The Hat

            Sometimes I wonder if the only reason my boss keeps me around is because I’m entertaining.  Sure, I’m great with the customers and I come up with nifty ideas for the shop, but there has got to be some other reason they put up with my antics.  Time and time again I walk into Richard’s office and ask him if I can do something absurd.  What's even stranger is before I go in there, I come up with information to back up my reasoning.  At times I’ve actually convinced him to let me do some very odd things.

            Though, some of the best stories I have from work I managed to accomplish all on my own.  In fact, just the other day I came across something in the front of the store that enhanced my day by about 75%.  I was digging around the front counter looking for rubber bands or something when I came across something glorious hidden deep in one of the back cabinets.

            It was a hat.  Not just any hat, mind you, a genuine, all American trucker hat.  Best of all, it had the store’s logo on it.  Therefore, my boss had no choice but to let me wear it.

            I couldn’t remember a time where a hat made me so happy.  Then again, I try to get overly excited about everything at work so I’m never bored.  My manager gets super creeped out by it, but in all honesty, he’s never heard me complain about how boring my job is.  “Wow, I can’t believe I have to refill fifty cartridges today.” becomes “This is nice, I get to sit down for a few hours and relax while I refill some cartridges.”

            Now, first thing I did when I found this hat was run into the bathroom and figure out how I was going to wear it all day.  First, I decided to pull my hair through the back in a ponytail.  I had forgotten to bring a hairbow with me to work, so this was beneficial in more ways than one.

            Later, while bending over to get something, my ponytail separated into two pieces and fell over my shoulders.  This happens all the time because my hair is so long, but it had never happened to me while I was wearing an awesome trucker hat.  I didn’t get a look at myself until the next time I used the restroom.  When I did, I laughed so hard it scared the rest of the employees.

            My hair falling to my front paired with my new, blunt-cut bangs and the trucker hat had managed to form a pseudo-mullet.  I’m still not sure why that combination came forth, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
 

            Now, under any other circumstances my hair would not look like a mullet.  My haircut is what I consider to be very fashionable.  It looks like this but about a foot longer (that is not me, by the way).

            I ran around the store reveling in my awesome fake-mullet.  Any time I spoke to one of m superiors I did so in a gruff, southern man-voice peppered with various CB radio terms.  None of it made sense, but that didn’t really matter to me at all.

“Hey, can you refill some PGI-5’s for me?  We’re running low.”  My manager would ask.

“That’s a big 10-4, good buddy.”  I replied.

“O-kay. . .”

            It was glorious.

            When it came time for lunch I realized that I was missing an important part of my trucker appearance.  A moustache.  Going back to the last time my boyfriend and I went grocery shopping I remembered that the market across the street had a bubble machine with fake moustaches inside.  I went super out of my way during my lunch break to acquire one of those.

            You might think that a trip to the grocery store during a thirty minute lunch break isn’t that bad, but it is when you don’t have a car.  I have to run across the highway to get to one road, then cross that road to get to my favorite lunch place.  Now, on top of that, I had to run across another road and all the way to the other side of the shopping center.  All for a moustache.  Worth it?  I think so.

            When I did get to the grocery store’s moustache machine, I lovingly placed my fifty cents into the slots and turned the wheel.  I wasn’t sure what kind of moustache I was going to get, so I was a tad worried that I’d end up with something useless like sideburns.  However, luck was on my side, and I received the most magnificent of moustaches that could possibly come with a sticker on the back.

            I high-tailed it back to the store, clocked in and donned my new facial hair.  My trucker persona was complete.  Now, every CB radio phrase I shouted at my coworkers had so much more meaning behind it.  I felt at peace with the world for the first time in days.

 
           Of course, my boss made it very clear that he didn’t care if I wore the moustache in the store just as long as I didn’t wear it in front of customers.  I was a bit disappointed, but I understood.  While my coworkers were used to me being excessively weird in the back of the store, the customers saw the customer service side of myself.

 

Luckily I’ve turned transforming between weird-me and professional-me an art.

My little sister is hilarious.

            I would first like to apologize for not updating last Sunday.  I had a super, super busy week full of lots of work hours and lots of sleep.  Hopefully this post will make up for it :D

            I called my little sister yesterday and confided in her that I didn’t really have anything to write about today.  She suggested the same thing she always suggests and then proceeded to tell me a rather hilarious story of her own.  Suddenly, it occurred to me that I could combine the two into one awesome post all about my bebe seestur.

Amber is absolutely hilarious.  Every story she tells me has me rolling on the floor busting my gut with genuine laughter.  Though, that seems more dangerous that hilarious. . .we’ll say she’s dangerously hilarious.

Sometime during the summer I answered my phone to be greeted by my already laughing sister.  Once she had calmed down, I asked her what was so funny.  She said, “You are not going to believe this. . .” and I knew I would have sore sides after she was done.

