My mother

This will be the first of what I can only imagine will be many posts. I know that I claim to be hilarious, but there are also a lot of funny people in my life, my mother being one of them. Her hilarity is always unintentional, which only makes her funnier. Additionally, my mother does not function (at all) in the morning until at least two cups of coffee. Ah, the set up for disaster...

My mom, dad, and I are sitting in a nice restaurant in Chicago on Saturday morning for brunch. Mom has only had one cup of coffee and it was hotel room-brewed freeze-dried coffee at that. The following is the conversation that ensued.

Waiter: Good morning, how are you all doing today? Can I get coffee or something else to drink for everyone?
Mom (grumbling): Coffee
Dad: Coffee for me too.
Waiter: Cream? Black?
Mom: Cream.
Dad: I'm black.
Mom: You don't look black to me.

No more pennies for me

When my brother was in Boy Scouts, they had this "penny thing" that they did. In the morning, each good little Cub/Boy/Eagle Scout put a penny in his right pocket. It was there to remind him to do a good dead for the day. As soon as he did that deed, he moved the penny over to his left pocket. Kind of a nice little trick to remind you to care about others, right? Well, I don't have a job and cannot afford to throw pennies around like, well, pennies. Besides the point. I like the idea of doing good on a daily basis and try to incorporate that into my life (when I remember).

Anyway, I was walking down the street yesterday and saw a wallet on the ground. It was one of those Velcro wallets we all had in the 5th grade to put our babysitting and allowance money in. It was also camouflage. I looked down at it and thought "There's no way anyone is missing this wallet. There is nothing of importance in there." As I walked a few feet further, I felt guilty about passing it by; there could be a lot of money in the Velcro wallet (yeah right) that someone needed or, more heart breaking, some kid had lost his first wallet and he was really upset.

So, I looked like the idiot on the street who turns around as I walked back down the sidewalk towards the wallet. I bent over to pick it up and turned it over in my hand so that the Velcro was facing me and I could open it. As I turned it over, I noticed a couple brown spots on the front (if you ask me, not very camouflage if you can see DIRT on it) but thought nothing of it.

As I unfolded the Velcro, something didn't seem quite right. The wallet didn't pop open like I had expected, it was sticking. With the Velcro now undone, I started to peel the wallet open and realized within milliseconds that there was shit in the wallet. Now when I say shit, I don't mean it was empty and I had wasted 30 seconds of my life on a good deed to open a wallet to find nothing; I mean literally, there was SHIT in the wallet. I didn't have to open it more than an eighth of an inch to realize I had been duped. I think I may have yelled a profanity or two as I threw the wallet down onto the grass and walked away.

I didn’t see any kids snickering in the windows behind me but if they’re out there, I’m sure they aren’t Boy Scouts.