Spring Break Quake

Once again, I am participating in Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop. This one might be interesting, because I didn't re-read it, and also, it's late and I am on my third night of only five hours of sleep. Maybe that works for you, but it ain't good for me. Anyway, if you'd like to play along, just click the button at the bottom of this post and you'll magically zoom over to Mama Kat's place! This week I chose prompt #5 - Earthquake! Where were you when it happened?

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It didn't take long for the news anchors to start referring to it as the "Spring Break Quake".

I was sleeping soundly in my bed in Beaverton, Oregon on that March morning in 1993. I'm not sure if my mother's frantic yelling in the hallway woke me first, or if it was the foreign rocking, making my bed feel like a raft on a choppy sea.

Either way, I sat up, tried to blink away the disorientation.

What was happening?

"It's an earthquake!", my father hollered from his bedroom, scrambling to right his glasses on his nose.

"Get into the doorways!", commanded my mother, and we all jumped up and stumbled to our doorjambs. We stood there in the yellow light of the hallway lamp, everyone cautiously eying the ceiling, waiting for bits of plaster to crumble in our faces. We had never been in an earthquake before, and wondered how long it would take for the floor beneath our feet to become still. Or disappear.

Finally, the world seemed to calm and my parents, my siblings, and I all just stood there for a moment and stared at each other in shock. I think my mother asked my father several times what we should do next? But he was just as much a rookie as the rest of us.

Quickly, he made a decision. "Everyone get in the car."

Pounding down the stairs, we threw open the front door and padded across the driveway in our bare feet to the waiting Camry. My sisters and brother and I huddled in the backseat while Dad jammed the key in the ignition to turn on the radio.

"We'll be safe in here until we know what's going on," he said.

Then a voice spoke to us from the radio speakers.

"If you're just tuning in, we have experienced a 5.6 magnitude earthquake, and the safest thing you can do right now is stay in your homes. In case of aftershock it is extremely dangerous to be outdoors or in your car."

The heaviness in the air vanished as we grinned at Dad and began to giggle at his innocent mistake.

Sheepishly, we exited the car and made our way back into the house. The sun wasn't quite up, but it was light enough for me to see that Dad was a little embarrassed at being chastised by a radio DJ. But it was alright with me, because if we had humor, then everything was right with the world, and I knew we would be okay.

(Did you come up with a good name for the bug yet?)

Sven, Bertha, Dilbert, and Hilde

I wish to inspire everyone to live life to the fullest. To make each day memorable; come hell or high water, or threat of bodily injury. This is a true story. Names have been changed to protect identities.



Once upon a time there was a young woman, Bertha, who was very good friends with a woman named Hildegarde. They had gone to school and church together for several years and had many adventures. Eventually, Bertha fell in love with Hildegarde's brother, Sven, and they were married shortly after Hildegarde married her own love, Dilbert.

One summer, Hildegarde and Bertha, along with their husbands, spent a lovely weekend at the beach. They basked in the sun, visited quaint shops, and splashed in the salty sea water. At the conclusion of their memorable weekend they traveled back to the city, but on the way they decided to pay a visit to Sven and Hilde's mother on the family farm.

When they got to the farm, however, the mother was out. While they waited for her to return, Sven and Bertha decided to take a nap, while Hildegarde and Dilbert opted to go for a walk.

Sven and Bertha made their way back to the guest bedroom and laid down on the bed. As Bertha was lowering her tired head towards the pillow, she looked out the window and caught sight of Hilde's head popping up out of the tall grass in the field across from the house. "That's odd," she thought. "Where's Dilbert? I thought they were going for a walk? And what is Hilde doing kneeling in the grass?"

But then Bertha's jaw dropped as she saw Hilde peel her shirt off and disappear again into the very tall grass.

"Sven!", shouted Bertha. "Hilde and Dilbert are doing it in the field!"

"Where?", asked Sven and he hopped off the bed to peer out the window.

"Right there in the grass, out past the well," pointed Bertha.

Sven began to laugh as he watched the grass moving to and fro in the very still summer air.

"Let's get the hose!", snickered Bertha.

"No way," protested Sven, "Hilde will kill you. She's much stronger than you and you know she would take you down."

