Summer Heat-Induced Ramblings

Weather.com is a pathologic liar. I've known this for years, and yet, I still place an unfailing trust in them. This gullibility combined with my stinginess has resulted in countless episodes of me nearly suffering from heat exhaustion. Early every morning, I eagerly check the weather (on weather.com), and based on their impressively incorrect predictions, I frequently decide it would be a good day to open up the house and let in the cool summer breezes (this desire is mostly motivated by my excitement over the prospect of saving money by turning the a/c off for the day - I literally get giddy over the $5 I could potentially save by being slightly too warm for my own good all day. On a side note, I clearly do not have a stable grasp of the traditional weather patterns of the varying seasons). Inevitably, because of this cycle of lies and blind trust, I end up covered in sweat, digging my nails into the carpet as I try to crawl across the floor in a last-ditch attempt to drag myself to a water source by no later than 10am, usually accompanied by an almost 2-year old screaming with excitement while he jumps on my dehydrated back, in accordance with the toddler law that "any adult on the floor is fair game."

In addition to this almost daily bout of overheating, as many of you know, there is a humanoid parasite growing inside of me. We're somewhere around the 2/3rds mark, and this not only aids on the rapidity of consuming heat exhaustion, but it also serves to diminish my already meager motivational inspirations.

To top it off, I recently went into battle with Dish Network. One day, out of the blue, our DVR stopped working. The receiver still got the satellite signal, so we could still watch live TV, but, as modernity would have us all believe, live TV is for losers. The defunct DVR hard drive meant not only could we no longer access all our previously recorded programs, nor make new recordings, but we couldn't even (*gasp*) pause live TV. After alerting Dish Network to the problem, they reassured me that this kind of thing "happens all the time," and they would send out a replacement receiver within 3-5 days.

Anxiously, I waited for UPS to deliver my new, hope-filled black box of TV recordability. Finally the day arrived. Husband helped me replace the old receiver and send it back to Dish. We patiently scrolled through countless channels and programming lists to repopulate our DVR schedule. Once again, I felt complete.

Then the unthinkable happened. My new DVR (that arrived in that UPS box with so many promises of years of pausable TV) stopped working. The power cord was faulty. After checking and re-checking our connections, I called Dish again to report the problem. They guided me through a 30 minute test procedure to ensure the issue was with the DVR, not the operator (although most of them were moot to begin with, as the box couldn't even turn on). Defeated, the customer service representative told me they would send out a replacement DVR (again) in 3-5 days (again). I waited.

In the meantime, with no working TV, Boy and I watched movies. He discovered his favorite movie is WALL-E. We have now seen WALL-E at least 20 times. Although, as far as children's movie addictions go, WALL-E is probably at the top of the list, as it has very little dialogue or music, and mostly consists of seemingly random beeps and whirs. Seemingly, because, after 20+ viewings, one can, remarkably, begin to memorize the precise timing of these electronic sound effects.

After a week of WALL-E and waiting, with no replacement DVR in sight, I called Dish Network again. They informed me that they had received my request for a second replacement DVR, but that they, in fact, have a policy that prevents them from sending out a new DVR within 2-3 days of having just sent one. But seeing as how the only situation that would necessitate replacement DVRs at such a frequency is the one we were in - that the initial replacement (refurbished) DVR sent to the customer was, itself, faulty - the only evident purpose of this policy is to prevent customers from receiving timely restoration of services. After "clearing up" our issues, Dish agreed to send me a second replacement DVR. In 3-5 days.

We now once again have working TV (and the power to record TV), I continue to turn my house into a sweat lodge most days, and I'm still incubating a fetus. However, I blame the combination of these three factors (and a great lacking of inspiration) for my failure to write a new blog post during the entire month of June. Although, logically, I should have had more time to write while WALL-E played on repeat (okay, that's a slight exaggeration; I don't think we ever watched it more than twice in one day), instead, I was seemingly crippled by the repetition, sweat, and increased hormones.

That being said, hopefully I will return to writing on a somewhat more regular schedule. But I make no promises, as weather.com is a known fabricator, and my longing for cool breezes will always play the fool to their trickery.

In related news, after having received multiple requests to post recipes of various food items I regularly prepare, I'm considering sprinkling the blog with a smattering of food-oriented entries. In general, I'm thinking of altering the content of the blog slightly, so as to include more current happenings (no cute anecdotes of the adorable things Boy does, I promise), much like this entry. If you feel strongly about this one way or the other, please leave me a comment, and I may or may not take your opinions into consideration, depending mostly on the current temperature and humidity level of my house, and any heat-induced hallucinations I may be experiencing at the time.

The Mystery of Trash

Much like the towel buying incident of my life, for an embarrassingly long time, the mystery of "taking the trash out" seemed to allude me. Like most families, my parents required my brothers and me to complete a list of weekly chores. My chores included helping with laundry, washing dishes many weekday nights, dusting and vacuuming various rooms, and cleaning the bathrooms. I didn't mind most of these, but I loathed cleaning the bathrooms, mainly because we lived in a house with five toilets and three boys. Maybe it was just my family, but the males in our house had a chronic inability to "hit their mark." All five toilet seats in our house suffered from a ubiquitous ring of dried pee.

Nearly every week I protested cleaning the toilets. I'd throw fits, stomping my feet, yelling to my mom about how unfair it was to make me clean the dried pee, when, clearly, I was not one of the culprits. In the time it took me to enact my protestation of the dramatically unfair, I easily could have cleaned all five bathrooms from start to finish. Finally, my mom's threats and demands succeeded, and I would resign myself to my Cinderella-eque fate, mumbling, between bouts of gagging, about the inequalities of life while scrubbing toilets on my hands and knees. The worst part about cleaning the toilets was that, inevitably, the minute I finished restoring one to its sparkling white state, one of the males would have to use it, and would, in true male-destructiveness, get pee on the seat. I assume the reason my mom didn't force them to just wipe down the seat every time after they went was because, like most males, they were not overly good at either remembering to do all those small tasks that greatly simplify the larger chores (rinsing dishes after using them, pushing in chairs, etc), or cleaning in general.

