funny – doreenslife.com

Badger Mountain

Once upon a time, my husband and some friends were planning a hunting trip to Colorado, elk and mule deer hunting. I had heard many stories about past hunts and asked if I could go also.

I had hunted even before meeting my husband, and wanted a chance to see game, other then deer, rabbits, squirrel, etc.

Some of his group were not too happy about having a “woman go on a hunting trip”. Everything from bad luck to scratching and itching whenever they want.

Anyway, my husband said I could go. The morning we left, I had a terrible head and chest cold. I don’t know if it was emotions from leaving my teenage daughters with my parents for 10 days or what, but I felt awful. We pulled an enclosed trailer behind the truck with all of our supplies in it. We unhooked when we got to the camp, so we could drive around and check out the area.

Our cabin was very nice. It was more like a huge storage shed converted into such. The loft could sleep 8 comfortably, in sleeping bags, and there were 2 sets of bunk beds, and table with chairs and a wood burner for the rest of it.

The bathroom, however, was about 100 yards away, down and up a ravine. It was not enclosed and had a blue tarp in front of it to hide you sitting down. Your head and shoulders were above it looking at the cabin. Plus, the guy that let us stay there said they found mountain lion tracks as big as a bread plate, so I definitely was not going to the bathroom at night…

After stomping around a few days and not seeing but one elk that was so far away, I thought it was a dog, we decided to drive around and scout some places they might be.

The sign at the bottom of the hill said “Badger Mountain”. We started up in our dualie (a truck with 4 wheels across the back), and the road kept narrowing. I was on the outside edge and was seeing tree tops and a sheer drop off. I HATE heights especially combined with a drop off with no guard rails…

At one point, the road looked like it was smaller then our truck and I asked about it. My husband said that one tire of our back 4 was off the road, hanging over the abyss. Ok, so severe panic set in and I started yelling, “Let me out of this truck, right now”. If there had been a back window into the bed of the truck, I would have been out, but the road widened a little and he stopped for me to get out.

I don’t know what a person would do if someone was coming down the hill in a vehicle. There was NO passing room. It looked like we were about at a 500 foot drop off. I wished they had put me to sleep before we left, like the old “A Team” used to with B.A.

So, I’m walking down the mountain and began thinking, “This is called Badger Mountain. Why in the world did I leave my gun in the truck?”

A little while later, the guys came and picked me up. They found a slightly wider spot up the way, and eeked it back and forth until they got it turned around.

My husband never has gone back to Colorado since. Maybe too much yet. 🙂

The No Apple Apple Dumpling

Many years ago, my husband and I were out for the day. When we got hungry, we decided to go to a little cozy diner that we liked to frequent.

We had a nice lunch. We don’t usually order dessert, but we did this time because apple dumplings were on the menu board. Something we both love.

So, we got them warmed up with some ice cream. I was savoring every bite, eating it slowly to make it last. My husband was a few bites in and looked at me and said, “Does yours have any apples?”

Confused, I looked up and said, “Yeah, doesn’t yours?”

He said “no” so I said, “well, maybe you aren’t in far enough yet.”

So he keeps eating, taking a little ice cream with some bites. After about 10 minutes, the waitress came over and asked how they were. My husband said, “I’m two-thirds through and I haven’t found any apples.”

She leaned over and looked at his plate and said, “Oh my, someone got the pie crust ball instead of the dumpling.” She went on to explain that they freeze their pie dough in balls and thaw to roll out. They look the same in the freezer. We laughed and laughed.

The waitress then asked him if he wanted a real apple dumpling, he held his stomach and said, “No, I’m full on the dough ball I just ate”. So, she packed him one to go.

Ever since then, he puts a fork in the middle of any apple dumplings that he gets, pulls it apart a little, and makes sure there are apples in there.

Why Don’t Husbands Ever Listen

I’ve been married 22 years and I’ve asked myself this question probably 100 times. Our first few years of marriage, I worked six days a week in a factory and he worked 5 days a week in a grocery store. He is a meat cutter by trade.

