You Just Can't Make This Shit Up

My life really is a never ending stream of ridiculousness. Last night an All-Family-Distress-Call went out when my mom's Scottish Terrier got herself stuck under the driveway.

Ahem, yes - under the driveway. For those of you who are unaware of what a culvert is, you might want to click here. For everyone else, I'll just keep going.

For those of you who don't know, this is a Scottish Terrier.

My sister and I are aware of the minor miracle that made us able to pass through our German mother's care without becoming morbidly obese. We're not sure how we escaped the fate of every single family pet, but I think it was being athletic and also the fact that it was the 80s and most of us wore spandex whenever possible.

In any case, Abby (named after Aberdeen) is the most recent in a long line of Scottish Terriers. As a breed, they are incredibly intelligent and ferocious little shits. Individual results may vary.

Yesterday Abby got it into her head to dive into a culvert and investigate tight spaces that her very large arse had no hope of fitting into.

Or back out of.

And so, Abby was in fact, stuck under the driveway.

Individual results may vary

I got the call around 9 PM because I'm the owner of a very nice Mag lite and my mother had managed to turn my dad's on at some point during the afternoon and never ever turn it back off. So I drove over to my parent's house to find the neighbor, my brother-in-law, my cousin, and my dad all standing in a hole up to their waists and pounding on the drainpipe to see if the dog was in that particular pipe or the next one.

For those of you who don't know, this is a backhoe.

Note - it's very difficult to see a black dog inside a pitch-black pipe after 9 PM.

Abby wasn't in that pipe, so the next element came into effect - the backhoe. Yep. We dug up the driveway, cut the phone line and continued beating on the pipe in the hopes that one very fat Scottish Terrier would get up the gumption to push herself on out. But she didn't, so the backhoe was implemented into Plan C, which involved pulling the entire culvert pipe up and getting it vertical so that her fat butt just fell out one end.

And she then proceeded to go up to the front porch and beg for a treat.

She got it.

The Stories We Tell

All of our lives can be retold as stories, some of us are just able to do it better than others.

People tell me all the time that my life sounds so fun, so odd, so... interesting. It's not. I've got a 40/wk that I actually love, but I'm also on the treadmill five days out of the weekly seven for half an hour, struggling to not eat drive-thru food more than I have to, and leaning a little closer to the mirror everyday to see how many more grays have spawned during the night. I also consistently forget to change my oil and lock my keys in my car ridiculously often.

I'm not any different from you, or any other average human being. The trick is to make myself *sound* interesting, which I've come to realize, is an inherited ability.

I spent five days in New Mexico with my crit partner, RC Lewis. It was awesome, except for the extra day spent in the airport. When I finally got home 36 hours later than scheduled my mom said, "Let me get my coffee, then we'll sit down and you can tell me all about it."

Then my sister called me to "hear all about it."

I suddenly realized that maybe not all families function in this way. Perhaps storytelling is something I was raised on, intrinsically absorbing the threads of my genetic plot as we invited anyone who had been on a trip, had an extraordinary experience, or we just hadn't seen in awhile, to "tell us about it."

From my German great-grandfather's accent laden stories of coming over on a ship alone when he was just fifteen, to my Irish grandmother's tales of growing up in an orphanage along with her five siblings, to my obscenity-laced overblown narrative of eight hours sitting on my ass in Albuquerque, our stories are part of a larger web that we've learned to spin from those who came before us.

So tell your stories tell your kids, and maybe when they're older they'll still want to sit down with you and share theirs.