"Yes, but first she'd have to catch me, and would she really chase me through the field naked?"

"Well, it'd be that or hunker down in the grass getting soaked!"

"True," muttered Bertha, "but either way it would be hilarious to watch! And I might be able to outrun her. Let's go!" Bertha bounced off of the bed and darted for the door.

"No. You are not getting the hose," commanded Sven, grabbing hold of Bertha's wrist. "Just go to sleep - it's not worth the trip to the emergency room."

"You're no fun at all," came the pouting reply from Bertha, but she obediently lay down and closed her eyes, trying not to picture the scene outside the window.

Bertha never did fall asleep on that golden afternoon. She spent the nap hour picturing all the possible outcomes of having gone through with her wicked hose scheme. Some of her daydreams were frightening, but most made her smile. And to this day, whenever someone talks about regrets in life or changing the past, Bertha remembers that day and vows to never let an opportunity to use a hose go unused again.

Pranks In The Office

The last job I had before I became a full-time butt wiper and floor mopper was at a telecommunication company. The job itself was actually quite boring, but there were two perks. The first was my business cards which listed my title as "Sales Engineer". Pretty sweet, huh? It sounds all important, but really all I did was design flow charts for 800 numbers. I was one of the annoying people who made it impossible for you to talk to a live person.

You're welcome.

The other perk was working with my uncle. He is just nine years older than me and has always been like an older brother to me.

We got to carpool to work most of the time - him and I. I think that must be where it all started. One evening on the way home from work I got distracted while I was driving and came within about twenty feet of plowing my little Ford Aspire into a cement barrier and killing us both. After my uncle, David, finished crapping his pants, we laughed pretty hard. And that started the prank war.

Several mornings after I nearly killed David, he decided to pay me back. It was early in the morning and he was driving us to work this time. (Wonder why?...) I broke the first rule of carpool etiquette by dozing off, and David decided this was the perfect opportunity to give me a taste of my own medicine. He slammed his foot on the brakes and screamed as loud as he could.

It took me only a nano second to wake up, acknowledge that I was going to die, scream, wet myself, hear David laughing, realize it was a joke, and slug him in the shoulder.

Retaliation - when we got to work, I waited for David to leave his desk and then I took a Hostess powdered doughnut and crumbled it into a million pieces in his pencil drawer. He had to borrow a shop-vac from the custodian and remove all his pens, paper clips, post-its and extra staples before he could vacuum up the mess.

He got my back by putting lotion on the earpiece of my phone while I was busy at the vending machines. As soon as I got back to my desk he called me and I stuck the phone between my ear and shoulder, but only made it halfway through my greeting before I realized I had a mystery ooze running down my ear canal.

Shudder...

This kind of thing went on for months. And then one day, David quit that stinking job and we had to have a going away party for him.

It wasn't so much a party, really, as it was just chocolate milk and eclairs before we all pretended to get serious about doing our work. David laughed it up all that day, rubbing it in that the rest of us schmucks had to keep reporting to our sadistic boss and dealing with heathen clients.

The following Monday came and I arrived at work all alone and sad that I would be there without anyone sane to keep me company. The second I sat down at my desk my boss came to peer over my cubicle wall and inquire as to whether I could smell anything funny.

I took a deep whiff, and boy, could I! It was the stench of death and rot.

We hunted for the source of the smell all morning long. It began to take over the entire tenth floor, and as the day wore on the smell became completely unbearable. Maintenance came in to check the vents for dead mice, all the trash cans were emptied, the refrigerator in the break room was meticulously inspected - we could not find the source of the smell anywhere.

Just as the building manager was looking up the number for a local carpet cleaner, it hit me.

David!

I called him at his new office and said, "What did you do? You wouldn't believe the smell here!"

Half an hour later, when David had quit laughing, he managed to tell me to look behind a co-worker's computer monitor.

Sure enough, behind a woman's monitor, tucked almost invisibly in the corner of her cubicle, there was a plastic cup of solidified chocolate milk from the going away party.

Have you ever smelled four-day-old milk that's been warming near a humming piece of electronic equipment? It's really quite unpleasant.

