Rebuttal to Brian's Car Wash Story

It has come to my attention that my son is planning on relating an incident that occurred while taking my car through the car wash. Should any of you follow his blog, The Dreamer's Door, (and you really should. He's very interesting) please be aware that his version of the event does not agree with mine.
The facts are quite simple.I had opened my door while paying for the wash because I couldn't quite reach the machine to swipe my card. I failed to close it all the way and when the car wash started some water came into my car. Here is where we differ on the following events. Brian claims I began to use a certain word and kept it up for the entire wash and all the way home plus a while longer after we got back. Certainly anyone who has ever met me could never even begin to imagine that a sweet, kind, gentle, patient person like myself could use that superfluous vulgarity at all, much less for twenty whole minutes.
I  believe that when the water began to get in the car I said something like "Oh dear me. I am getting wet"
My son replied with something like "Well shut the door you crazy old woman!!!"
Not all that much water got in. My phone didn't even get wet because my purse floated to the back seat and my dash really did need a good cleaning. I did get the door properly shut and we simply finished the wash and headed home. My son would never tell a lie but he certainly remembers the event incorrectly. I think I can explain his confusion. First he had a bit of soap in his ears, (though I had a more.) Secondly he was laughing at his poor old mother a bit too much. In fact I remember thinking that I would,er, I mean he could hurt himself if he didn't stop laughing so hard. I have even figured out why he mistakenly thought I might have said a certain bad word. I put on my window wipers and they were making a sound kind of like "fwuck, fwuck, fwuck" as they went back and forth. Through his cruel laughter he must have misheard that sound and shockingly thought that I was making such a noise.
So there it is, all easily explained.
PS, And I only had those wipers going not a second over fifteen minutes.

Jack the Wonder dog

Jack is a wonder dog along the lines of I wonder why I have him. I wonder if he will ever grow up. I wonder if he will ever stop using the little dogs as chew toys. (Alas, all my bichons now have hairless ears and tails.)
I wonder if he will ever stop making surprise lunges while he is on the leash.
I also wonder if he will ever meet a person he doesn't like. I wonder why he is so happy all the time. (Whoo hoo!!! I'm going out side!! Whoohoo, I'm coming inside.) I wonder if he will ever stop greeting me when I leave the room for ten seconds just as excitedly as when I've been gone all day.
I wonder what goes through his head..
A few weeks ago Jack spent almost three days studying me. He would sit and stare at me while I watched TV, or read a book. He watched while I talked on the phone. He watched me when Ron or Brian came home. On the third day I had had enough. "What are you looking at, you crazy dog?"
Slowly and deliberately while gazing at my face he lifted his lips in a perfect smile, his tail wagging like crazy.
Apparently he was studying me to learn how to smile. After that first try he now smiles alot! He smiles when he wants a treat, when I come home, when I say his name.
The first time he smiled at Brian he gave a huge goofy grin showing all his impressive white teeth. Brian had a brief second of wondering if he was about to get eaten, but soon realized what was going on. Now Jack not only smiles at us, he has also taught Ron's dog Pepper to smile and they sometimes smile at each other.
Now I wonder, how did we manage to get along without Jack the Wonder dog.

