Category: Life

This is a neat little story I came across and thought I would share it with you.

A few months before I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Tennessee town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around to welcome me into the world a few months later.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me the word of God, and Dad taught me to obey it. But the stranger — he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.

If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn’t seem to mind.

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to her room and read her books (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home… not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush.

My Dad was a teetotaler who didn’t permit alcohol in the home, not even for cooking. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex.

His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing. I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked… and NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you were to walk into my parent’s den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures. His name?………………………………..

Do you know it yet????

Surely you’ve met this stranger.

The stranger get’s around…….

His name????????

We just call him, “TV.”

I can identify with this unfortunately!!!

Have you ever asked your child a question too many times? My three-year-old son had a lot of problems with potty training and I was on him constantly. One day we stopped at Taco Bell for a quick lunch in between errands. It was very busy, with a full dining room.

While enjoying my taco, I smelled something funny, so of course I checked my seven-month-old daughter, and she was clean. Then I realized that Danny had not asked to go potty in a while. I asked him if he needed to go, and he said “No”.

I kept thinking “Oh Lord, that child has had an accident, and I don’t have any clean clothes with me.” Then I said, “Danny, are you SURE you didn’t have an accident?” “No,” he replied.

I just KNEW that he must have had an accident, because the smell was getting worse. So, I asked one more time, “Danny, did you have an accident?”

This time he jumped up, yanked down his pants, bent over, spread his cheeks and yelled “SEE MOM, IT’S JUST FARTS!!”
While 30 people nearly choked to death on their tacos laughing, he calmly pulled up his pants and sat down. An older couple made me feel better, thanking me for the best laugh they’d ever had!

My younger cousin sent me an email, inviting me to “meet her online” in Spicy Town. Spicy Town is a fictitious town in an online video game produced by the company that sells Slim Jim spicy snacks. So I went to the online game site to meet my cousin there. I had to create an avatar to use to play the game. It was kind of fun, creating the avatar. The avatar was called my “spicy side.” Setting up my “spicy side” was quick, easy, and amusing. I had to take a picture of myself and upload it to their site, then their program helped center my facial features around their pre-drawn outline of facial features, then they make a funny little creature with horns and funky hair, and then they turned me loose into the video game.

During the game I was supposed to go around collecting Slim Jim’s that I found lying around on the ground. I only found three, but I only played for a few minutes, trying to find my cousin. There were other people’s avatars in the game walking around too. Some seemed to be fighting with each other (I don’t know why, maybe one insulted the other, those spicy sides are unpredictable and uncontrollable!) some were just walking around ranting and raving. The game has chat functions and buddy lists, but I didn’t stay on it long enough to check those out, had to many other things that were demanding my attention at that time.

If you want to play the game yourself, go to spicyside.com!