by Kathy Brasby | Aug 19, 2014 | Stories
Sometimes a mom needs to re-examine the smart remarks when the kids get older.
Here’s what I mean: Few things torque a tall teenage boy more than having to slide his long legs into a cramped front seat of a car.
Or so it seemed when my son, all 6’1” of him, stuffed himself into the driver’s seat of my car.
“This is crazy. Who can get into this?” he asked as he shoved the seat to its far limit.
Moms need smart remarks in these instances. When the kid towers over you, outweighs you, and knows more cool technical terms than you do, snappy remarks are important in the arsenal.
So I fired a smart remark back. “Well, it is not my fault you have such long legs.”
I settled into the passenger seat feeling certain that he’d settle into his seat with his hands on the wheel and his mouth shut.
Then we stared at each other.
My husband is two inches taller than I am, but my legs are two inches longer than his. I stand 5’9” – fairly tall for a mom.
“Um, maybe it is your fault,” my son said.
Yeah, maybe it is.
Looks like I need a snappier comeback.
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 12, 2014 | Hope
Some jobs just don’t fit some people.
Chuck’s crew had one of those projects where the construction happened on one side of a canal and the electrical power was on the other side.
So Chuck was handed the 100-foot extension cord and instructed to get it hooked into the electrical outlet.
Chuck threw himself into the task, which involved unrolling the cord and dragging it across the ground to a small foot bridge. Then he dragged the remainder of the cord to the outlet.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew assembled scaffolding, laid out tools, and inventoried the building materials.
Then Chuck came back to his foreman.
“All set?” the foreman said.
“I need an adapter,” Chuck answered.
The foreman narrowed his eyes. “An adapter?”
Chuck held up the end of the extension cord. “Yeah. I’ve got female to female over there at the outlet and I need an adapter.”
“I suppose you have male to male at this end?” the foreman replied.
“I haven’t looked yet.”
Chuck didn’t last long at that job.
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 8, 2014 | Seasons
“Harvey always walked around with his head bend down,” the physical therapist told me over coffee and scones. “He had a walker and he’d walk hunched over. We worked on that for weeks but I never could get him to lift his head.”
“Frustrating for you?” I asked.
She chuckled. “More for him, but he never knew.”
“So did you change his therapy schedule?”
“Well, yes.” She sipped her coffee. “One day Harvey was walking down the hallway, like he always did, with his eyes on the floor and his head hunched over. We had a new resident on the floor that liked to escape her room early.”
“Escape her room?”
The therapist nodded. “She liked to sneak out of her room topless.”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, Harvey was making his way down the hallway when this lady did her thing. She walked right by Harvey without a stitch on top.”
“And Harvey—“
“Oh, Harvey just kept shuffling along.”
“He was shocked?”
The therapist took a bite of her scone. “He had his head down and he never saw a thing. Missed the whole show.”
“Did you ever tell him?”
“Nope. I decided he could keep shuffling along. We’d work on something else.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 5, 2014 | Stories
Last week I wrote about Goats in Love but it was only part one. Story number two may top it.
Rocket, our daddy buck, spent a lot of time alone pining for his girlfriend. Now the girlfriend varied from week to week, but Rocket was always ready.
Rocket’s pad also paralleled a small pasture where two does lived. One day I noticed that one of the does, Lulu, was ready to meet Rocket. The other doe, Maybelle, was oblivious.
I did mention that Rocket was always ready, right?
I opened the gate and Rocket roared into the pasture, legs churning in a blur like Wiley Coyote chasing the roadrunner.
Rocket, as we already established, had more hormones than brains. Chanting “hey, good lookin’” as he flew past me, he focused his loving gaze on Maybelle. Not Lulu.
A female goat not in the mood has no interest in a hormone-fueled buck. Maybelle saw Rocket racing toward her and took off like a jet. Her legs were churning faster than his.
I watched the pair flying around the perimeter of the pasture, legs spinning. Rocket’s head was up as he enjoyed the beauty of his new girlfriend. Maybelle’s head was down; she had no time for anything but a panicked gallop.
Meanwhile, Miss Lulu was sending little air kisses and twirling her tail like a string of pearls.
As the racing pair headed down the backstretch, their path took them past Miss Lulu who by now was flashing her lashes like a neon sign.
I did not know a thundering buck could make a 180-degree correction without turning inside out but Rocket did it.
Suddenly, he was bringing roses and chocolate to Miss Lulu.
And Maybelle leaned against a fence post, heaving for air while her life passed before her eyes.
With goat romance, when it’s not your time, it’s not your time.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 29, 2014 | Stories
I’ve decided to declare this time as Valentine’s season for goats because, well, if you have to ask you may not understand.
Of late, I’ve been seeing these adorable YouTube videos of baby goats cavorting with great joy. If you’ve seen those, your appetite may be whetted toward goats. Well, you need to know more.
If you haven’t heard about goats in love, you are woefully deprived.
In our goat herd, we usually keep our buck – the future daddy – separated from the does so we can control when the babies come.
One bright fall morning, one of our girls had put on her high heels, lipstick, and Chanel before sashaying along the fence line she shared with Rocket the buck.
Rocket got the message: she was in the mood. Rocket was always in the mood so he pushed his manly head through the fence to sniff her fragrance.
When I saw the hearts drifting into the air above those two, I collected Miss Elinore and brought her into Rocket’s pen. She wiggled her hips and lightly danced from the gate to the fence line so that she could lean against Rocket.
Just what he had hoped for, except for one thing.
Rocket’s massive head, and I could not make this up, was stuck in the fence.
He pulled and twisted while Elinore was nearly doing a pole dance beside him. His front legs were like pile drivers pushing into the ground. His cheeks would have turned red from the exertion if not hidden by that thick buck fur. No go. He was stuck.
The love of his life was at hand and he couldn’t get his head out of the wire.
I gotta tell you that it’s hard to cut fence wire when you’re laughing that hard.
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