Apparently, my mom had bought some delicious, gourmet, chocolate flavoured instant coffee and neglected to tell Amber about it.  When Amber discovered it in the kitchen she read the “chocolate” part of the label, but not the “coffee” part.  She ended up partaking in the “hot chocolate” a lot that day.  So much, in fact, that by bedtime she was bouncing off the walls, shaking violently and in no way ready for bed.  She stayed up all night and played RuneScape.

 

She was still playing RuneScape when morning came and was so aggravated by her inability to sleep that she went into the kitchen and made herself another mug of hot chocolate.  

The day continued with no sleep and lots of hot chocolate, so naturally she was unable to sleep for yet another night.

Finally, on the third day of extreme lack of sleep, she crashed and slept for a million years.  

She woke up extremely bewildered and unsure of what had happened, so she figured a cup of hot chocolate would clear her thoughts.  However, this time she decided to read the label more carefully since it was the only thing she had done differently in the past couple of days. 

Then, upon discovering that she had been injecting herself with copious amounts of caffeine for the past two days, she burst out laughing and called me.

Another fantastic thing about my sister is that she has the inability to identify animals from a moving vehicle.  It’s hilarious, because half the time we have no earthly idea what she’s talking about.

 

The kangaroo one is my favorite.  It's not everyday you see a dead kangaroo on the side of the road in the southeastern united states.

My sister is also extremely tall.  I’ll wrap up this post with a size chart comparing me, my sister, my dad and my boyfriend.

            I'm not even all that short.  I'm pretty tall myself :I

And yes, this post was super all over the place.  I just kinda felt like putting as much stuff in here as possible to make up for not updating last Sunday :D  HOORAY FOR SLOPPY OVERACHIEVEMENT. 

My Mom is a Witch

            Life is full of some of the most magical coincidences.  There are plenty of people out there that don’t believe in such things and plenty of people who just don’t care.  However, there are events so fantastic that the only other explanation besides coincidence is that someone up there has the best sense of humor.  I’d put my money on a little of both.

            I myself believe that coincidences are some form of divine tomfoolery simply because it’s funnier.  In fact, I can recall a story where my mother experienced such an incredible coincidence that to an outside party she appeared to have some form of deity on her side.

            Several years ago when I was a tyke and lived in this house the first time (long story) we lived in an era of constant church badgering.  What I mean by this is at least once a week a couple of sensibly dressed men would ring our doorbell and ask us if we would like to hear about the lord.

            Being a generally pleasant woman my mom would usually politely tell them she was already a Christian and thank them for their time.  They were lucky she always got to the door before I did because even as a child I was quite devious and would’ve much rather terrified them beyond belief (or so my tiny mind thought).

 

            See, I don’t even know if that’s physically possible, but I wanted to do it and my mom never let me.  Not only that, but she actually managed to thwart my plans of ever doing it in the future.  How this happened was either coincidence, divine intervention, magic or a combination of the three.

            Again, several years ago, it was extremely stormy outside and I was forced to play inside to avoid all of the horrendous things that might happen to me if I were to leave the house.  We were all piddling around trying to avoid the rainy-day-blahs when the doorbell rang and everyone in the house stared at the door in disbelief.  There was thunder loud enough to shake the house and people were outside?!  My mom slowly opened the door.

            Standing there with umbrellas instead of bibles was a pair of sensibly dressed men wanting to talk to us about the lord.  You’d think severe thunderstorms would be enough to keep the church goers indoors but apparently they weren’t as sensibly minded as they were dressed.

            My mom just stared at them for a moment before she unleashed a very loud piece of southern mother wisdom.

        
            For those of you who have never been yelled at by a woman with a thick, southern accent try to imagine being yelled at by your mom but multiplied by a thousand.  For some reason southern accents seem to have the “Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry, ma’am, it won’t happen again, ma’am” effect.  I’ve seen grown men cower in fear of an angry, southern woman.

            Her words wormed their way into the sensibly dressed men’s heads, most likely because they were both about 18 and imagined being yelled at by their own southern mothers.  Both of them responded with mumbled versions of, “Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry, ma’am, it won’t happen again, ma’am” before turning around and walking towards the road.

            My mom walked over to the large window I was sitting next to so she could watch them leave and just as the sensibly dressed men reached the end of our driveway an enormous bolt of lightening struck the middle of our cul-de-sac about 10 feet away from the umbrella wielding church-folk.  They jumped into the air about ten feet and ran down the road as fast as possible.  My mom was speechless.

            As you can see, the above event is a perfect example of how a coincidence can be perceived in many different ways.  The sensibly dressed men probably ran down that road screaming about how some crazy, bayou witch had cast a lightening spell on them and the only way they survived was because they were preaching the good word whereas my mom and I saw that as the greatest coincidence that ever happened.  Ever.

            Since then, I have never even seen sensibly dressed men in our neighborhood let alone on my porch.  The peace is nice, but I’m still pretty pissed off that my mom stole my future chances of scaring these men with my delinquent tactics.  Then again, it’s not like you can top summoning lightening.