So, one summer, I was working the next day and he had it off. He was going to mow grass and burn a brush pile we had. He had been mowing too close to the edge of our pond, so I told him he shouldn’t get so close. I had told him many, many times before, but reminded him again. We were also in a drought long enough that the grass was crunchy. I told him to hook up the hoses to the spigot outside and run it down close to the fire, in case it got out of hand.

I came home from work that day only to find him sitting in the easy chair with his feet up, watching television. I was a little irked, thinking he had spent his day doing nothing. Then he told me why he ended up there.

He was mowing around the pond, when the mower, with him on it, fell in. He had one knee in the muck, trying to push the mower up and out. Then after he got the truck and pulled out the mower, he put it away. Said it needed to dry out.

His next bright idea was to light the brush pile. As the grass started burning toward the woods in several different places, he had to run uphill, get the hoses, attach them to the spigot and started down with the hose. It was too short, so he had to run uphill and find buckets to fill. Then run back and forth filling buckets and throwing it at all the flames threatening the woods. So, okay, he’s off the hook for today.

The next thing I can think of, is he was going to spray some kind of dust into a yellow jacket nest that made its home on our back porch in the ceiling. I am a beekeeper, so I told him he should wear my bee helmet, long sleeves, and gloves to do that job. Next, I see him through the back door with a ball cap and short sleeves on, with some kind of sprayer, on a ladder, reaching up to the hole in the ceiling. I watch him spray one puff and then the dance was on…Yellow jackets don’t like it when you invade their territory and were flying around his head. I have never seen his hands move so fast. I was wishing I was video taping it.

You don’t have to feel bad for him, he only got one sting on his ear. The next time I looked on the porch, he had a bee helmet, long sleeves and gloves on. Hmmm…..

And why is it that when he comes home with some fantastic tidbit of information, it is usually something I have been telling him for years…

Hunting with Pam

I was raised in a good family. My Dad and Mom worked hard to give us a nice life. I had a lot of fun with friends and my brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles.

I’ve always had an interest in shooting guns. But my family was not really into it. When I was grown up, I had a boyfriend that took me target shooting with a .44 mag pistol. We went to a friends house for a party and they set up a box with sticker dots around it to shoot at.

I had done a little shooting with a .22 rifle and loved it. So I said I’d try the pistol. So, standing with both arms up in front of me with the pistol in hand, I took aim and shot straight through the 1″ dot at about 50 feet away. I took aim and did the same at the next dot. Nailed it. My boyfriend looked at me and asked if I was aiming at the dots. I said that I was, that’s why I hit them. He must not have quite believed me so he told me to aim at the lower right dot and “boom”, I put a bullet right through that dot. He said he would never make me mad…

So now, I wanted to deer hunt. I borrowed a 20 gauge gun from a friend of mine and went to my best friend, Pam’s house. We had been best friends for quite a few years and she wanted to get some deer for the freezer too.

She borrowed a gun and we went out to her woods the day before gun hunting season started. We looked for trails and took some hay bales out to hide behind and some chairs to sit in while we waited for the deer to come.

This was both of ours first time trying to hunt a deer. We went out in the dark and took our seats. Had drinks, snacks and a pad of paper and pen to write notes if we needed.

So we watched and listened, the sun came up and we heard shots over on the next hill. Basically we got bored and started writing funny notes back and forth to each other. Each of us tried to stifle the snickers and then belly laughs but the more we tried, the worse it got. We figured we scared every deer off of that whole valley that day. Probably had a lot of hunters not too happy with us.

I eventually got some deer in my freezer, but not hunting with Pam. We have too much fun to be serious hunters together. And that’s okay with us.

Bats

My earliest experience with bats was when I was about 11 years old. My family was staying in a cabin in Maine, for a vacation. My grandparents were there for the evening. I was playing “war” with cards with one of my brothers when we heard a scream. Grandma ran to the bed and pulled the covers over her head, soon followed by my mom, who called me under the covers with her.