Christine

I have a haunted car.
A couple of months ago I decided to do something about the terrible mileage I was getting on my car. The car was perfectly fine, but was only getting 22 or 23 miles per gallon. It's a fifty six mile round trip to church and I have to make the trip at least three times a week so I was spending quite a bit on gas when you add in all my other driving. There is a reason for the saying poor as a church mouse. Spending so much on gas was eating up our budget. Some months anything beyond Ramen noodles seemed like a luxury!
I was at the used car lot with my son who was actually shopping for a car, his old Ranger having finally rusted out beyond any hope of repair, when out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of silver. I wandered down the lot curiously when I came to the source of the flash, a VW Beetle tucked between two big SUVs.
She was a beautiful silver with a saucy racing stripe running up her hood and over the car. I like cars with nice "faces" and her's was sweet. She seemed to be smiling at me. As I admired her the lot owner came up and "innocently" asked me if I would like to try her out. "Oooooowhahaha, she's a wonderful car," he said, as he slipped the key into my hand. "You'll love her, ooooooowhhahaha"
So, unaware that my life was about to change I took her for a test drive. She was wonderful, peppy and responsive, the manual transmission so much fun. She had heated seats and a beautiful leather interior. We drove around a while and I began to think I needed this car.
On my return to the lot the lot owner approached with a smile. "Isn't she great? She gets great mileage too. The former owner said he got over 40 per gallon and in the summer it got up to 50 a gallon. Can't beat theses diesel engines."
"Why did he get rid of her if he liked her so much?"
"Oh he just mummble, mummble erhem mummble."
"What?"
"Cone on, let's get the paperwork going"
So, a few minutes later I had a car!
As I pulled out of the lot in my new car, the doors suddenly locked with a loud ominous thunk. I should have turned back then, but I was in love.
At home I had two days of bliss then I went to start her on the third day and the check engine light was on. I called the car lot. "It's just the glow plug sensor. Don't worry about it. We'll put a new one in next time you come out here."
That didn't sound too bad, but as I hung up the phone in the house I heard a horn beep in the driveway and the loud thunk of car doors locking.  My nightmare was beginning. The car began to lock and unlock at will while driving, at night, at odd times during the day. The interior lights went on and off. No light when I got in and out at night , but working fine in the daytime.
I complained to my son . He laughed and said, "You should call her Christine, after that haunted movie car"
Out in the driveway, "Christine" beeped her horn and locked and unlocked her doors. My son said, "See? She likes that name."
She does like that name. I entered the car after a hair cut. I was sitting texting my husband to let him know I would be home soon. Christine suddenly locked the doors and set off the car alarm.
Approaching her in the parking lot I saw an elderly woman passing by and as she did Christine locked the doors and blew her horn. The poor woman dropped her bags and clutched her chest.
Even after a new glow plug sensor, the check engine light goes on and off, staring at me when I'm driving.
I am not sure what the future holds. I try to treat her nicely, giving her car washes and filling her with her favorite diesel fuel and i got her new wiper blades, but I'm not sure how long this tentative peace will last. Even as I write this, I can hear her lock going on and off in the driveway.
My husband says, "You are aware that it is just a short in the door locking mechanism aren't you?"
So he says, but he hasn't seen the dash light winking at me or heard her sinister chuckle when the doors snap locked. Where this will end????? I just don't know.

People Watching

I love to stop when I am out and get lunch at the mall so I can enjoy a little people watching. It is endlessly fascinating to me. I love to see couples in their 70s and 80s holding hands and clearly still in love. I have noticed an interesting phenomenon with really beautiful women too. You really often see a jaw droppingly gorgeous woman happily walking and holding hands with a really plain guy. I admit I think maybe the beautiful women tried really handsome guys and found a lot of them more in love with themselves but the average guys treat their girlfriends better. Just a idle guess, but the people who really make me laugh are usually young people who clearly think they are really "cool". It's the guys in the saggy pants and over sized shirts and giant baggy shorts. At what point does a young guy look in a mirror and suddenly decide he looks sexy and dangerous by looking like a baby with a big load in his diaper. I saw a twenty something year old with his pants sagging, showing his underwear walk past a eighty something year old guy whose pants sagged exactly the same. Really? This looks sexy? Nothing about the filled diaper look seems sexy to me. I like jeans that show off a nice butt!
The opposite of the saggy pants look is the girlfriends of the saggers. They seem to favor the "if I can squeeze myself into it, it fits" theory. You see girls whose pants are so tight they can't even get them up and rolls of fat hang over the waist band. This is hot? Their shirts are also tight so every roll of fat is emphasized and jiggling as they strut past.
I was sitting next to a table of college age guys and they too were people watching. I heard one of them point out a girl that was passing. He said she wasn't bad looking and he thought she might even look hot if she had on clothes that fit her. See? I'm not the only one.
The problem though is that I am me. Sometimes I get so amused I get involved. I saw a young man strutting around showing off his dirty diaper look. As I passed him I gave him a big smile and said, "Oh my, you're just so cute," you should have seen his face. I bet he went straight home and burned his outfit! I am an evil old lady.

