Big Bird Scare

I got home from eating dinner last week and was stunned when I saw a big bird.

Nope. Not this kind of big bird.




This kind.

That's right. To my horror, I saw an owl lying in wait in the bushes directly in front of my windshield, literally two feet in front of my car. It was an owl with a beak sharp as a T-rex talon. Its demonic yellow eyes were piercing through my very soul even through the dark of the 8:00 night.

To be fair I didn't ACTUALLY see the eyes. They were closed. I figured the direct beam of my headlights was causing him to camouflage himself by shutting his beady little bird peepers. Well, this killer wasn't fooling me.

In the bushes I could make out his pointy little tail and his soldier-like posture. I knew this owl was ready to strike, ready to plunge towards me the moment I stepped out of the steely gray protection of my Saab. I had a brief daymare of this owl making a beeline for my forehead, knocking me over in one fell swoop, and pecking my eyes out.

Of course, I did the one thing I always do in a crisis.

I called my mom.

"THERE'S A HUGE OWL IN FRONT OF MY CAR!!!!" I squealed at a high enough pitch for only the local dogs to hear.

"Honey, it's not going to hurt you," my mom said, annoyingly rationally.

"MOM!" I wailed. "It's going to peck my eyeballs out and eat them for dinner! I'M GOING TO GO BLIND!"

"Aww honey, that's okay. I can get you a seeing eye dog," she said, "But I guess that wouldn't be good because you don't like dogs."

"THIS IS NOT FUNNY! I AM FREAKING OUT!" I cried.

"Well," my mom sighed. "Flash your lights or something. See if it flies away."

I did.

Nothing changed.

The killer just sat there, still as one of those soldiers in London that you can spit on and they won't move. The ones with the dumb black helmets that look like Marge Simpson's hair.

"Honk your horn then," mom suggested.

I did. Several times. The dern owl didn't fluff a feather.

"Just go on in...I'll stay on the phone with you," said my mom patiently.

"No!! I'm not getting out of the car NOW! Not after I honked my HORN at him!!! Now he's DEFINITELY going to peck my eyes out!!!" I shrieked loudly. "Forget it!! I'm moving my car!!!"

I warily pulled out, then shook myself out of my bird-induced hysteria and pulled back in. "I'm getting out!" I cried to my mom. "I'll call you back as soon as I'm in the door!"

I hung up. Gathered the vestiges of my waning courage. Opened the door of my car a tiny crack.

Suddenly the motion detector light on the side of my building came on.

I craned my neck to look closer at my feathered killer.

I called my mom back and said all in one sentence:

"THE LIGHT JUST CAME ON IT'S A COUPLE OF DEAD LEAVES HANGING THERE BYE!"

Now I know:
I may need to check into getting contacts. Or avian-aversion therapy.

It Would Have Been Funny...Part 3

All those that know me, know I don't mess around when it comes to my food.

I like having three square meals and I want them on time. Delay my chance to eat, and I guarantee my crankiness level will increase exponentially until I am fed.

This next shining moment of mine happens at a particularly vulnerable moment. I was at a job I didn't feel qualified to do. I was trying desperately to seem put-together and confident. And yes, I was ready for lunch.

And then my boss has to feed me...
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If you haven't noticed, these are pretty much weekly installments.

Last week held a true jewel of a humiliating moment. A real gem of hilarity...if only it hadn't happened to me.

It all started with my company's United Way campaign to raise money for the Meyer Center - an amazing organization that provides help to 2-7 year old children with developmental disabilities.

I was all for our field trip to read to the kids. I was all for donating a portion of my check to go to the United Way. But this one facet of the campaign, well, it delayed my lunch and simultaneously vaporized any self-confidence I possessed.

For this special part of our campaign we met for lunch one day in the conference room. I kind of had a bad feeling about it from the start, as it was promised in the email invite to be an "eye-opening experience."

Yeah, "Eye-opening experience." That's a euphemism for "Sit back, relax, and get ready to feel like a total idiot."

As we sat down to delicious Two Chef box lunches, Erin, our campaign coordinator, handed out little note cards with our disabilities listed.