In contrast, my brothers had very few weekly chores. They had a habit of sneaking out of the kitchen on nights when they were supposed to clean the dishes (and some how getting away with it), and, in many cases, when my parents told them to do something, they would cheerily agree to it (as opposed to my overly dramatic refusals, followed by stubborn compliance) and then would simply "forget." For some reason, my parents both never figured out my brothers' schemes to avoid being productive members of our family, nor followed up on the agreed-upon chores and forced completion. In retrospect, I really should have just followed their example, instead of storing up so much resentment.

There was one chore, however, that my parents routinely forced my older brother to do: take out the trash. This was one he couldn't easily shirk and avoid, because it didn't take them long to revisit the kitchen trash can and realize it was still full. My brother hated taking out the trash about as much as I hated cleaning toilets (although, considering it took 2 minutes at the absolute, most stubbornly, slow pace, I don't see how the two are even comparable).

On a semi-weekly basis, my parents would engage my brother in battle over the trash.

"Brian, the trash is full. Go take it out."

Upon hearing this, Brian had two general choices of action: run from the room and pretend he didn't hear them, or begin to throw his own dramatic fit over the cruelties of life. If he chose the first path, he would inevitably end up heading down the second within a matter of minutes.

"But I HATE taking out the trash!!" he would wail.

My parents would insist.

He would stomp his feet and yell about the evils of "taking out the trash."

My parents stood firm.

Finally, realizing his defeat, Brian would sulk his way to the trash can, tie closed the bag, lift it out, and carry it out to the garage. In a matter of seconds, he would return, uninjured, and whistling happily to himself, only to leave the room and return to his video games. One of my parents usually replaced the garbage bag.

I sat through this occurrence countless times, observing his obvious distress, heartfelt protest, eventual crushing defeat, and the thirty seconds of labor required to get the trash bag to the garage. And then he would disappear into the garage.

Recognizing his performance as being remarkably similar to my own toilet-cleaning-induced frenzy, I had the utmost sympathy for him. However, from as far as I could tell, "taking out the trash" involved less than a full minute's worth of effort. To me, this clearly implied there was some devastating step I was missing - and this step obviously took place in the garage, the only place I couldn't witness the tortures of his chore.

This mystery of the required protest to taking out the trash endured in my mind for years. It was only exemplified by the countless jokes on sitcoms about lazy husbands who also dreaded this mandatory task. If so many people hated it so much, it simply had to be more complex than merely taking the trash bag out to the trash can. Surely an entire gender of mankind wouldn't react so violently against carrying a plastic bag twenty feet out to a plastic receptacle. There was something to "taking out the trash" that I was oblivious to. And it must have been absolutely dreadful (like cleaning a weeks' worth of your brothers' dried pee off of five different toilets, while on your hands and knees and breathing in the fumes of week old brother-pee).

For years I was thankful I had avoided this task falling to me. Not only must it have been truly terrible, but I was terrified I wouldn't be able to do it correctly, had it ever fallen to me, since I was blissfully unaware of the dreaded garage-phase of the chore. Had my parents ever asked me (which, fortunately, for my self-esteem, they didn't), I would have had to admit that I simply didn't know how.

In college, we had small trash cans in our dorm rooms, but all we had to do was empty our trash into the large dumpsters outside the dorms. To me, this meant we weren't really "taking the trash out," since it was so easy. Living in a dorm wasn't the same as living in a house. We weren't responsible for our own trash pick-up, and, consequently, we never had to perform the secret step. While living in Germany, I was provided with countless laminated pages on instruction on how to "take out the trash," since they separate and recycle every item of waste into five different colored bags. This was also so different than the traditional American experience, I assumed it was just in its own category of chores.

It wasn't until I got married and we lived in our own house that I ever had to face this dreaded chore on my own. Husband deployed to Iraq just six days after our big church wedding, so I was left in our house alone. Fortunately, we lived on an Army post, so we didn't have to arrange for our own trash pick-up; we were simply given a large trash receptacle and instructed that pick-up was on Wednesday mornings. After discreetly observing our neighbors, I learned that most people kept their receptacles on the side of their house (we didn't have garages - just car ports). Mimicking my neighbors (I'd make a good Stepford wife), I, too, kept my large receptacle by the side of the house. On Tuesday evening, I put my half-full bag of trash into it, wheeled it down to the curb (just as the neighbors had done with their own), went back in the house and restlessly slept, nervous I'd done something wrong, as I hadn't performed the mystery step.

Early Wednesday morning, I heard the garbage truck creaking its way around the neighborhood. I jumped out of bed and ran to the window, peering out between two slats of the terrible, 70's style blinds (ahh, government housing). I held my breath as they neared my house. I felt a cold sweat break out all over my body as they grabbed my trash can, turned it upside down and dumped the contents into the truck, returned it to the curb, and... drove on. I'd done it! I'd taken out the trash!! All by myself!!

Wait. It hit me. That literally was all there was to "taking out the trash." Somehow, in spite of the universal hatred of the chore, it actually only involved taking the trash out. I suddenly felt a stab of hatred toward my brother. All these years I'd pitied him. Thought his torture was similar to my own. Felt genuine camaraderie with him. And, as it turned out, he was just exceedingly lazy. But worse, my parents seemed to think his thirty seconds of work were equal to the weekly hour I spent scrubbing the bodily wastes of my brothers. Clearly, life is not fair.

It's been several years now since my first triumph with the American system of trash removal. I've lived in four houses, dealt with three different trash pick-up services, and, for the most part, have achieved a level of comfort with my ability to successfully "take out the trash."

Although, I do have to admit, Husband and I still regularly get into arguments about what we can and cannot throw away. Just recently, after our move, I called our new trash pick-up service to inquire about getting rid of all our extra boxes (both the empty flattened boxes, and the two dozen or so giant wardrobe boxes full of used packing paper). I was informed that the garbage truck "will not take more than 10 flattened boxes a week." I resigned myself to finding a recycling center in the area, ensuring they would take the large wardrobe boxes full of paper, and making dozens of trips out to them. I figured, within two months, we should be able to get rid of all the boxes.