Jack and My Interesting Life

I have written about my puppy Jack and my interesting life. (Getting glued to a theater seat certainly is interesting!) Jack, six months old now, is still the smartest pup I've ever met and the most stubborn. He has pretty much stopped chewing on my arms, but he still plays way, way too rough with my Bichons. He actually throws them up in the air then catches them. Not all that much fun for the bichons. Working hard to get his "playfulness" under control. None of the dogs ever try to stop him, even as they get bruised and chewed. He does keep life interesting.
Case in point. Last night I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. Around 5AM Jack decided he needed to go out. Like a good pup he attempted to wake me up. I had left the foot rest up on the couch so he put his front paws on that and began to lick my face. I started to wake up but hadn't moved so he decided to jump onto the footrest. Well, as his weight (around 60 lbs now) landed full on the footrest I suddenly found myself on the floor with a huge leather couch on top of me. Not a wake up method I would recommend! I have knee replacements and they are pretty old, so getting up at best is problematic. Had to lift the couch off me, twist around, but another problem....bare feet on smooth hard wood floors! Ice should be so slippery! My dear family blissfully slept through the crash, my groaning, my calls for help, Jack's startled yelps, my repeated slips and crashes back to the floor. Nevertheless, I am super woman. Made it up, let the sweet pup out and back in, got out the aspirin and went back to bed. Husband looked puzzled in the morning at my hysterical laughter when he asked me if I'd slept well.
Never a dull moment.

The son in law

I am beginning to think my son in law Paul is a wee bit disrespectful. He addresses me as "the old coot". That's not too bad. After all a coot is a rather attractive duck, but I'm thinking he might not be using the term in that vein. His subtle mentions of things like, did I have a pet dinosaur growing up and did I mind giving up my horse for a horseless carriage, are beginning to make me think he might be thinking that I'm old. Me! Old?!
On my birthday this month I knew he was thinking about me because I saw a post on Facebook from him. He was asking if anyone knew of an app that mimicked ancient runes chiseled on rock. He said he was trying to find a medium I could relate to. Really, Paul.  A note neatly inked with a quill would have been just fine.

Frogs

When I was a child I desperately wanted a dog and a pony. It was pretty much an obsession, but my mother always said no (thus my disturbing over compensation now. See, it really is all my mother's fault). My dreams squashed at every turn I sought alternative pets. I was thinking about this while I was watching a big bull frog on my goldfish pond today. I frequently brought home frogs and toads and snakes, baby birds and pretty much anything I could catch. It was a while before I learned that some things were better left in the ponds and forests where they belonged. It was a hard lesson.
One of my favorite places to hunt was Wintergreen Gorge, that backed a cemetery of that name. It was a five mile bike ride from my house. Once there I would go through the cemetery to the gorge itself, behind the small chapel. I'm pretty sure no one is allowed to go there any more. It was a very steep climb down to the river that ran through the gorge. Multiple people had fallen and died even back then, but I and the occasional friend who accompanied me just found the climb fun. We would anchor ourselves with wild grape vines and inch our way down, using select trees to stop us from falling. Once down we would wade in the shallow water or swim in the deeper pools. It was a quiet, beautiful place to spend an afternoon. One memorable day I discovered a small pool filled with tiny black tadpoles. True to my nature I had brought along collecting jars in my back pack. I must have caught 200 of them. The climb back up was really hard carrying glass jars full of tadpoles but I made it and biked the five miles back home. Once there my long suffering mom asked me what I intended to do with 200 tadpoles. Well, I planned on keeping them. She reasonably asked what they ate. That was a bit of a problem. I figured they ate "things in the water". Exactly what that was I wasn't too sure. Still reasonable, she asked me if I thought it was fair to cram them in jars away from their home. By the next morning I was feeling sort of guilty about the poor things all crammed in my jars, so nobly, I decided to do the right thing. I carefully re-packed my back pack and set off to return the tadpoles to their natural environment. Five miles later I was back to Wintergreen Gorge. As I rode through the gates I noticed the large pond near the front gate. Thinking about how long it would take to climb back down to the creek in the gorge I decided to let the tadpoles loose in the pond. It was much nicer than the almost puddle I had taken them from, (and I reasoned I would get home a lot sooner) so I threw my bike down on the neat lawn around the pond and got out my jars. Feeling virtuous and noble returning the future frogs to nature, I uncapped the lids and dumped my babies into the pond.
It took ten seconds for every single one of them to be eaten by the fish that swarmed this sudden free meal.
I DID NOT EXPECT THAT.
Didn't feel quite so virtuous going home, but I never again took 200 tadpoles from their puddle again either.