Yes, it was an "empathy" lunch, much like Pi Kappa Phi's Spaghetti "Empathy Dinners."

Well, I was delt a real card, I'll tell you that much.

While other members of our staff were fortunate enough to get "autism" - only allowing them to speak in words of 3 letters, or "blindness" - how hard is it to fumble around for your sandwich? puuulease! - I was given the card of all cards. The only one in the stack.

NO USE OF ARMS.

So, Erin tied my arms behind my back.

"Awesome," I thought. "I'll just wait it out until the game is over and I'm allowed to 'take off' my disabilities. Then I'll eat."

I wasn't going to ask for help. I wasn't going to smash my face in my salad and dig around like a squirrel rooting for acorns.

No way, no how. I was keeping my dignity in tact. And I planned to do that by holding my own fork.

Or so I thought.

Lucky for me, I was sitting beside my boss, who happened to have Cerebral Palsy. This meant that his fingers were taped together like crab claws. Also lucky for me, my boss was totally into playing the game.

So he wasn't going to let me off the hook.

No, he was going to help me eat.

In other words, he fed me.

It started with my water bottle, which he poured generously into my watering trap with his crabby claws. Since that didn't work, he got out a straw and put that in the bottle. Alas, the straw fell down into the bottle and we couldn't get it back out. No fingers, remember? So, he poured the whole bottle - straw and all - into a cup, which allowed me to sip unassisted.

Not to be set back by our first mishap, my boss takes my roll and stabs it with a knife. He then proceeds to play "airplane" with me, forcing me to take a generous bite.

I chew it as long as I possibly can, trying to delay the inevitable next bite.

Then we go for the salad. He really piles on the bite here, and drenches it in my side of balsamic vinaigrette, so that dressing is dribbling down my chin while my cheeks are stuffed like chipmunks'.

He proceeds to wipe my dressing-drenched chin with a napkin clutched by his crab-like claws.

The paper napkin gets stuck to the tape on his fingers, however, making for a really awkward situation all around.

Moral of this story:
Keep a pocket-knife in your boot like MacGyver. If anyone ever tries to tie your arms behind your back before lunch, you'll be able to escape.

It Would Have Been Funny...Part 2

For your reading pleasure, a sticky second installment in the series.

___________________________

My ability to consistently embarrass, humiliate, and/or make a mess of myself has reached its absolute peak.

At least I hope so.

This morning's tale does not come close to the monstrosity of yesterday's, errrr, disaster. But, it IS a pretty sticky situation.

I eat a granola bar every day for breakfast. Every, single day. Every day.
It's a South Beach Diet bar, the peanut butter kind. Small but delicious. And filling.

But today, I wanted to change it up. I had gotten some of that healthy bread from the grocery store, and hadn't used a piece all week.

"Some buttered toast might be nice," I thought to myself. So I pop two pieces in the toaster. Tap my toes impatiently as they brown.

And get out the butter.

Just a pat.

Then. I see the jam in the fridge. Cherry jam. With big chunks of cherries. So sweet and delicious. I knew I had to spread some on top. But I don't have restraint. Or good sense, it seems. Jelly on toast is fine.

But jelly on toast - TO-GO?!

Maybe if you lay it on thin. But no, not me. It was a tablespoon-full on each piece, at least.

Maybe if you put the jelly sides in, like a sandwich. But I like them separated. Open face.

Maybe if your hands aren't full of other stuff. But trying to juggle a purse and a drink and the open face cherry jam toast is not going to happen. It's just not, people.

I do make it out the door. Lock it.

Down three flights of stairs in pointy toed heels. Phew.

I make it down to Stanley, my Saab, and set the purse on the passenger seat.

I swing my leg into the car, but, holy smokes, the momentum gets the better of me.

Oh no! The toast! It's slipping!

Flying through the air in that sickening slo-mo.

I'm like a cartoon, flapping my arms, mouth in a perfect "O" from the "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" emerging from my watering jaws, the "NOOOO" that is shaking the very foundation of my apartment, waking sleeping babies, scaring old ladies walking their purse sized puppies, and making the guy getting into his car next to me get into his car a little faster.