My brothers were yelling and running around so I looked out from the covers and grandma was yelling, “a bat, a bat, get it!” I guess we got under the covers because bats fly around and get caught in women’s hair. I later found out this isn’t really true. But it sure made for a wild night, until grandpa got the bat.

When I moved into a 150 year old, two-story brick house, that I bought in the late 1990’s, I found out that bats were not what I had previously thought.

I worked afternoon shift, and one night after work, I was going to sleep on the couch on the first floor. I had a beagle that played games with the coons all night. He would lay on the door of his box and the coons would come to eat his food and drink his water. He let them start and would run out barking his head off. Run up and down the run, and when he was sure they were back far enough, he went and laid in the door again. Only to run out barking again in three minutes when they came back. With no neighbors to complain, it was too much noise to sleep through.

So, I had just laid down and pulled a cover up to my chin, when I heard wings go about 10 inches over my face. Jump up, lights on, saw a bat flying through my rooms. Since I was there alone, I called a neighbor friend up the road and told him I had a bat in the house. He told me to leave the lights on until the bat lands somewhere. Put some heavy gloves on and get a towel. Then move slowly and, with the towel in your hand, slowly close in on the bat and pinch lightly his wings together on his body. I thought sure, he’s going to fly in my hair. So I also put on a ball cap with all my hair tucked inside.

As I was getting close to the bat, he opened his mouth and kind of yelled at me, squeaky like, but didn’t fly. He let me get ahold of him and pick him up and take him (or her, who knows) outside. Cool, that worked great!

About a week later, my husband was in the shower and called me in to see what was in the tub. It was on the tub floor and he said looked like a wet mouse. I got close and it was a wet bat. It must have been on the shower head when he turned the water on. So, gloves back on and bat outside. (My big brave husband)

This continued enough that we looked into finding out how they were getting in the house. The chimney to the fireplace just happened to be opened to the sky. The next weekend, it got sealed off.

The bats stopped getting in the house, but they were in both attics above. One was a walk-in, and the other you had to use a ladder to get up in. At first, I was so afraid of going in when they were there. I thought they would fly at me and chase me out. The fact is, they never flew at me. They were hanging on the rafters and would yell at me, showing lots of teeth, but were never aggressive or menacing. I guess they didn’t like getting woke up in the middle of their night, which was my day.

They were such an organized bunch, I would sit in the driveway at dusk, and watch them come out of the roof. It was like clockwork. They came out, one after the other, every few seconds. I had a pond close to the house and had no mosquitos at all. Those wonderful bats kept them ate up…

Plus, in October, every year, I would hear one bat squeaking in a cadence. For several days this would happen. Then about a week later, they were gone. I think they migrated to Mexico, but they never told me where they went. Then, in March, they were home again.

I really came to love those bats. Mosquito clean up. Plus, the free bat quano. I’d go in when they were gone and sweep up all the manure, and put on my garden. People pay a high price for that stuff.

Since I have moved, I see a bat once in a while. I bought a bat house to put up next year to try and lure some here. I miss watching them.

For the Love of Salt

My love of salt started when I was a baby. I chewed every wood surface I could find and sucked on it. My mother asked the Doctor about this and he said that I was trying to get salt out of the wood. He then said that some bodies just need more salt then others.

The first picture is the different kinds of salt that I have on hand at this time. Plus, the third picture is a Persian Blue Salt that I forgot to add to the pix. I also have a Ghost Pepper salt that I just bought. The middle picture is my collection of salt dips that I collect. My favorite find was the little salt spoon that is laying beside the green one.

My love and absolute need for salt continued through my grade school years when I lived beside my grandmother’s house and there was a field that used to have cows in it. There was a wonderful salt lick that I would take a rock to, and chip off small chunks and put in my pockets to eat on the bus or whenever I needed it.

I also knew where our church kept the rock salt that they used to salt the sidewalks in the winter. I would fill my pockets with that on Sundays to eat through the week. It was behind the pastor’s office door, by the way.