Husband, however, insisted we just try to throw the boxes out. Start out small. One wardrobe box at a time. The first week, I found myself once again, hunched down by my windowsill, peering out at the garbage truck, holding my breath, sweating profusely, and watching in fear as they pulled up to our house. And there, before my very eyes, I watched them as they... took our trash. Just like we pay them to do. Fascinating!! The next week, Husband put out four large boxes. Again, the anxious wait in the shadows of my curtains. And again, another successful "taking out the trash" incident. By the fourth week of putting out boxes, I was less nervous, but still snuck peeks when I heard the truck rumbling down the street. Eventually, the garbage men (and woman) cleared our garage of boxes (I posted an ad for the empty, flattened boxes on some local website and got rid of them in a matter of hours).

And so it was that I uncovered the truth about "taking out the trash." Clearly, the only conclusion to draw is that men are ridiculous. If Husband or Boy ever try to complain about performing this simple duty, I'll be sure to put them on toilet duty for a month. Although, the fact remains that it's still their pee on the toilet.

The Day I Defeated Peer Pressure

In third grade, my school began our lengthy D.A.R.E. (Drug Awareness and Something-that-starts-with-R Education, or something equally as catchy) program. We spent hours in class learning about drugs. Mostly cigarettes (because to us naive 8 year olds, cigarettes were by far the worst drug in existence). We learned how they can give you lung cancer, and how the smoke can be harmful to other people. In my mind, that translated to "only bad people smoke cigarettes."

We also learned about Peer Pressure. This terrified me. To me, this was something that didn't happen until high school - but it was an inevitable horror I was doomed to face. Nameless high school bullies would corner me in the massive, yet deserted hallways between classes, and they would force drugs upon me. Because, to me, drugs were cigarettes, this meant these bullies (usually boys with long, scraggly pony tails and ominous black t-shirts, in my visions) would be literally trying to force cigarettes into my mouth and lighting them, and I would have no choice but to smoke it, or risk never breathing again (as I couldn't logically breathe without smoking if a cigarette were being held to my mouth).

After learning of the dangers lurking in those thin, white tubes, we were sent home with a survey sheet and instructed to ask both our parents the questions, so we could come back to class the next day and discuss the realities of drug abuse in our personal lives. The survey included a few memorable questions, including: "Do you smoke cigarettes?" "Did you ever smoke cigarettes?" "Were you ever negatively affected by Peer Pressure?"

I, being the very straight-arrow, goody-two-shoes little girl that I was, was beyond eager to go home and question my parents on these most intimate details of their youth and early adulthood (it didn't occur to me that my parents could have actually smoked before they were 18, seeing as how that would have been illegal).

I questioned my mom first. But I had the upper-hand through our interrogation, as I knew already that my mom had smoked. She'd told me before that she smoked until she got pregnant with my older brother, and then she'd quit.

Smugly, I asked her, "So, Mom. Have you ever smoked before?"

She calmly gave me her feeble story of knowing the dangers of smoking and quitting when she knew she would be putting her child's health at risk. I wrote down her answers with a feeling of superiority. Clearly, I had never smoked, so I viewed myself as better than her in a way - Peer Pressure hadn't gotten to me. Oh, my poor, simple mother and her misguided cigarette smoking ways. She just wasn't strong enough to stand up to Peer Pressure! (I learned later in life that, more than likely, my mom was the one who pressured her friends to smoke - in high school, nonetheless - as she was a bit of a rebel. She staged walk-outs at college, was out there burning her bra with the best of them, and actually smoked things other than just cigarettes; though, fortunately, our survey didn't ask that, as I believe my innocent little school girl head might have exploded at that prospect.) The rest of her answers were insignificant to me. I already had all the information I needed. My mother had been a smoker.

I waited with such eager anticipation for my dad to come home that night. Finally, after dinner, I got my chance to interview him. Approaching the questions with true curiosity and no bias whatsoever, I asked him the first question, "Dad, have you ever smoked cigarettes?"

"No," was his clear and simple answer.

I was stunned. My father. Had never smoked a cigarette.

"Never?!" I screeched incredulously. "Not a single cigarette? Not even a cigar??"

"No," he said smiling, proud of his lungs' clean bill of health and the studiousness of his youth.

In light of this revelation, my father became a super hero in my mind. He had never smoked anything. In. His. Life. He was invincible. He had stared Peer Pressure in its cold, dead eyes, and he had come out victorious. Nothing could stop him. He was... My Dad.

At that moment, I made a promise to myself. No matter how great the Pressures offered by my Peers, no matter my age, location, or situation, I would not smoke cigarettes (or anything else, for that matter). If My Dad could do it, surely I could, too. I would build on the strength I had inherited from him to say "no" to Peer Pressure, and my lungs, too, would remain smoke free for all time. Together, we were an unstoppable force of Peer Pressure negation.

Years later, while working at a t-shirt printing store in the local mall, my worst fears came to fruition. I worked with a boy around my age who, ironically, had a long, scraggly pony tail, and frequently wore black t-shirts. One day, he told me he was going out for a smoke break. I expected him to be gone shortly after informing me of this, but when I turned around, I noticed he was still there.

"Why don't you come with me? You could borrow a smoke from me." Oh, Peer Pressure, you sly beast, you. Taking on the form of Austin's body, just to try and press your evil wears upon me. Knowing this with the pinnacle of my D.A.R.E. training, I looked him straight in the eyes and, squinting ever so slightly against the glare of his dark temptation, I stated, "I don't smoke."

"What? Sure you do. Everybody smokes. Come on." Trying your best, I see, Peer Pressure. Well it won't work on me!

"No, I don't. I never have. I'm not going to start now." Taking out the big guns now.

And to my absolute surprise (but surely, somewhere in my subconscious, I knew this day would come - I'd dreamt about it since the third grade), Austin actually stepped closer to me, and literally tried to shove a cigarette into my mouth.

I pushed him away, and, in the process, broke his cigarette. He told me I'd have to buy him a new one, and I just laughed at him. Poor, defeated Peer Pressure. One last attempt to get me on your side, but it won't work. I will not contribute to that filthy practice. Austin left to go on his smoke break without further incident.

A year or two later, one evening, when I was home with My Dad, he made some snide, joking comment about me being a "bad kid," implying that he believed I smoked and drank (thus further propagating the wrongly assumed belief that so many people have of me as a pot head). I laughed and informed him that, not only did I not drink, but I had never, not even once in my entire life, smoked anything. All because of that D.A.R.E. survey in third grade, and My Dad's unique ability to defeat Peer Pressure. "No, Dad, I've never smoked anything, because I wanted to grow up and be like you - and you told me in third grade that you'd never smoked. Anything."

