big puddle of soap on the floor directly behind the sink.  You recall the noise from the slide-out, and slide it in a few inches. There is the lid and dispenser and more shattered plastic and soap in the carpet, in the little eight-inch overlap area. It just is not a good idea to open the slide-out when a plastic soap dispenser gets pushed into the overlap.

Your husband assumes that you left the soap on the counter. You believe it probably flew out of the sink while he was speeding around a corner or bouncing through some road construction. Not that he's a crazy driver. But you are a good RV wife so you don't criticize him for either his driving or his suspicions that you could be so careless. You just thank him for helping dispose of the plastic shards and spend a lot of time on your knees trying to soak up and clean up all the soap from the carpet. It's a great way to spend a beautiful sunny afternoon. And the carpet will never be cleaner.