And as Isaac Newton figured out that hallowed day, the apple falls from the tree because of a little force we call gravity.

That's right, children. The toast will always land jelly-side down.

One piece falls between the seats, chunks of cherries slithering down the sides of the console and onto my perfect carpet.

If you do not know this already, I am a maniac about my car. It is a nice car, to be sure, so crumbs do not belong. I actually pulled my car over to the side of the road once to make my sister get out and find a small piece of biscuit that she dropped between the seats. True story.

So jelly!? On my carpet?! Maddening.

The other piece flies jelly-side down onto the passenger seat with a sickening, sticky thud.

I won't detail the aftermath, but I will say that the cleanup was an interesting process. I had cherry jelly on my hands, my jeans, my sweater, and my face when it was all said and done.

I used the dew on top of my car to wet the one scrap of napkin that I had saved in my glove-box, but that didn't help much.

Moral of the story:
Keep baby wipes in your car. You'll never know when you might need 'em.

It Would Have Been Funny...Part 1

I can't believe that this much time has gone by, but it's been five years since I started a little note collection on Facebook entitled, "It Would Have Been Funny If It Hadn't Happened to Me."

Trust me, y'all. It's still funny. In fact, I got a pretty extensive laugh out of reading these stories for the fifteenth time.

So for the next several days, I'll be sharing some tried but true stories from my real life, events that make me shudder and burst out into hysterics all at once.

This first installment is back from bygone days at my first real job as an assistant account executive at a small PR firm in downtown Greenville. I was a green (and not in the good way) 21 year old golden retriever, just fumbling through each meeting, each project, each moment of the day. Even then, I knew I wasn't meant for the business world.

As my sister would say, I was "CTL" (clueless to life), and then it got even worse.

I hope you enjoy reading about my humiliation as much as I do.
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Once upon a time, I was innocently drinking my coffee from Coffee Underground. Im sipping it when I suddenly feel the urge to GO.

So I run down to the one-seater in our break room. But no sooner have I flushed then the water starts backing up. "Great," I sigh. I can't leave it all filled with water. That would just be gross.

I jiggle the handle. The water just starts filling up. Faster now, over the rim. I thought it would go up and go back down.

But no, this is a small-scale model of the Hoover Dam. This makes me want to say another kind of "dam." This is a dam disaster.

Panic ensues.

WHOOSH! Toilet water, on my black pointy toed shoes.

"TERRY!!!" I squeal, filled with the most permeating humiliation and defeat ever known by woman-kind.

Terry is the renaissance man of the office, the paperwork guy, the building guy, the guy you ask when you don't know what else to do guy.

I thought he'd hear me, but it was no use.

I looked everywhere in the 5x5 space for a plunger. A stack of super absorbent beach towels. A shrink ray so I could successfully flush myself down the toilet, too.

Determined not to let the crapper get the better of me, I remove the lid, and jiggle the mold-covered balloon thingy with my bare hands.

Nothin.

The water is puddling now, coming up around my ankles in a sickening swamp of sewage.

"TERRY!!!!!" I scream. I can't get the water to stop. Nothing I do fixes it. No beach towels are appearing, although I prayed so hard I'm surprised God didn't beam them down just to shut me up.

Unless! Haha!

I can stop the water flow by holding the mold-covered balloon thingy up in the air.

Relief!!!

Until I realize that when I let go of it, the water starts back again. A waterfall. A deluge. A tsunami of sewage.

And I'm standing in an small ocean of toilet water.

Great.

I prop up the balloon thingy with a can of Lysol so the water stops, and miserable, defeated, I trek up the stairs to Terry's office, leaving toilet-water tracks behind me.

As we go down to get the crusty old mop and bucket, Terry as embarrassed as I am, I shudder at the day I've had.

Alas, pointy-black shoes soggy and armpits stained with plunging-induced-perspiration, the clogged toilet and I part ways.


So, moral of this story: leave the toilet clogged. I don't know why I didn't stick with my old motto: "Deny, deny, deny." Don't try to flush again. Just walk away and no one will be the wiser.


Now I know:
Forget business. Go into education. Then you can blame it all on a kid.