Mother Dear

     It’s been proven that I’ve embarrassed myself plenty of times. I guess that just goes to reason because I’m blonde (at heart). A whole new dimension is added, however, when other people embarrass me. My mother is one of those people.

     Pop, Mom, and I stopped at a rest stop on my way to take my cosmetology boards in Grand Rapids, and I walked into the restroom first. I got into my stall and I heard someone else rustling about. It’s always good to be careful what you say in restrooms before you know who is there listening. At least that’s what I think.

     Mom walked in and said rather loudly, “Evangeline, do you need any hand sanitizer to wipe off the toilet seat?”

     I inwardly groaned. The unknown person just found out we were a family of fruitcakes. Cover blown.

    “No,” I muttered, trying to not make the situation any worse. Mom helped out with that.

     “Well, our society is so promiscuous that I don’t trust any toilet seat,” she said with conviction.

     That was it. I was definitely not coming out of my stall until the other person was gone. They couldn’t see me. They couldn’t know I existed.

     So I waited. I made sure they were gone, and then I came out and washed my hands. Mom came out as I was drying them.

     “Mom, there was another person in here!” I exclaimed, thinking she would feel as sheepish and embarrassed as I had.

     Mom shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s true.”

     So much for scolding her. (Somehow that doesn't seem to work on parents.) We talked a little longer about the rather comical situation, and then Mom left.

     As I was finishing drying my hands, I heard rustling. Someone else had been in the bathroom the entire time listening to the whole thing, unknown to my mom or myself!

     I left as quickly as possible, trying to gather any shreds of dignity that remained. (There probably weren’t enough shreds to make a decent pot holder.)

     The moral of the story is try to stay away from public restrooms at all costs, and do NOT take your mother unless you really do want to use hand sanitizer on your toilet seat.

     Love you, Mom!

 

 

    

 

 

 

Words from Above

This summer, my family and I were vacationing at a lake in Michigan called Long Lake. It was fun for all of us except my mom who doesn’t like lakes, but that’s another story.

     One sunny afternoon, I was diligently working on my tan (its harder work than you think) and reading my Bible on a lawn chair. After awhile my dad and brothers came out, and were headed to the boat for a ride. Being the very spiritual, godly person that I am, I left my Bible reading and jumped in the boat with them. (I promise I finished it later.)

     As we drifted away from the dock, the wind started blowing the pages of my Bible and Pete took note of it.

     “You’re gonna lose your place, Vange.”

     “It’s God’s way of showing me a verse He wants me to read,” I joked. “It’s special revelation.”

     Sometimes people open up their Bibles randomly and whatever verse they see first, they think that that is the verse God has for them. Sometimes it is, but as a general rule, that’s not the best way to hear from God. I have to admit that sometimes I do that, but let’s pretend I don’t. Anyways…

     I forgot about it, but when I got back, I looked at my Bible and began to read to Pete the first verse that I saw.

     “And this shall be a sign unto you, saith the Lord, that I will punish you in this place, that ye may know that my words shall surely stand against you for evil” (Jer. 44:29).

     Pete hooted with laughter. “Only you, Vange.”

     Thankfully, the Lord doesn’t always speak directly to us through randomly selected Bible verses or I may not have made it back from the lake that afternoon.

Have You Ever...

     Have you ever tried to pull up window blinds and have them come crashing down on you with the wood work as well?  

     Have you run into a door?

     Have you watched Legally Blonde and related to at least most of it?  (“Eeee! Road trip!”)

     Have you tried to secretly eat a caramel apple sucker at school by pulling off the stick and having the whole sucker stuck to the roof of your mouth?

     Have you had a client who wanted you to save discarded hair so they could use it to plant trees?

     Have you ordered Mulan from the library only to find it’s in Chinese?

     Have you hidden in your suitcase and jumped out to scare your friend’s boyfriend?

     Have you ever thought that tiki torch fluid was apple juice?  

 

     If so, you have lived a fun, fulfilled life. (At least, that's my take on it.) ;)

 

    

¿Mi Tio?

     At one point in my long life of 25 years (you can tell I just had a birthday because I’m feeling old), I spent eleven weeks in Mexico doing mission work.  I thought after having studied the Rosetta Stone program and having taken Spanish lessons from a teacher, that I would pick up on Spanish quite quickly. Not so.

     The little Mexican kids would babble on to me about something, and I would be like, “Your grandma ate a brick and then rented a llama? What?”

     Ok, it wasn’t exactly like that, but I could catch a few nouns here and there, and body language and hand motions were my friends.

     One fine evening, I went with the missionary family and Joanne (another single girl) to a birthday party of a young lady from the church. They did the usual tradition of smashing her face in her birthday cake as she tried to take a bite with no hands. That was exciting, and I still had yet to embarrass myself. It was a good night.

     Later on, Joanne and I were in a group of young people and the birthday girl introduced me to a young man.

     She said, “Es mi tio.”

     I figured Mi Tio was his name, so I said, “Mi Tio?” To make sure I pronounced it right.

     At that, everyone burst out laughing and the birthday girl was saying, “No, es MI tio. MI tio.”

     Finally, Joanne had calmed down enough to tell me that “tio” meant “uncle”.

     So, she had said, “This is my uncle.”

     I had said, “My uncle?”

     “No, MY uncle. MY uncle.”

     Of course I turned red, the uncle was amused, and every time I saw the birthday girl after that, she would give me a sly grin, and say, “Mi tio.”

