My wife recently said to me, and I quote,

"I am not left handed".

Love ya, Baby!  I sure do like being married to you!

I'm so proud of my kids, they have such great ingenuity.  Just call them "Wile E. Coyote".  We recently got a kitten and so they thought it would be fun to make a cat trap.  A cat trap in its most basic form generally consists of a cage of some kind (in this case a laundry basket set up on its side), some sort of trigger mechanism attached to the cage to spring it (a piece of string tied to the laundry basket and held by my son), and of course bait.  The bait (cat food) gets placed on a plate in a place where the cat is sure to find it, and as it is naively eating the bait, BAM!!!, my son lowers the boom.  In true Wile E. fashion, the cage flips down right over the cat and continues rolling right on past it so that the cage is now laying on its other side.  The cat is largely unaffected by this whole incident, barely looking up from its food long enough to give a "Why are you bothering me when I am eating?" look.  Since then they have constructed a bird trap and a gnat trap, with limited success and I have also heard talk of frog traps, turtle traps, spider traps, and human traps.  It would appear that the sky is the limit.

Summer is not the time to go traipsing through the woods looking for rubber stamps to stamp in your logbook, aka Letterboxing.  That is, if you have an aversion to ticks crawling all over you.  We recently took a letterboxing trip and for a little while everything was going swimmingly.  Then we started to notice the ticks.  "Hey, look, a tick.  No problem, just kill it.  Wait a minute...what is this?  Another one?  Well we can handle two...no make that three...four...Aaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  GET THEM OFF!  They're all over me!!  They are too numerous to count!!!!  I feel their little tiny legs crawling all over me!!!  What are you supposed to do for ticks?  Stop, drop, and roll!?!  It's not working, they're still here!!!  I will now curl up into the fetal position and think happy thoughts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Okay, so I didn't actually say all that,

But I was thinking it.

So there I was just driving along minding my own business, and I started to smell something kind of funky.  I figured out that it was the car in front of me, so I moved on with my life.  Later on that day, I was driving again and started to smell a very similar smell to the one that I had just smelled earlier that day.  I thought to myself, "What an interesting coincidence."  Sooner or later I figured out that the smell was definitely emanating from my truck, not good.  I parked and looked underneath it and saw something odd hanging down.  Turns out it was a long, gray, burning, smoking, smelly sock.  Don't know how it got there, I'm pretty sure I didn't run over anyone.  I'm developing a theory that my truck was evloving, and in so doing, it was trying to grow legs.  I guess wheels just don't contribute all that much to preservation of the truck species so the next logical step is to grow legs.  How enterprising of my truck to procure a sock in anticipation of the imminent arrival of a non-rotary motive device.  It was, however, unfortunately premature as I left the useless sock smoldering on the side of the road.  But I still say that this is an historic event for trucks thourghout the world and it is just a matter of time before we start seeing similar developments in all of truckdom and I, for one, am looking forward with eager anticipation to what the future holds.

As a matter of fact, I think I recently saw a feather sticking out of the grill of a Toyata Tundra...

By the way, I forgot to include slugs in my last post in the "skin crawl" category.  Ticks will get their very own post in the future.

Now I know what you are thinking, "Why make such an obvious list?  I mean, really, you are a man, she is a woman, this list could get quite long!"  Well, actually (you sexist) I really had to rack my brain to fill out the entire list, and in all honesty, I am perhaps the most blessed husband in all of blogdom.  There are so many things that would go on a list of all the things that my wife is better at than I am (not the least of which is ping-pong, although I'm gaining on her) that I suppose there are not enough blogs on the internet to list them all.  That being said, and because this is my blog and I can put whatever I want on it, and because I am so humble, and because I like lists, here are:

10 things I am better at than my wife:

1)  Not never using double negatives

2)  Having bad breath.

This one is really a no contest since she smells so sweet!

3)  Snoring.

I am just going to have to take my wife's word on this one, as I have never actually heard myself snore.  At least I never snore when I am awake.

4)  Losing things.

Again, no contest.

5)  Getting lost.

I must admit, that my wife does seem to have an internal compass.  This can be quite frustrating sometimes because I like to pretend that I always know where I am going.

6)  Saying things that when you look back on them later make you say, "What on earth was I thinking?!"

7)  Burping my ABC's.

She has really never made any claims that she could ever do this (she's probably just jealous) but the kids are a chip off the 'ol block.

8)  Being boring.

Come to think of it, most of the things on this list are really not much of a contest.

9)  Making fun of the kids.

and last but not least, and perhaps the one I am most proud of...