But David's little good-bye token warmed my heart because it told me that he would miss me and that he wished me luck in surviving life with all the whack-jobs he had left me alone with.

He also taught me that the best pranks are the ones that present themselves to us like a momentary gift of pure genius. They are simple. They are smelly. And you commit these acts when you won't be around to take the blame.

Inspired by:

Glad It Didn't Leave Scars

Before I was a mom, I was a babysitter. You'd think that years of babysitting would have taught me to avoid the children route, especially when you consider some of the experiences I had while tending to other people's offspring.

(And you know what? I'm actually glad that I wasn't permanently damaged by those babysitting experiences because I actually really like my kids. They're so much better than other people's.)

The following is a story of the worst babysitting job I ever had. It is a re-post of a story I told on my personal blog a year ago, with a few touch-ups. Feel free to skip it if you've read it already. If not, you are not allowed to skip, but must keep reading. Sorry.

(Here is where you should imagine fuzzy, wavy lines transporting you back in time to a period of my very enthralling history.)

I was about 13 years old when I would frequently babysit for some friends of my parents, Trent and Sheryl. They had two very well behaved children; Miles was around four or five years old, and I believe Amanda was two.

Trent was in dental school at the time, so to help out with finances his family lived above a mortuary. If a call came during the night to retrieve a body, he would go and collect it. I'm not sure if he got paid to do this, or if their rent was free as long as they performed their corpse taxi duties, but can you imagine a more exciting job? I can't.

Anyway, they lived there above the morgue as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do, and hosted some killer Halloween parties, because that would be the main perk of such accommodations, don't you think?

Sheryl did take me downstairs once to show me a body that was being kept in "the fridge". I have always had a kind of morbid fascination with cemeteries and morgues, and at the same time a paralyzing fear of dead people, so that was a bit of a wicked treat for me.

One afternoon I was babysitting Miles and Amanda, and I knew it would be quite late before Trent and Sheryl came home, so I had settled in to play games, watch movies and do whatever else the kiddos required for entertainment.

Around four-thirty in the afternoon I was playing Hi-Ho Cherry-O with my charges and was interrupted by the sound of a door opening at the bottom of the stairs that led to the morgue. I froze, stiff as one of the poor souls in the basement. My pulse was racing as I listened intently for the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, or moaning escaping the lips of someone who was presumed dead but awoke, all the contrary, in cold storage and was seeking aid.

Eventually I decided that I would not be able to breathe until I made sure that we were not about to be joined by a reanimated being. I approached the ominous door which separated the living and the dead, and reached out for the knob. I waited there for a while to make sure I really was prepared to die; I wasn't, but I was left with no choice but to turn the knob, because I was turning blue in the face from lack of oxygen. I opened the door a crack and peeked down to the bottom landing. There was no one there. There was, however, I neat stack of mail sitting on the third step.

Good grief, people! If ever you live upstairs from a pit-stop for the dead, you may want to warn your babysitter that the postman might open the door that serves as barrier between embalming fluid and peach scented potpourri. Otherwise, your sitter might have a heart attack and join the folks downstairs, and then who's looking after your kids, huh?

Quickly recovering from that episode, I then cooked and fed the kids Spaghettios for dinner, got them bathed, and read them a story before bed. Then it was lights out for them, and I did the dishes and then plopped on the couch to watch TV and fall asleep.

At one-thirty in the morning, I awoke to the sound of retching coming from the kids' bedroom. I was up and in there quicker than lightening, and poor Miles, who was notorious for his over-active gag reflex, was in the process of throwing up all those Spaghettios he had eaten for dinner.

Now here's another tip for all you parents and babysitters out there: If you have a child who is prone to throwing up, do not let him sleep on the top bunk. Miles had leaned over the edge of his bed before ejecting his dinner, and poor, sweet Amanda was crying on the bottom bunk, completely covered in circle-shaped pasta vomit. I have been a mother for nine years now, and I have yet to encounter a mess that rivals the middle of the night vomit-fest that Miles treated me to.

But what they say is true - it's easier to clean up all kinds of bodily fluids if they come from your own flesh and blood. Still - after that night I think it a wonder that I agreed to have children at all.


Inspired by: