Monday, July 26, 2010

Annual Run Of Bad Luck

     My father in law used to kid me about how sometimes I seem to be like a character portrayed in the cartoon strip "Lil' Abner". This miserable looking human walked around with a constant black rain cloud over  his head. His name was Joe Mishphlick or something similar.
     It does seem that I'll have an annual run of bad luck and then things will begin to straighten out back to normal in a few weeks. This particular event started out with the announcment that our water supply would be shut off for 24 hours while the plumber chlorinates the water system. Directions were not to drink the water and not to flush the toilets as the chlorine would contaminate even further. So the next morning I went potty like a good boy I had turned off the water supply and filled the bath tub with flush water. Ok, got a little pot and began to scoop out water...carefully. Can't flush...needs more water. Ok..more water = bigger pot. Big pot pour in toilet and side of pot hit wall and you guessed what happened. Ok...make coffee in new coffee pot...pour in water and space between the shelf and the coffee pot is no longer the same as with the old coffee pot. You guessed what happened with water all over. And at that momet I knew it was time for THE ANNUAL RUN OF BAD LUCK !
    Dolores and I had a few terse words about water on the floor in the bathroom and I had wandered down the hill to pick a few blackberries for our cereal when I heard the loud thump and a dog squeal several times. Bonnie? I callled her name several times. We've been training her constantly in an effort to keep her off of the main road and to stay on our property, but she doesn't always obey. Sure enough Bonnie had run in front of a pickup truck and was bleeding badly. We rushed her to the vet who had to amputate her back right leg. Poor little doggie has one of those big plastic cones on her neck and is slowly healing. This has been a traumatic experience for all of us.
    Add to this the fact that we had decided to redo the computer room, which looked sort of trashy, and had moved boxes and piles of junk in various places. You've probably taken your computer apart and then tried to put it back together again. If so, you know what happens.... you guessed it!
     If you get a chance to view the little video "I Shall Survive!" you'll see how things can happen to make you feel like a victim. Thing to remember is there are also the big good stuff things that happen - like celebrating 17 years of being cancer free and being married to a wonderful wife with a 57 year anniversary coming up this year. I shall survive! Thank you Lord !!!

I Shall Survive !


Sunday, July 25, 2010

TIPPING OVER OUTHOUSES

Tipping Outhouses




Halloween to Indiana farm kids doesn’t mean going around from house to house yelling, “Trick or Treat !” cause the nearest neighbor may be a half mile away. If you’re a teenage kid, you’re bored cause there must be something a kid can do on Halloween other than staying home at night and listening to the radio. That’s why a bunch of us got together to tip over outhouses.

Now, if you’re a city kid or you were born after World War 2 then you should know that an “outhouse” means an outdoor toilet. First a big hole was dug real deep and then they’d build a little house right over the top of the hole. When you go inside of an outhouse be prepared to hold your breath for as long as you can cause it’s like smelling everybody’s poop piled up for the past two months. Inside, there’s usually one or two toilet seats…come to think of it I don’t know why anyone would want to go in and sit next to someone else when they’re doing their business, but the two seaters were real popular. Way back in the real old days everybody didn’t use toilet paper, they used pages from a catalog. You can imagine how scratchy that was ! Even back then people liked to sit and read, but I would have run out of holding my breath. To keep the place clean people would pour a white powder lime or lye down the holes once in a while. Sometimes, if the outhouse was used a lot where it started to fill up, the hole was filled in and the outhouse moved to a new location.

Two school bus drivers lived near one another. The bus driver for the elementary school was Jim and the bus driver for the high school was Ernie. Ernie smoked a cigarette while he was driving. Sometimes the ash on his cigarette would be real long, but he’d keep on puffin’ on that cigarette. When the two school buses would pass one another, Ernie would hold up his hand. Jim would fly by in his yellow bus, but Ernie wouldn’t put his hand down until maybe a mile further down the road. One time Ernie backed the bus up into a snow bank and the tires started spinning. “Wait a minute, Ernie. We’ll get it !” and all high school boys got out. Ernie thought we were helping to push the bus out of the ditch, but we were holding the bus so it kept on spinning tires and throwing muddy snow. Pretty soon, Ernie really put on the gas and pulled us and the bus out of the ditch. He smiled and thanked us for helping. So it just made sense that if we were going to tip over outhouses, we’d have to go to Ernie and Jim’s houses on Halloween night.

Ernie’s house was first and we were like a troop of commandos on a night raid. If someone would have thought of putting black on our faces, we probably would have done it. There was about five or six of us all creeping up on Ernie’s outhouse trying to be silent, yet still carrying on a conversation. Ernie and his family must have been sound sleepers cause we were talking up a storm. “Alright everybody push !” The thing swayed a bit, but stayed where it was. This was going to be harder than we expected. Finally, someone took command of our group and called out, “One, two, three…push !” and it started going over. Kenny’s foot slipped and he almost fell in the hole. We were all laughing so hard we almost had to let the building go back on its foundation, but a final “PUSH !” and over it went. We ran back to the prearranged meeting spot and laid down on the grass laughing so hard at the thought of Kenny drowning in that hole of….well you know. Then we took on a real belly buster of a laugh thinking of how Ernie would head out to his outhouse to go and all he’d find was a big smelly hole. Now it was time to get over to Jim’s place and see his outhouse.

We had to sneak in from the rear on this one and be real quiet cause the lights were still on in Jim’s house. No loud talking you guys. “Alright,” whispered instructions, “this time let’s do it on three again.” He counted as we pushed. Maybe it was that they counted while I pushed, cause on three that thing didn’t move an inch. Kenny saw the foundation. “He’s got this thing bolted down on cement blocks. We aren’t never going to….” BAM ! Jim came out on the back porch and fired his shot gun. We found out later that Ernie had called Jim to warn him about kids tipping over outhouses and Jim was waiting for us. We all took off running in the dark in the best direction, which was out of there. Jim was yelling something and swearing as he fired a second time with his double barreled shot gun. This time you could hear little bee-bees hitting the leaves of the trees just over our heads. We ran right by the meeting spot. I don’t think any of us stayed around to laugh together about what just happened. Ron told me the next day that he ran into Jim’s clothes line and it swept him off his feet, but he got up and ran again as soon as Jim shot the second time. Ron had a sore neck for a few days and his talk was sort of raspy, but he got over it. We both laughed at the thought of Kenny almost falling in that hole.

That was the last Halloween prank we did cause the next year we graduated and Kenny and Ron joined the National Guard and were sent off to Korea.