My father got a surprised look on his face. "I told you that?" He said while starting to chuckle. "Well, that was a lie."

The sound of your known world crashing around you can truly be defined as a "deafening silence." The room stood still as everything I'd ever known, the very principles upon which I'd based my entire life's ethic shattered with those simple words: "that was a lie." I couldn't breathe. How could he have lied? He was My Dad! He was a super hero! Together we could defeat Peer Pressure! And yet, it had all been an innocent lie to guide a third grader on the right path through life.

That part of the lie, at least, succeeded. And quite well. As of that moment, I was determined to rebuild my life's principles. So everything had been a lie. I had still conquered Peer Pressure, even without My Dad at my side. He may have lied, but I'd inherited the strength and will power, nonetheless. I could continue our saga even in his absence. I made a new vow to myself that I would never smoke anything, not even once, in my entire life, so that when my own children were in third grade and came home with a D.A.R.E. questionnaire about cigarettes and smoking, I could tell them in all honesty that I had, in fact, not ever, not even one little time, ever in my life smoked anything.

I could feel the super powers begin to flush through my veins.

My Brother Doesn't Keep His Promises

I am about five years older than my younger brother. Because of the age difference, we never really fought, but we also didn't have much in common. He, like my older brother, is a very intelligent person, but he has a few social quirks. I'm not sure if it's a result of being so much younger than Brian and I, or if maybe something we did contributed to it (we used to like to throw a blanket over his head and pretend to hold it down over him. Evidently, he was claustrophobic, so we wouldn't actually have to hold it down, and he would just lie in a lump under it and scream. In retrospect, I think we were terrible older siblings), but for whatever reason, he's always been a very independent, relatively quiet person.

He, much like me, suffers from being a "stupid smart person." I once asked him what month was the 8th month (he was at least in junior high at this point), and he not only couldn't tell me off the top of his head, but he had no idea that months had corresponding numbers with which to identify them. He was, however, currently reading Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." After talking on the phone to someone, if asked what they said immediately upon hanging up, he couldn't tell you if his life depended on it. But he can build a computer from scratch.

He's also always been a very contemplative person. When he was just two years old, he would sit quietly in a chair in a room by himself and think. If you asked what he was doing, he'd calmly reply, "just thinking of something."

Because of his known thoughtful demeanor, it was especially disconcerting one day when he was three years old, sitting calmly and thinking by himself, and turned to me and said, "When I'm 21, I'm going to get an ax and cut your head off."

We hadn't been arguing or fighting (and I don't think we'd started the blanket-torture game yet), and he had stated his intentions so matter-of-factly, I got chills. I remember running to my mom and screaming, "Brett said he's going to cut my head off with an ax!!"

My poor mother sighed. "Where is he going to get an ax? Does he have one now? If not, you're probably safe." I explained that he said he would do it when he was 21 (most likely, he figured he'd have to be 21 - a legal adult - before he could purchase his own head-cutting-off ax; he really had put a lot of thought into this) and she brushed off my urgency, "Well then, you've got a few years left."

My mother might not have been concerned about the future of her children, but she hadn't seen the completely calm, sane, rational look in his eyes when he made his fateful promise. He'd thought out the logistics, and his plan had been set in place. At the innocent young age of three, he set our destinies in stone.

Over the years, I thought on and off about this incident (more off than on), and occasionally counted down the years I had left to live. I didn't really believe he was going to get an ax and cut my head off, but the thought did frequently resurface, just to remind me of its existence.

A year and a half ago, when I was planning a gigantic Thanksgiving feast at our house, a terrifying realization dawned on me. Brett would not only be attending our festivities, but he would be celebrating his 21st birthday just six days prior. I tried to push the thought out of my mind, reassuring myself that he had not only not meant what he said, but surely he'd forgotten it nearly 17 years later. But I hadn't.

I told Husband about my fears. He laughed at me (in retrospect, the logical reaction to have), and told me I was being ridiculous. Of course Brett had forgotten. Such a sympathetic man I married.

We had 17 adults and two kids at our Thanksgiving-fest-o-rama. I figured this was the best protection possible. Even if Brett had remembered, and had been serious, it would be hard to get me alone to cut my head off. He clearly wasn't insane enough to cut my head off in front of 15 other people. Plus, he'd had to fly into town - an ax was blatantly not going to make it through TSA security (he'd only brought carry-on luggage). I made sure we didn't have a ax lying anywhere around our house, and double checked to ensure the neighbors' garages were all closed, in the unlucky scenario that they had axes stowed away.

Thanksgiving evening, after everyone was full of delicious food and drink, and we were sitting around playing Mexican Train Dominoes, my fearless protector thought it would be an appropriate time to reminisce.

"Hey Brett!" Husband called out. "Do you remember telling Laura you were going to get an ax and cut her head off when you were 21?" Brett, maintaining his composure, laughed and simply said, "no."

After recollecting for him the story of his calm 3-year old coolness as he swore to be the purveyor of my demise, we all had a good laugh. Brett claimed not to remember the incident and found it especially humorous that I'd been mildly concerned about his threat for the past 17 years. A good performance, for sure.

The weekend ended without head-chopping-off incident. I saw Brett again once during that year, but didn't bring up the ax-promise, and managed to keep my head secured to my neck through the visit.

When his birthday rolled around again last November, I breathed a sigh of relief. Brett was no longer 21. I was free! He hadn't cut my head off with an ax (not that I ever really thought he would, right?). In my state of jubilation, I excitedly told Husband the good news - my life was no longer at risk!!

Husband greeted my enthusiasm with his infuriating logic, "Yeah, unless he just meant at least 21 years old. Since he didn't specify that it would happen 'during his 21st year,' he feasibly could have meant any time after he turned 21. Guess you're not safe after all."

Why You Shouldn't Smuggle Drugs Into Norway

The year after I graduated from college, I got a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year in Germany, working as a teaching assistant in English at a German high school. I lived in Göttingen, a small town in central Germany. Whenever my skills as a bilingual dictionary weren't being abused by the school (they must have missed the "assistant" part of my job title), I tried to travel as much as possible. This often led to a week of near-starvation at the end of every month, as the US State Department grossly underestimates how much monthly bills as a TA in Germany add up to be, but for me, the choice was usually an easy one. Who wouldn't rather see amazing new cities than eat?