If all else failed, I would just go to the stove and pour salt into my hand and lick it out. In my early 20’s, at a doctor appointment, he asked me if I was thirsty a lot. I said yes, but I eat a lot of salt. He still sent me for blood work, but it was all normal. Heh heh.

My current doctor said I may want to cut back a little on salt and I said that it was my favorite food group. She didn’t even crack a smile. I thought I was funny.

So here is a list of the kinds of salt that I have right now: I have 2 Himalayan salt blocks, 1 Himalayan salt light, 2 Himalayan salt candle holders, Himalayan salt chunks, also in white, a Himalayan salt heart, white pretzel salt, tobacco spiced sea salt, roasted garlic sea salt, spicy garlic salt, sriracha salt, chipotle salt, green herbs salt, rosemary lavender salt, curry salt, plain sea salt, hickory smoke salt, cherry wood smoked sea salt, seasoned salt, garlic salt, Himalayan pink salt, smoked salt, Hawaiian red salt, Eurasian black salt, pure ocean salt, sel de guerande, Persian blue salt, jalepeno pepper sea salt, sriracha pepper sea salt, Cyprus citron flake salt, Carolina hickory smoked salt, Trapani salt road sea salt, Cyprus chili flake sea salt, and ghost pepper salt.

P.S. I haven’t found anything that salt is not good on.

Learning to Cook

When I was about 13 years old, my mother thought it was time for me to learn how to cook. She would ask me if I wanted to help her cook dinner. I remember thinking, “why do I have to help cook?” and I would hurry outside as fast as I could. Whenever she would ask, I’d say “nope, I’m going outside”. I had two brothers with lots of stuff to do, any type of ball to play, bikes to ride, ropes to jump, or mud puddles to try and throw each other in. And a really great train went by our house every day and the caboose guy would wave at us.

She got clever and said, “I’ll teach you how to make pie crusts and I’ll make the filling”. Pie, yes I’ll make the crusts anytime to get a pie out of it.

Along came my first husband. We got married a week before my 19th birthday. His mother was a gourmet cook and even packed him a thermos of mashed potatoes to take in his lunch for work. After cooking for a week, I was given a Betty Crocker Cookbook for my 19th birthday gift. It looked like greek to me.

I got all “gung ho” and was going to make all the bread for my family. My first and final loaf (for many years) came out of the oven looking exactly like a brown brick. The upside of that was if I would make enough bread, I could build us a house. Plus, I got really good at blowing out oven fires.

I tried a soup recipe and saw where it said to brown the meat. I thought it was brown and I would save some time by skipping that step. It came out tasting like what I think stone soup would have tasted like. How could so many things be in that pot and it tastes a little like lightly flavored water?

I was going to cook us some pork chops. Since you put a roast in some water to cook it, I put the chops under water to cook them. They came out tasting like cardboard. The cookbook wasn’t helping much. And in the first month of being married, he lost 10 pounds.

I ended up asking my mom to come show me some tips and I started learning to cook after I got married. She said she knew I’d eventually want to know how.

And that is how my love of cookbooks started. I have too many to count at this point in my life, and I have become quite a good cook. My grandchildren always challenge me for their birthday dinners with stuff I’ve never tried before.

My advice on cooking would be, take it slow and simple at first. If you’ve never made a recipe before, do exactly what it says. You can adjust it the next time, if you want to. And have fun, it’s so satisfying knowing you’re feeding your family good home-cooked food. Plus, the joy of sitting around the table and listening to the stories of the day from each other. This grows a family good!

A Berry Picking We Will Go la la la

I was going out back to pick blackberries a few days ago. I ride my four-wheeler out a trail through the woods, to the open fields where the berries grow along the tree line.

I don’t know how fast I was going, but about one foot in front of my face, a spider web came into view about one second before I ran through it. It couldn’t have hit me more directly in the face if I had been aiming at it. It covered my face and neck and was in my hair. I was going too fast to see if there was a spider in it, or not, so I started swatting all over my head and shoulders, while still going down the hill. Yuck!

A pair of turkeys with two young ran off the trail as I came through. I think they were laughing at me.

From now on I’m going to ride with a pole stuck out in front of me to catch any webs first. This kind of thing is exactly the reason that I let Tom ride in front of me. Heh heh.

Grandma’s in the House – Supervisor

By late spring, I took a second job. It was a part-time, afternoon shift job, sorting mail. The garden suffered, in that the weeds grew pretty good that year.

When I had a day that I wasn’t working, I would head outside. It’s my favorite place to be. (My mom said I used to throw myself on the ground and cry and cry when she would bring me inside, when I was a very small child even). Back to the story…So, I would hear the door squeak open and see Grandma peak her head out and look for me. I figured she was making sure I was okay.

There was an old corn crib on the property that Tom converted into a chicken coop for me. I was painting the outside of it. I heard the door squeaking open and shut frequently, but didn’t think anything about it. Then, when Tom got home from work, I heard her telling him that I wasn’t working today (meaning at the house, not the job). She said I was napping in that building down there. That’s when I realized I had a supervisor.

I was working in the garden when I heard the back door squeak open and close, and I knew she would be coming to the front door next. That was one time in my life I was glad that the doors squeaked. The weeds along the edge of the garden were about three foot high by then and I dove down behind them. This was repeated whenever I heard the back door open. She always went there first and I had time before she got to the front door. The report that night was that I was goofing off somewhere, that I wasn’t working.

Grandma asked me one day, why I had so many coffee mugs. She said you need only three. One for each of us. (There were 4 of us living here, us three, plus our daughter, Andrea who Gma called “that girl that lives with you”.) I told her that we got mugs when we go on vacation somewhere, and also that I like pottery (LOVE is a better word for it). The next day, a mug “fell out” of the cupboard and broke. Hmmm….

On days that my mother and me went grocery shopping, Gma would tell Tom that we were off sitting and drinking in bars all day. That’s kind of funny, being that my mother is a preacher’s wife and the trunk load of groceries that I brought home. And I never had alcohol breath. Did not know where she got that story.

Also, with her being 90 years old, had some “bathroom issues”. She was always telling me that it was because of my cooking. I said that was strange, because no one else had that problem. So, sometimes when my husband is having stomach issues, he’ll look at me and say, “It’s because of your cooking”. He thinks he’s funny.

The Canoe Trip

How do I start? I loved canoeing as a teenager in high school and even afterwards. Then life got busy, working lots of hours and I didn’t do it for a couple decades.

My husband said he used to go all the time with his parents when he was young and really enjoyed it.

I know my brother, Rusty, liked to canoe, so I asked him and his now ex-wife to go with us. When we were paying for the trip, the guy asked us if we wanted to go the three mile or the ten mile trip. Me, being all gung-ho, said let’s do the ten miles.

So, me and Tom get in our canoe and head down the river. I’m in front, paddling. We start heading for the bank, so I switch my paddle to the other side of the boat. Then we zing to the other side of the river towards that bank. My brother’s canoe is calmly going right down the middle of the river. He ends up pulling away by a far piece, probably to avoid all the yelling going on in our canoe.

My canoe bounced from bank to bank and back again. At one point, I grabbed ahold of a large tree, that was jutting out over the river, before being slammed into it. I think that veer was intentional…

I kept asking Tom what he was doing and he said paddling. I said, “I thought you said you loved canoeing and did it a lot as a kid.” He said, “Yes, but I was always in the middle, and my mom and dad did all the paddling.” That explains a lot.

I don’t know why we couldn’t sync together and go down the middle of the river, but those ten miles seemed like one hundred, and was probably at least 30 miles, the zigzag way. I kept telling him to paddle on the opposite side that I was on, to go straight, but it never happened.

So, my advice would be, before canoeing with anyone, get a background check to see how they came about learning to paddle. And then ask their family and friends.

I never lost my voice canoeing before. First time for everything, I guess.