Today's thoughts

Captain and I are almost ready to head out on our camping adventure.  Of course, getting ready didn't go as smooth as we'd hoped.  That camping check list I talked about?  Yeah...can't find it.  So we are flying on a wing and prayer there and hope we don't forget something essential.  At least it isn't as if we are going to the wilds of Alaska.  If we did forget something, there is most likely a Walmart within 20 minutes in any given direction!  It took several phone calls for Captain to find someone to feed his six baby calves.  Thanks to Tyler Maxson for stepping up on that one!

On a side note, don't ever look for a post on Sunday.  I take Sundays off...a lot like Hobby Lobby and Fareway do.  It's a family day around here, and I will honor that.

Until Monday (or later, I don't know if I can keep up the every day posting thing), I will leave these thoughts with you and hope you enjoy them!

You wouldn’t know it by seeing or talking to Captain, but he is the proud possessor of an impish streak a mile wide.  To his great glee, he married the world’s most gullible person.  He enjoys seeing how much he can buffalo me, and (in the spirit of matrimonial harmony, of course) I let him have great success.

During a governor’s campaign race many years ago, Captain was telling me that one of the candidates was accused of appearing nude at a swimming party and the offered the excuse for such vile behavior was that he was sleepwalking.  Because this sounded exactly like the sort of asinine thing a wanna-be public official would say, I believed Captain’s account.  That was my first mistake.  My second mistake was in repeating it at card club the next night.  I went on and on about the increase of corruption in the government and the decline of morality in our elected officials until Captain interrupted me…to tell me he had made the whole thing up.  Only the fact that there were four witnesses present kept him from being the guest of honor at a wake.

Captain not only uses verbal trickery, he is fond of the visual aspect of practical jokes too.  Upon returning home from the grocery store once, I entered the kitchen only to spy a monstrous beetle-type bug on the counter.  Now, I pride myself on being largely unaffected by creepy crawlers, but I was very pregnant at the time and given to uncharacteristic behavior.  So I dropped the four bags of groceries from my hands, slammed a bowl upside down over the bug, and ran screaming to the barn in search of a big, strong man to dispose of the big, ugly bug.  Well, “ran” maybe isn’t the right word; being 8-1/2 months pregnant, the best I could manage was a waddle.

I found Captain in the barn talking politics, religion, and women to a salesman.  I ignored good manners and interrupted their conversation to inform Captain that our home had been invaded by a mutant alien life form roughly the size of New Jersey (hysteria and exaggeration being the prerogatives of mothers-to-be), and unless he wanted this particular woman to give him a sermon he wouldn’t soon forget, he had best consider himself elected to take care of said alien life form.  Trying to maintain any semblance of dignity after Captain told me it was a plastic bug was futile.  I simply waddled back to the house.  Where I proceeded to bake that little plastic bug into Captain’s apple pie.

Humorous—but not offensive or belittling—stories and the retelling of them are what make up the fabric of a family’s history.  It gives a sense of continuity and bonding.  No one escapes having a tale told about them because everyone is human, and everyone makes mistakes.  Blessed are those families with endless fabric to wrap themselves in love through the years!