When a group of my friends scattered around Germany (not all were Fulbrights) found round-trip plane tickets to Oslo for 22€ (around $30 at the time), we jumped at the chance. I saved up as much money as I could in preparation (about $100), and eagerly counted down the days until our journey.

The day before our flight left, we all met up in Berlin. Our flight was out of the capital city, and some of the people going with us were lucky enough to be living there. As I've told you before, I used to live in Berlin, so I was thrilled to go back "home" for the day. I met up with my friends who lived there, we walked around town (because that's what you do in Berlin), ate some pizza, and then went to one of their friend's apartments, where everyone smoked a lot of pot. Except me. Because I don't smoke pot. But that is actually a very good story for another time. People have always told me they're very surprised when they learn that I don't smoke pot (and never have). I'm never quite sure how to interpret that...

The next morning, the group of us heading to Oslo woke up bright and early (and hungover), to head to one of Berlin's three airports. The excitement of the impending trip helped with our headaches (I do drink - well, at least I used to, before the whole "having children" phase of life), and by the time we were on the plane, everyone was in great spirits. We were going to Oslo! That's in NORWAY!!

The plane landed after a surprisingly short flight (Europe is really small if you spent your childhood road-tripping across the US). Because we were a group of nerds, we were all very excited about the possibility of getting our passports stamped; Norway is, after all, not part of the European Union. We deplaned and got in line, eager to show the important man behind the glass our passports. We talked eagerly amongst ourselves until it was our turn. We all approached at once, spilling our enthusiasm all over the passport man, who, in turn, didn't really care that we were coming in to his country, and didn't stamp our passports.

Mildly disappointed, but determined not to let that minor glitch get to us, we followed the line out of the customs area of the airport, which led through these giant glass doors and into the unsecured area. A woman a short distance in front of us had an adorable cocker spaniel that was holding up the line. An airport official was with them and pulled the dog out of the line. Before long, we were walking past them ourselves. One of the girls in our group bent down to pet the adorable, friendly family pet. She stood up just in time to be briskly whisked away by 7-foot tall Blond Giants into a secret door behind the hallway we were currently walking down. The rest of us froze in horror as the dog greeted us in his friendly way and the airport official told us gruffly to keep walking.

Before I had any idea what was happening, we were on the other side of the big glass doors, minus one member of our party.

"What the hell happened to Jill??" I tried to keep my voice from exploding into a scream (by the way, her name is clearly not Jill).

"She had pot on her," I was calmly and quietly informed. Panic began to set over the rest of our group as we stood like lost and confused sheep, directly on the other side of the big glass doors. It didn't take long for the giant blond people to approach us and tell us to "move along." We tried to inquire after our comrade, but all they would say was that she had been arrested.

As the recently deplaned crowed thinned out, we realized we were not the only group nervously pacing and waiting on a kidnapped party. A group of Middle Eastern-looking men were next to us looking just as nervous. It quickly became an unspoken competition to see whose abductee would be the first to show. We lost.

We moved away from the doors, but continued to mill around aimlessly. After waiting close to 45 minutes, another Middle Eastern-looking young man came through the doors, and the other party perked up instantly. They shot us victoriously smug glances as they walked away to Norwegian freedom. Finally, after another 30 minutes or so, Jill emerged. Escorted by one of the extremely tall, perfectly white-haired Norwegian Blond Giant police officers. He quietly informed her that she could have a word with us. She walked over to us and we erupted into a bombardment of questions.

"What's going on?" "Are you going to jail?" "You had pot on you?" "That COCKER SPANIEL was a DRUG DOG?!" "Who the hell makes a cocker spaniel a drug dog?!" "It didn't even occur to us that a cocker spaniel could be a drug dog!" "Did YOU know a cocker spaniel could be a drug dog?" "Are you okay?" "What the hell are we going to do?"

Jill managed to keep her cool (although she was clearly shaken as well). She informed us that they were not going to make her go down to the police station. She had been officially arrested, and would have to pay a fine, but she would be released to go with us - in just a few hours. She told us we could go on to the hotel, but we decided, after all the trauma we'd already been through, it would be best to stick together as much as possible. The Blond Giant approached us from behind, and, in his hilarious Norwegian accent informed us that, "Iht was tihme to go bahck." First he escorted her to a near-by ATM, then walked her back through the big glass doors. He wouldn't let her say anything else to us. We stood in slightly calmed desperation, watching our adorable little friend being dragged back to Blond Giant airport prison.

We spent the next two hours getting to know the airport and writing prison letters to our dear friend in lock-up. While waiting, we had another terrible realization: Norway is insanely expensive. We had to share airport food, because we couldn't afford to each eat our own meal. It was the start to a very thrifty four day vacation, which included switching from our decent hotel to a not-so-decent hostel, walking through miles of very cold snow (our visit was in early January - no wonder tickets were only $30!), and eating at gas stations to try and save money, where even the gas station attendants speak English ("Hof course, Ih speahk Henglish").

Finally, our Jill was released to us. She came out through the giant glass doors, once again, but this time without her perfect aryan escort. We sat on a bench outside the airport trying to recover from the terror and fear we'd all just endured (Jill more than any of us) for the last three+ hours. After ensuring Jill was doing better and feeling okay (she even laughed at our prison love-letters), one of the other girls in the group got a sly grin on her face.

"Don't worry, Jill. It'll be okay," she said, quietly, through the conspiratory grin. "They didn't catch me." She pat her bag.

I was shocked. I stared in absolute disbelief. There is no way TWO people in our group attempted to smuggle illegal drugs across countries - especially going from an EU country to a non-EU country, where we were sure to have to go through customs. And yet... here we were. Maybe it's just because I don't smoke pot, but I was starting to question the ability of my friends to make appropriate critical thinking decisions.

Finally, we set out on our way to our (expensive) hotel (that we could only afford to stay in for one night). As soon as we were there, my friends "partook" in the illegal substance they were able to bring along. My disbelief had started to wear off (after all, I have spent a good deal of time with people who do smoke regularly - maybe that's why people are always surprised to learn I don't...) And then, Jill blew my mind (and I wasn't even the high one, people!!).

She confessed to us that this was not the first time she'd smuggled marijuana illegally into another country. In fact, she'd done it just a few weeks before. When she went to ISTANBUL. In TURKEY. Where they probably would have thrown her in jail for a few years (if she was lucky), had she'd been caught. Although now, in retrospect of our afternoon, Jill was lamenting her foolishness and expressing her intense gratitude at being caught this time, in civilized and polite Norway, rather than terrifying and outrageously-strict-on-drug-smugglers Turkey.

The rest of our trip was significantly less eventful and overall very enjoyable. Albeit very cold. Oslo is a beautiful city (even in several inches of packed snow), and we had a great time seeing authentic Viking ships from the 800's, Munch's "The Scream," trying to find Bunny Island, tracking down the tallest person we could find (he turned out to be a German baker who was well over 7 feet tall - we figured he must have moved to Norway to finally live somewhere where he could fit through all the doorways), seeing giant Norwegian fishing boats, shopping at authentic Norwegian butchers (with real stuffed reindeer in the window), watching all the beautiful Blond Giants at their annual equivalent of the Oscars, talking in our best (terrible) Norwegian accents, and tromping through the snow.

And of course, smoking a little grass.

The Day I Realized My Boss Was a Serial Killer

I used to work for a wireless company's network. As part of my job requirements, I had to make sure all the individual buildings underneath each cell phone tower were up to the company's safety and environmental codes, as well as conduct inventory on every piece of equipment at every site. This probably would have been a terrible job in a lot of places in the country, but we were based out of El Paso, with our region extending through western Texas and the southern half of New Mexico - so many of our towers were on top of big, gorgeous desert mountains with absolutely amazing views. However, this meant that, for many of the sites, I had to get a ride with my boss, as my company vehicle was just a small SUV, not capable of going up the very steep, rocky mountain sides like the big trucks could.

I got along with my boss fairly well. We had drastically different life views, but as long as we didn't talk about the big three (well, two, really, as money was never a very interesting topic of discussion, anyway - he had quite a bit of it, and I didn't, and beyond that, it was pretty boring to discuss), we usually passed the hours in the truck, driving across the southwestern desert, rather enjoyably.

My boss, I'll call him Jim for this story's sake, was one of the most unlucky people I've ever met. He had a terrible habit of being in the wrong place at the exact wrong time. When he was younger, he had been a police officer in several different states, so he had a decent amount of medical emergency training and was good at handling crisis situations - which was a good skill to have, considering his terrible luck.

Shortly after I started working for him, Jim was the first person to come across a terrible accident just outside the city limits. If you've ever been to El Paso, you know that the city kind of ends abruptly and the desert takes over - and there are few, if any, street lights or marked street signs once you leave town. He was driving home one night (he lived in suburb of El Paso, but knew shortcuts across desert roads, because our towers were everywhere, and we probably knew the layout of the city and desert roads better than anyone in the town), and he was the first person to arrive at the accident. A drunk driver had hit a car full of local college students and then fled the scene. Jim jumped out to start assessing the situation while they waited for the police and emergency services to arrive. One girl was very badly injured, and he recognized this. He sat down in the dirt and tried to talk calmly to her, reassuring her that she would be okay, and knowing that she wouldn't.

He didn't talk much about the accident after it happened, except to say how much it had disturbed him. Even after the years of being a cop, a gruesome car accident could still get to him.

And that was just the beginning. Over the months that I knew and worked with him, more and more terrible things kept happening around him. His best friend from high school (who lived in another state) was diagnosed with cancer, and had a freak allergic reaction to one of the medications they gave her, and she ended up dying. He accidentally ran over and killed two dogs on the busy street right outside his neighborhood. His truck was stolen from a parking lot, but was fortunately recovered right before the thieves could get it over the border into Mexico. He walked into a gas station just moments after it had been held up, only to find a man having a heart attack. He quickly jumped into action, and managed to keep the man breathing until paramedics arrived. He later went to visit the man as he was recovering in the hospital, only for the man to have a stroke minutes before he got to the room to visit him.

At first, I was skeptical of the truth of all these things. It seemed so crazy that he was so often the first person at the scene of the accident. But, because I spent a decent amount of time driving in the company vehicle with him, I became witness to his terrible luck first hand.

One day, as we were driving to a cell site in a town north of El Paso, we came across a terrible accident in the middle of the highway, just south of the town. As was Jim's luck, we were one of the first cars at the scene. A drunken man in a motorized wheelchair had been trying to cross the highway - and a young 17 year old girl, driving her boyfriend's mother's car, had accidentally hit him, going about 50 miles an hour. Somehow, the man was still alive. Jim jumped out right away and began trying to stabilize the man until the paramedics arrived. I stood back and watched in horror. It was truly a terrible scene, and I'm not sure whether or not the man ended up living or dying (he was taken away in the ambulance alive, though).

Another day, while driving on the interstate through El Paso, an SUV full of drunk young men hit us. They tore off the driver's side mirror, but, fortunately, caused little other damage. We watched the SUV play pin ball through the traffic in front of us, hitting nearly every car it tried to pass. We called the police, and they informed us that they had too many other things going on at the moment and couldn't send a single one of their 30 on-duty patrol cars to stop the drunk driver flying down the city's interstate. Thankfully, they managed not to kill anyone.

But Jim's bad luck streak just wouldn't quit. He had previously been a youth pastor at his church in the suburb of town, but had recently quit for personal reasons. However, he kept in contact with many of his students, as he had developed caring relationships with them. One day, one of the girls from his youth group (who was only 16) was hospitalized after her boyfriend brutally beat and raped her when she refused consensual sex. Later, he informed me that she had died due to the extensive trauma to her brain.

On top of everything else, he was in the middle of a very ugly divorce. His wife made a claim to the police that he had hit her, and she got a restraining order against him. Then she proceeded to torture him with it, repeatedly calling the police to say he'd violated the restraining order, or making anonymous calls at 3am that he was throwing loud parties and giving underage kids alcohol, or that he had weapons in the home (a violation of the restraining order), which gave them the right to repeatedly search his house.

I listened in horror to all these terrible things that happened to and around him. Although some of them were hard to believe (or too terrible to believe), knowing that these sorts of things did have a habit of happening to him, and that he really did just have terrible luck, I took him at his word and oftentimes felt sorry for him.

