The Jello Incident.

Last night's post was pretty heavy and so tonight I want to shake it up and tell you about The Jello Incident. I hesitate in telling this story because if my mom ever reads it, my brother and I may get into trouble. But it's worth it because it was hilarious and we are idiots. But this year my Grandma made my kids the Jello Easter eggs and the story all came back to me.

It all started one Easter... several years ago. I mean, it was a long time ago.. maybe even 15 years ago. Holy cow. I'm old.

Anyways.

One Easter our Grandma made us these Jello molded eggs. Like these:

You see the big ones to the left? Well.. for whatever reason, Travis and I each took one and went upstairs with them. The upstairs to my mom's house used to be an attic but people renovated it and there were three rooms: mine, my brothers and the neutral territory room in the middle we called the play room. Well, the stairs to go upstairs has a weird ledge on one side but the ceiling is HIGH. I mean.. really high. So high that in order to paint it you have to have scaffolding set up on the stairs. So.. you get how high this is.

Anyways. So we each have this blob of an egg and we decided that it would be a good idea to throw them around like balls. Now, I'm like... 14 or so and Travis was around 12. Again, we were idiots. Travis threw an egg too high for me to catch and the sucker flew up and hit the wall... really high up.

And it got stuck.

I'll be honest- we panicked. Not only did we hear our mom scream "Knock it the fuck off up there" but we knew if she came upstairs and saw the egg stuck on the wall.. she'd be pissed. So we decided we had to get it down and never speak of it.

Logically, we found a yardstick and with careful maneuvering we knocked the egg down onto the stairs. Which was gross. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to clean Jello off of carpeted stairs without using a vacuum.

When I looked up I realized we had a bigger problem. The Jello egg stained the wall. Folks- that wall had a huge, I'm talking baseball sized reddish colored stain of Jello on it. We were going to die unless we could clean it.

Again, we put our genius brains together and devised a plan. We would take the Christmas shaped Avon soaps we got from Grandma at Christmas (which were never used but the boxes were still on our dressers), somehow attach it to the yard stick. We ended up using a ton of masking tape. Then we figured... the soap has to be wet in order to properly clean, so we got a soaking wet washcloth and secured that on top of the soap, which was taped to the yard stick. The whole thing seemed completely flawless.

I sent Travis back on the ledge (because he's taller than me) and made him scrub.

Unfortunately...

we failed to take into consideration that the soap itself was red and hey... the box clearly states the soap is supposed to turn the bath water colors.

Fucking FAIL.

We were now working with a stain the size of a honeydew melon on the wall.

Fortunately, our parents never came upstairs often so our mess went undiscovered for years. It was always this joke Travis and I shared because we knew if our mom knew what we did she'd be pissed.

Fast forward to a year or two ago and Mom moves her bedroom upstairs. I happened to get there right after all the heavy lifting was done and my mom says something to me about the stain, and did I know how it got there?

I told her it had been there since we moved in. I completely lied to my mom, but most importantly, she bought it.  I immediately had to call Travis and tell him and he of course laughed hysterically. And agreed that continuing to lie was probably our best option.

So this year when my Grandma brought Jello eggs for the kids I made DAMN SURE they ate them in the dining room under close supervision.

Sorry about the wall, mom.

The Bike Incident

If you don't know about Another David, you need to go to his blog right now. He's so much smarter than I likely ever will be plus he rides bicycles and goes for insane 20 mile rides. How he doesn't permanently have a bike seat glued to his ass- I don't know. But he's fab and I love him to bits. AND if we ever meet up he's promised me an evening filled with midgets and debauchery.

Who doesn't need a friend like that?

Anyways. So I remember commenting on his blog somewhere about what I refer to as "The Bike Incident" which is what makes me leery to own a bike even though I know I would, for the most part, like it.

The story begins when I was around 12. This is me at like age 10. Apparently I wasn't cute enough to get pictures taken of me at age 12 or something. But you'll see I was still a hot bitch rocking my black spandex cropped leggins with the lace trim, the matching black/white shirt WITH a hot pink sweatshirt. While hiking in Jay Cooke State Park. In sandals.

Yo betta recognize.

Anyways. So most kids get bikes for Christmas and that's fine because they can actually ride their bikes on Christmas. For us it's kind of a great gift but torture because you know it's another 6 months before you can go out and really have fun with it. Bikes aren't super conducive to snow. Well when I was 10, my brother was 10, our parents got us mountain bikes. Not real ones, but we thought they were. All I knew was mine was white with pink and green paint splotches with black accents. It was the fucking hotness. It had gears and 10 speeds and hand brakes and yeah. It was the most bad ass bike I had ever had.

Fast forward to the spring and my dad decided he was going to teach us how to properly ride a bike. Now, I had bikes in the past and knew how to ride it. I mean, I wasn't a toddler here. But I apparently didn't know enough to not break this bike and my dad didn't want to see $100 go down the toilet. He was adamant about bike care and how we should use the kick stand and not just throw it on the ground, etc. He wanted us to take pride in our new vehicles.

So one afternoon dad comes home with this jalopy of bike he got from god knows where and he was going to take us out to what we called "The Gully" by our house. The Gully was basically an old logging road for trucks, unpaved but well worn and wide that would take you straight to the St. Louis River which is what the paper mill sits on. We had played back there and we knew that there were other trails we just didn't know we were allowed to go that far into the woods. Well, that wasn't mostly me because I was the chicken shit when I was younger and Travis probably was back there all the time lighting fires and such.

Anyways- so we get on our bikes and I figure I'm good to go. We are riding along this trail which was kind of high up. To our right was a bunch of woods and to the left was a drop off with train tracks at the bottom. We went as far as we could on our trail before realizing we had to turn around or ride down this drop off hill and ride along the train tracks.

At that moment, Travis screwed up his brakes. My dad stopped to help him and looked at me, told me to "take 'er easy" down the hill. I'm SURE he said "down the hill" which to me, means ride your bike down the hill. I see a path that is worn into the hill which obviously means it's safe because bikes have been down it. So I start out on this little path.

Approximately 2 seconds into said ride down the little path I hear my dad yell my name, and then I see it. A barrel. Half sticking out of the ground that you couldn't see from the top. Obviously, I panic and hit the barrel.

I then go airborne, do two complete somersaults in the air, at which point I separated from my bike, hit the ground, roll down the hill, land on the railroad tracks. It felt like 10 minutes that I laid there when it really only could have been a second when my bike came down. And landed on top of me.

I pretty much started crying and thought I was going to die. But here comes my brother and Dad, taking their leisurely fucking time around the path, not the way I went, and asked me if I was ok. I remember my dad telling me to get up because I had to ride the bike home and him asking me several times if the bike was ok.

Nice.

At some point I was hobbling along and it felt like I had blood running down my leg. My dad told me that I had to take my pants off to see if I had gotten hurt. So there I am, age 12, half naked next to some railroad tracks, crying, and the biggest bruise I have ever seen developing in my left inner thigh. This thing was the size of a dinner plate and was the inner thigh and part of the front and back. Black as night. And puffy. It was getting more and more puffy and it hurt like a som'of'a'bitch.

I had to walk home like that because riding the bike was not going to happen. My mom laughed. Travis teased me. My dad said I needed more lessons.

I rode my bike again, on flat roads only, for a few more years. And every once in awhile, I see them go on sale and I think I'd like to buy one and take the kids out. But then I think oy...I don't want to be that loser parent that rides bikes with their kids. Those kids always got beat up.