10)  Choosing a really great and wonderful spouse!

Is it some sort of witty political satire, a tounge-in-cheek social commentary, or perhaps a bed time story for the extremely emotionally disturbed?  You'll have to read it and judge for yourself, but here are some of the lessons that I came away with after having recently read that old children's classic by Hans Christian Andersen, "The Tinder Box":

1)  If somebody doesn't do what you want them to, cut off their head, especially if they have just given you oodles of free money.  I had never really considered this before as something to teach my kids, in part because they don't usually carry around sharpened swords, but I can now see the value of this little kernel of wisdom and have started browsing for swords on e-bay...although I'm still not sure how to work this into the curriculum.

2)  If you give money away to poor people then everyone will go around saying what a very good man you are and how admirable you are.  Even if you adhere to rule number one above.

3)  People will like you when you are rich.  An important corollary to this rule is...

3a)  If you are not rich people will not like you and they will not come to visit you because you live on the top floor and there are too many stairs.  Until you get rich again and then you will have many friends again and you can move to the bottom floor where all your friends can visit because friends shouldn't have to climb stairs to visit friends.

4)  A surefire way to know whether or not you love someone is to sneak a peek at them while they are sleeping, this works much better if they have no idea what is going on.  This may sound creepy to our modern sensibilities, but evidentally it works.

5)   The best woman to marry is one that never talks.

6)  Murder a woman's parents, make her queen, live happily ever after; now THAT is true love.

10 things you might not know about me:

1. I have a pretty bad sense of direction.  I often confuse east and west and have a hard time knowing which way is north, especially indoors.
2. I've never owned a ferret.
3. I have hair on my fingers.
4. I have never, ever, flown anywhere on an airplane.  Well...except for the half dozen times I've traveled across the country.  But that's it.  Oh...and I guess there was that one time for work.  But other than that, never.
5. I know how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.
6. I have the most perfect feet of anyone I have ever met and have seen their feet.  (Just ask my wife)
7. I don't understand the second law of thermodynamics.
8. Sometimes I'm repetitive and redundant.
9. I correctly use percentages 53.2% of the time.
10. I've never been to Heaven, but I've been to Oklahoma.  Well they tell me I was born there, but I really don't remember.

...walking out of the convenience store with a fountain drink in each hand and sack of groceries on my arm.  How can I get the keys out of my pocket and into the car?  What a pressing dilemma!!  Of all the times in my life when I have thought about how nice it would be to have more than two hands, this was one of them.  Thinking on my feet, I cleverly tucked one fountain drink under my arm and reached for my keys with my one free hand.  Keys jingling in my palm, I was ready to pronounce victory and drive home with a smug grin on my face.  It was right about this time that a mighty wind rose up and threatened to blow my hat right off my slowly balding head.  So now, with one hand keeping my traitorous hat on my head, and with absolutely no more free hands, I stood uselessly in front of my car longing for admittance.  I couldn't let go of my hat for fear that it would blow like a tumbleweed across the busy parking lot, and I had to keep the fountain drinks in their full upright position (because what kind of a man brings home only a partially filled fountain drink to his loving wife?  Even though five-sixths of a pop is better than no pop at all, I guess, but that doesn't really fit in with my hunter-gatherer sensibilities).  I felt not a little bit unlike the Three Stooges (all five of them) as I attempted several times to adjust my hat to a position that would allow it to withstand the springtime gales that were buffeting my person without losing my grip on the aforementioned pops or the grocery items - all to no avail.  It was a tense several seconds.  Anyway, I finally just took off my hat and got in the car.

Epilogue:  As I was getting into the car, the grocery bag ripped and would have fallen to the ground, but I caught it. 

My daughter got a pink monkey for her birthday.  You push it's foot and it sings and dances to part of the theme song from (of all things) "The Monkees".  She will dance right along with it and can't seem to get enough.  She calls it, "Aaaa Aaaa", named after the sound a monkey makes.

The alarm went off

but I had to scoff.  I'm still tired,

in sleep I'm mired.  Can't you see

it's all about me?  I slept in,

I did it again, I missed my date,

hope it's not too late.  I sprang out of bed,

face turning red.  How could I be so lazy?

I must have been crazy.  Places to go,

seeds to sow, letters to send,

fences to mend.  Life's too short

to always resort, to hitting the snooze,

and missing the news.  It's not too late,

don't procrastinate.  Renew your mind,

don't be blind.  No picture's too worn.

No heart too torn.  Put back the pieces,

Love never ceases.