One morning, he had a court appointment first thing, and would be coming in to work a few hours late. We had a tour of the office scheduled for a group of the company's sales associates who wanted to learn more about the network side of things, and he had promised he'd be in to the office on time, so I wouldn't have to stumble my way awkwardly through the tour. Fifteen minutes before they were scheduled to be there, I started to get a little nervous, so I sent him a text, asking if he was still planning on being there on time.

"Got pulled over. Think I can still make it," he replied.

I sat at my desk, anxiously tapping my foot and hoping the group wouldn't arrive early. I had no idea how to entertain them, and my limited knowledge of how things worked (inventory, mostly) was surely not the exciting network tour they were anticipating.

Unfortunately, the group beat Jim to the office by about two minutes. I asked them if they could take a seat in the conference room and wait a moment for him to get there. I assured them the tour would be much more enjoyable with him as a tour guide, instead of me.

I rushed back to my desk and was about to text Jim again, to let him know they had arrived, when he burst through the warehouse door, wiping his arm with a towel. But not just any towel. This towel looked like it had blood on it.

He came over to me and said, "Get me a roll of paper towels and bring it out to my car." "But the tour group -" I started. His icy glare told me to drop it and just get the paper towels.

I met him back out as his car, handed him the paper towels, and as I watched him clean up what looked like blood splatters from the door frame of his car, I noticed that his arms didn't have any cuts. Using my extensive powers of deductive reasoning, I realized, this was likely not his blood.

"What happened?!" I asked, but he ignored the question, walked past me, and went into the building to give the tour, as if it were nothing usual at all.

After the tour group left, he sat me down in the conference room to explain. He said he had been pulled over by the cop, right in front of a school zone near the office. While the cop had his truck pulled over on the shoulder, a teenager from the school had darted out in front of his truck, clearly without looking both ways first, and had run into the street, only to be hit by a passing car that hadn't been able to see around the pulled over cop car and big truck. Because of his training, Jim stepped right in with the cop to give emergency attention to the young boy as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. He said the boy wasn't hurt too badly, and the cop was so thankful for the extra set of hands, he let Jim go with just a verbal warning.

A few days later, we were back in Jim's truck, driving across the desert to another cell site. Things were going along pleasantly enough, when he asked me to reach into the back seat and get a binder of papers we needed to do the inventory. I lifted up the binder, and underneath it, there was a big red stain on the seat cushion - right next to a mostly empty bottle of red food coloring.

My mind froze. I literally went cold all over as the truth spread down my body and into my appendages. I could feel the cold, tingly dread of realization as it leaked into every inch of my being. If your heart really can stand still, mine surely did in that moment.

"What are you doing?" Jim's calm, normal-person voice cut through me. I must have still been leaning back into the seat behind me, too frozen in my realization-terror to move.

"You spilled red food coloring on the seat!" I blurted out before I could stop myself.

For a split second, I saw the dark cloud cross Jim's eyes. But he regained his sane-person persona and calmly explained, "oh yeah, I bought some cake supplies to help some of my kids [youth group students] bake a cake the other day. I forgot to make sure the cap was on that one all the way before I threw it back there! There's a green one back there, too, somewhere." As if that made his story believable. I looked back, and, sure enough, there was a green bottle of food coloring, too. Except that it was in a cup holder, and it had never been opened.

"Oh! That's awfully nice of you." I said, too easily. Surely real me, the belligerent me he's known all these months wouldn't have just accepted such a weak story at face-value. He HAD to know I suspected something. I quickly tried to change the subject, just to show him how believable his story was. "So, another hot day in the desert, huh?" I joked.

After I feebly convinced him of my lack of suspicion and he got talking about something or other, I had a moment to think. Convinced he could see through my weak agreeableness, I just knew he was going to drive us further out into the desert (even though we were pretty far into deserted isolation as it was) and murder me. This must be what he does with all his victims. And really, the area couldn't be more perfect for it. With endless miles upon miles of uninhabitable desert, with a truck big enough to off-road through it, the southwestern desert really does provide a perfect, hidden-in-clear-sight graveyard.

But some how, miraculously, he didn't murder me. Not then, and, so far, not yet. When we got back to civilization, and I got back to the comfort and security of my own home, I began to think back on all his stories of bad luck. I didn't get a newspaper in El Paso, but they still have newspaper archives online. I quickly set out on a massive search to find evidence of any of his past claims of disaster. If the high school boy was made up, were the others, as well?

The more I thought about it, the more of an idiot I felt like. Surely, if four local college students had been in a drunk driving accident and one of them died, it would have made local, if not national news. And yet, no word anywhere. If an underage girl was raped and murdered by her of-age boyfriend, that would have obviously made the news. In a town where someone's apartment catching on fire makes the nightly news, logically, I would have heard about a gas station being held up at gun-point, resulting in a man having a heart attack and ultimately dying of a stroke in the hospital, wouldn't I? I didn't get the local paper, but I wasn't living isolated in a cave, either.

I didn't sleep that entire night. I was too terrified to go into work the next day. But maybe he really did believe that I believed his feeble story about cake decorating? He did think I was kind of an idiot, after all. Whenever he started talking about something that I either didn't care about or really disagreed with but didn't have the energy to argue, I simply agreed and said, "oh, that's interesting." (I've found that to be a very useful survival technique in many situations, actually - there are probably a lot of people who think I'm either very naive or very gullible and kind of stupid, simply because I don't have the energy to argue reality most of the time.) Maybe I had somehow managed to win back his trust! Maybe I wasn't going to be murdered and have my body left for the coyotes in the middle of the desert! Nevertheless, I told Husband (who was deployed in Iraq through all of this), that if I suddenly disappeared, Jim had murdered me, and my body was somewhere in the desert. Husband didn't think this was overly funny, but I didn't really think it was entirely a joke, either.

To this day, I'm still a little frightened of Jim. I actually have occasional nightmares about him just showing up at the house. Although once I got over all the lies and just accepted that he was most likely a habitual liar, I still really rather liked him and got along with him pretty well. It also made being sympathetic toward him much easier - I no longer had to exert any actual energy into feeling bad about the terrible situations he wasn't really ever in. But just in case he reads this and realizes I knew all along and just pretended to go along with his lies, if I suddenly disappear, you'll all know who to investigate first.