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Proposal

I’ve had several requests for my proposal story, so here it is. J

    My proposal happened one night when I was working at the hospital. (Of course, the hospital is a highly romantic atmosphere.) Anyway, I needed to go into a patient’s room to have him sign paperwork, and a nurse and unit secretary warned me to duck because he might take a swing at me.

     “You better just not go in there,” the nurse finally decided after seeing my horrified expression. (I actually wasn’t horrified, it just sounds better to put that in there.)

     I went back to the business office and tried to get a family member of the patient to give consent over the phone, but they refused to do it. Arrrgh. Now, I really had to go in there. Well, if I died I would go to heaven, so the worst thing wasn’t really that bad. Heaven was gonna be great.

     I tried to get in the room several times, but nurses were always in there, and I didn’t want to disrupt seeing as how it was a rather delicate situation.

     Finally, I got in there, and asked my questions while trying to be as nice and nonthreatening as possible. I didn’t have to work too hard at that one because a 5’1” blonde woman who smiles a lot doesn’t tend to look that threatening anyway.

     I got back to my desk and realized that I forgot to have the patient sign the last paper. It’s nothing unusual for me to go back to the same patient a couple of times because I forget stuff, but I didn’t really want to see this particular patient again.

    I literally dragged my feet all the way back to his room. In fact, one of the nurses asked, “Why are you dragging your feet like that?” Just kidding! I only figuratively dragged my feet and no one said anything.

    Anyways, I don’t remember if it was before or after I tried to get a verbal signature (the events of that night are still hazy in my mind), but the patient turned to me and asked, “Will you marry me?”

     He’s not what I would have considered marriage material, but I couldn’t exactly tell him that because I didn’t want to upset him. I mean, a refusal to a question like that was no small matter, and this patient was liable to do anything.

     I smiled nicely. “Not today,” I said.

     “Tomorrow then?”

     This guy wouldn’t quit!

     If I said, “Not tomorrow,” we could keep going on like that and never stop, so I sort of laughed it off and made a hasty exit, leaving my heartsick suitor behind me.

     The moral of the story is never forget to have a patient sign a paper, and always remember that someone will marry you no matter how rotten you think you are. J

                                                                                The End

 

We Have a Newborn

    

     As I’ve mentioned before, I work in admissions at our local hospital, and for some reason, blonde moments abound there.

     When I was training, the unit secretary from OB (obstetrics) called down and said. “We have a newborn.” (Or something to that affect.)

     Not knowing that I was supposed to take down the information to register the new baby, I figured congratulations were in order.

     “Great!”  I said.

     She and the nurses probably laughed about that one for a week.

 

     OB must wonder sometimes about the ditsy girl in the business office because I’ve had more than just one blonde moment with that department. This time, I was not in training, but the extension that called down threw me off because I didn’t recognize it at first. I thought it was ICU.

     “We had a delivery,” the woman on the other end began.

     I immediately thought of the emails we had been receiving about what to do when instruments were delivered to the hospital. I was pretty sure we were supposed to call somebody.

     “I had a note here,” the woman continued, “That the time was 13:43, but it’s supposed to be 13:46. I just wondered if you could check that and make sure the registration is correct.”

     Now, I was thoroughly confused. “What kind of delivery?” I asked.

     “A newborn.”

      Right.

More on Gas Stations and Sweet Char

     Sweet Char (my car) is a very nice little car, but she is getting up there in years, so that always comes with health problems. Some of them I inflict on her, such as when I hit two deer and got a rock in her windshield on three consecutive school days. (I'm not unlucky at all, just zoned out when I drive.) And some of her health problems are inherent, such as a leaky tire.

     Pop was very concerned about said leaky tire, and he kept after me to check it. As usual, I forgot until Sweet Char and I were happily cruising down the road headed home from school. I suddenly remembered, and then, of course, Sweet Char started feeling weird and visions of blown out tires and me skidding all over the road came to my mind.
    
     I needed gas anyway, so I pulled in to the nearest gas station and began to fill up. I grabbed my tiny little pressure gauge and tried to take the tire pressure but it kept falling apart. After putting in the spring for the twentieth time, I noticed that there was a guy next to me that looked big and tough and had tattoos. In my mind, a guy like that would definitely have a pressure gauge, so I asked him.

     "Do you have a...a...tire gauge thingy, or whatever they're called?" I asked looking and sounding very confident.

     "I don't know, let me look," he said, probably feeling sorry for such a helpless female. Not that I was, of course, but he probably thought I was.

     "Here, I found one," he said at last. He handed me a really spiffy looking tire gauge.

     My first test read 20, then 32, and then 32. I figured the average of those scores were pretty good, so I handed it back to him and went on my merry way.

     When I got home, I proudly told Pop that I had checked my left front tire.

     "That's great," he said, "But it probably would have helped to check the front right tire, since that's the leaky one."

     Whatever. He's so hard to please.

    Can I just preface this next story with the fact that blond people sometimes have difficulty distinguishing right and left? It's not that we don't try, it's just that it's not always second nature to automatically know, just then, which is right and which is left. We just have to think about it for a split second longer, and that's probably because our minds are so busy elsewhere, it's hard to fit such a trivial thing in.

     I mentioned hitting two deer earlier in my post. Well, the second deer really did a number to my left headlight. On the way home, it was only hanging on by the wires and kept falling out when I tried to put it back in. I decided I would duck tape it when I got home and look like a hillbilly for awhile, but that's not really relevant to the story.

     Anyway, I called home and left a message about what had happened. When I got home, Pop was laughing and played my message.

     In it, I said, "My front right left headlight it falling out."

     Hey, at least I didn't say, "My front, right left tailight it falling out", right?