My Strange Morning and Stranger Pants

We're in Iowa. And whenever we're in Iowa, Pops has Tons Of Work that he needs Done. So we woke up at 9:00, I borrowed some really strange old jeans from my Mom (mid-nineties jeans....jibblies), a t-shirt, and some mowing shoes and went outside to get marching orders.

So it was Me, Pops, Gramps and Joey. A very volatile combination. (It's usually three against one; I'll give you three guesses on who gets ganged up on. The first two don't count.)

The first order of the day was to push Dad's antique John Deere B out of the barn. We had to do this because:
a.) we had to wash it
b.) the stall was filled with cat poo that we (me?!) had to clean out

It was super nasty pushing that tractor out when the wheels were covered in shadies. Dad had gloves. I did not.

Somehow we got the tractor out (we almost knocked a weed whacker off and broke it). I was real glad when Joey showed up because then I could stop touching the cat-poo wheels. Sort of.

So then Dad said, "Wash the tractor." He commanded me to go find some soap up at the house. The soap did not exist, apparently Mom doesn't buy the kind he wanted. So I got something else and headed back down to the barn.

Joey and I then washed the tractor. In the rain.

The rain began as soon as we started sudsing up the tractor and Pops said it was "helping" us.

That was when he started hosing off the other side of the tractor. The side we had recently washed. Maybe some of you don't know what my dad's tractor looks like, but it's not real tall and it has a lot of holes in the engine part.

Most of the spray Dad was spraying on the tractor came through and sprayed us. Not Ideal.

So it was raining, Dad was "accidentally" spraying us with the sprayer, and we had cat poo vestiges on our hands.

The morning wasn't looking real great.

Oh, and morale was dropping because we were getting hungry. Somebody had made the mistake of saying the word "doughnuts" and as soon as that happened, morale just tanked. We (primarily Grandpa) kept grousing about how the lack of doughnuts was impairing our judgment and productivity.

Grandma showed up and decided she'd get on the doughnut bandwagon. Pops was beginning to feel outnumbered and was making bold statements of "no doughnuts" and "we're not eating lunch" and suchlike.

Mutiny was in the air. (Again, primarily from Grandpa.)

In order to keep me and Grandma quiet, Pops handed us his busted up model airplane and said, "take this to the trash over there."

So we did. Only "the trash over there" was real full. So grandma and I looked at each other...looked at the busted airplane...and started jumping on it to break it into smaller pieces so it would fit in the trash can.

I felt real guilty jumping on Dad's airplane. I was afraid at any minute I'd hear "WAIT! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" and he'd realize he'd given us the wrong airplane to throw away or something.

But that didn't happen. (Good thing, too, because Grandma smashed her piece into really tiny bits. She was going to town on it.)

When morale was as low as it could possibly get, Grandpa mutinied and said, "We're going to Culvers!" He then stuffed Pops in the truck and forced him at not-quite-gunpoint to drive him there.

And, thus, we went to Culvers.

Me, dressed like this.

Disclaimer: What you are about to see is very disturbing. If you don't think you can handle it, run away from your computer monitor screaming. If you don't, you may be very likely to do so after you see these pictures.


This second pictures is Sister's fault. She liked it because she thought I looked real ugly and terrible. And so she made me stand like this while she took a picture. I only upload it now because I realize that it does have comic value. Other than that, the picture is disturbing.

And that's my morning. Breaking Pops' airplane, getting soggy, and wearing strange pants.

I need to go to Iowa more often.