The Day I Almost Died

Most people I know have had their wisdom teeth removed, usually without much incident. But when a friend asks me how bad it really is, I usually tell them to settle their debts and say their good-byes to loved ones. I thought I was joking, but since Husband has been studying to become a PA, he's actually learned that I was frighteningly close to not surviving the Great Wisdom Tooth Disaster of 2001.

I had my wisdom teeth removed the day after I graduated from high school. All four were impacted and had started to bully my other teeth into breaking formation. Needless to say, they had to go - I didn't suffer through years of a palate expander, braces, and retainers just for some rogue wisdom teeth to destroy all that hard work. The actual removal was uneventful, aside from being the first and only time in my life I've been under general anesthetic. I remember waking up in the recovery room, my mouth stuffed full of cotton, and seeing the nurses tending to the girl next to me. Sure, she might have finished before me, but I was suddenly awake and needed attention.

I struggled to alert the nurses to my desires - namely, to get the mattress out of my mouth. They looked over at me, but clearly misread the urgency in my eyes and muffled attempts at pleading to be the standard waking-up noises of someone coming out of general anesthetic. After another agonizing five minutes, they finally came over to tend to me.

Leaving the clinic, I felt like I was capable of anything. They explained basic care and rest procedures for the up-coming days, and I nodded knowingly, as if to show I was making detailed mental notes of their instructions, and would have no problems complying exactly. In reality, I was so proud of myself for being able to act like I was paying such close attention and so minimally affected by the anesthesia that all my mental efforts went to congratulating myself on my astounding feat of trickery. I was an all-powerful goddess on ether. When it was time to leave, I stood up to stroll out (again, full of pride at my togetherness), but they forced me to sit in a wheelchair, against my super-human wishes. Unfortunately, they didn't put the foot rests down, and I spent the entire ride out to the car, focusing all my strength and energy into keeping my feet from dragging on the ground. A perfectly with-it person would have no trouble keeping their feet up, so I decided this was a vital part to my performance, accompanied by appropriate smiles, laughs, and idle joking. Looking back, I imagine I most likely looked more like a hopeless drunk, fidgeting awkwardly in the wheelchair and struggling to stay seated in it in general, laughing and nodding to the sounds in my head, and most likely drooling a little down the front of my shirt.

I got in to the passenger seat and instructed my mom to go through a drive-thru and get me a vanilla shake - I did manage to at least hear that part of the nurses' instructions - I needed to eat something in order to take all the pain meds they had given me. On our way, I reclined my seat all the way back (while mumbling incoherently to my mom about my amazing, new-found goddess powers) and dozed off. I woke up suddenly while we were in the drive-thru lane and realized I couldn't see. I started screaming at my mom that I'd gone blind (so much for super-human abilities!). She calmly told me to sit up - and, upon looking out the window, I realized I was not, in fact, blind, but had merely been staring at the inside of the door. Ahh, a simple mistake for us super-humans.

When we got home, I took the pain meds I had been prescribed, drank two sips of the giant shake, and promptly passed out. I continued this routine (with a progressively soggier shake) for at least a day and a half. And then the fun began.

Earlier in high school, I had been diagnosed with mild stomach ulcers. I probably should have told the oral surgeons this. Or at least drank the entire milk shake when I took the pain meds. Instead, I thought I was still a super-human. Oh, how very wrong I was. I started a cycle of dry-heaving for 20 minutes, vomiting for 5 minutes, and then sobbing hysterically for 5 minutes before starting the cycle over. This continued for approximately an entire day.

My parents brought my an empty gallon bucket of ice cream so I could vomit in bed, at my convenience (who wouldn't rather throw up in the comforts of their own bed?) . Needless to say, I couldn't keep the pain meds (or any sort of nutrition) down. I spent those terrible 24 hours in bed, sobbing, and wailing about how I just wanted to die.

Then, after an entire day of this, the pain started to overwhelm me. I actually got to the point where I couldn't cry, the pain was so bad. I moved to the couch downstairs and I remember staring at the ceiling for hours on end, knowing this was the end for me.

Finally, my mom came home and realized something was wrong (my parents have always been very good at picking up on small signals). She took me to the emergency room, where they decided that my ulcers were not agreeing with the very strong pain meds, and instructed her to take me back to the clinic. When we arrived at the clinic, people started rushing around urgently and talking quickly. This was the first time it dawned on me that my experience was not, in fact, the norm. They rushed me back to an exam room, took a bunch of x-rays, and continued talking quickly in hushed voices around me.

Then the surgeon came in. With an army of nurses. They positioned themselves around me and explained that I had obtained the dreaded "dry sockets." In all four of the holes (evidently, the rogue wisdom teeth just had to pull one more stunt before they left me for good). The doctor informed me that the bone was now infected. In all four holes. And that the infection was spreading down my jaw. They were "thankful" that I'd come in when I did. Then they proceeded to give me twelve shots of novocaine and pack the sockets with these very long ribbons full of antibiotics and anesthetics, that tasted, like one of the nurses said, like sucking on a mouthful of cloves. If you've never sucked on a whole clove, I suggest doing it. Really. Go try it. It tastes awesome.

The relief was instantaneous. I went home, happy and with a renewed view on life. At the advice of one of the nurses, I made myself a big glass of chocolate milk (to combat the clove taste), put it to my numb lips, and started drinking it's delicious chocolately milkiness. But I couldn't taste it! Oh, how far the super-human have fallen!! I tried for several more seconds until I realized my younger brother was laughing at me. As he pointed out, I wasn't, in fact, drinking the chocolate milk, I was pouring it down my shirt. I couldn't feel my mouth for about 16 hours after the novocaine shots.

I had to get my sockets re-packed every week for the following four weeks. To this day, I still can't handle the smell of cloves. I also couldn't take any more pain meds - even plain tylenol -because of the stomach ulcers that resurfaced when attacked by the very strong pain meds and lack of any sustenance for over 3 days.

A (very small) part of me thinks it's a shame that I didn't succumb to the poison death spreading through my bones, as it could have impacted all of oral surgery history forever - "How risky is it to get my wisdom teeth out, doc?" "You could DIE." It makes the whole process seem much more glamorous.