Category Archives: Humor

You might not live in the country if…

Humor, Society

with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy…

You might not live in the country if…

  • you ever say “depending on the traffic” when estimating how long it takes to get somewhere
  • you never say “but I can’t come if the road is muddy” when estimating how long it takes to get somewhere
  • you never say “but it’ll be later if I get stuck behind a tractor” when estimating how long it takes to get somewhere
  • you have known some of your neighbors for less than 20 years
  • no random strangers give you a (friendly!) wave as you drive down the road
  • you think “the road” is an ambiguous phrase
  • mail addressed just to “Your Name, Town” might not get to you as fast as usual
  • you can’t remember what church someone goes to
  • you’d never consider someone that lives 2 miles away to be a neighbor
  • you think an auger is something unpleasant at the dentist’s office
  • you think “imporoving your irrigation” means buying a $2 attachment for your garden hose
  • you think “your beans are weird” is probably an indecent joke
  • you wouldn’t be seriously insulted if someone told you “your beans are weird”
  • when looking for a house, it never occured to you to avoid the highway so you don’t get so many comments about whether or not your crop’s rows are straight
  • you have no idea where your nearest gravel supplier is
  • you don’t have to install anything on your roof before you can watch TV
  • you think a lagoon is something from Scooby-Doo
  • when driving down the road, you can’t identify some of the crops alongside it
  • you’ve never driven down a road with crops next to it
  • your indoor plumbing still works when the electricity is off
    alternative test for Amish: the nearest phone is less than a mile away
  • you moved to the area from out of state last week, and you haven’t met any distant relatives (or at least made any distant connections) yet
  • when people refer to “the Old Country”, you wonder which country they mean
  • families whose native language isn’t English have probably lived in the United States for less than 100 years where you live
  • something more than 30 years old would never be considered “new”
  • you know less than 10 that can remember a time when electric service wasn’t available in the area
  • you’ve never lamented the invention of touch-tone dialing, since you don’t miss getting updates on the local news from the operator
  • when doing genealogy research, you start somewhere other than the church archives
  • when someone suggests having dinner together, you ask “at which restaurant?” instead of “your place or mine?”
  • “at which restaurant” isn’t a stupid question where you live because there’s more than one good choice within 20 miles
  • less than half of the radio stations in your area have a noontime ag report
  • your high school sports teams have winning seasons periodically
  • your graduating class had more than 25 people
  • you think “the fifth grade teacher” is ambiguous because there are several 5th grade teachers at the local elementary school
  • you don’t think traffic is heavy if there’s someone ahead of you at the stop sign
  • you don’t think that the mere presence of stop signs is a scary indicator of urban sprawl
  • as you stroll through a parking lot, there’s a car you don’t recognize
  • fresh horse droppings on the road might cause the city to send out a street cleaning team
  • you have no connections with people that can give you a discount on beef because it was alive on their farm last week

And the way to tell you might not live in the country:

The waitress at a restaurant explains they’re out of chicken, and you think that means something other than your fried chicken will arrive 20 minutes late, but extra juicy.

3 More Parts to the Credit Card Prank!

Humor

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the credit card prank, where a humor writer tried to sign his credit card receipts in all sorts of different ways. He drew landscapes, signed his name in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not one cashier wondered what he was doing.

Well, he has three more articles where he devises new ways to try to get noticed. Despite the fact that he sometimes holds up lines for several minutes taking photos of his receipts, nobody cared.

Here are the links to the new articles: one, two, three.

Very funny stuff.

Skunk + Basement + Valentine’s Day + Rifle

Humor

Here’s a true story that happened to us on Valentine’s Day, 2002. (If you like better stories told way better than I do, check out Cliff. This is all I’ve got.)

It had started snowing that morning. By evening, temperatures were very cold and there were about 4 inches of snow covering the ground. I went outside to get our cat into our garage for shelter, and was looking down at our window well when I got a surprise. For those of you that don’t know what a window well is — it’s a dug-out area that permits one to crawl out of a basement window in an emergency, and is usually a hold about 5 feet below ground level right next to the foundation of the house.

Anyway, there was a skunk down there. It was a cold skunk, and it was hiding in one corner.

So you can imagine, this causes several problems. I certainly don’t want to crawl down there for the obvious reason. Plus, there was somewhat of a rash of rabid skunks that year, so there was no telling if this skunk could infect me. For whatever reason, I grabbed a long stick and gave him a poke or two (I was still firmly on the ground and the skunk was still a good five feet beneath me.) This made him start digging a hole in the corner of our window well (which has a sand bottom). Argh.

Read on for more

So I do what anyone does with a vexing wildlife problem: call dad. He suggested giving the skunk a ramp to get out of there. So I put a board down there at a good angle. Left it there overnight. The stupid skunk wouldn’t use it!

So the next morning, I have to go in to work like usual. I start calling around to see who can take care of a skunk for me. I’m not a hunter and don’t own any firearms, so I can’t shoot it.

First, I call 911. They tell me that they definately do not shoot skunks. Perhaps I should call the city pest control? Can’t do that, I’m outside the city limits.

Next, I try the county health department. They’d be glad to fill out some paperwork for me after I kill a skunk, but they have nobody that could do that for me.

Hmmm… I do some work and ponder this for awhile…

Inspiration! I call the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, infectious desease division. I tell them that I have a very sick skunk stuck in my window well, and that it looks highly diseased. Certainly a serious health risk, and nobody can take care of it. This got their attention and they promised to check around and call me back shortly.

I got a call back from the county health dept. They had just received a call from “The State” and were told that the Sheriff will take care of my skunk. I call 911 back, and sure enough, they dispatch a deputy.

So I head home to meet him. He shows up….

Deputy: So you’ve got a skunk.

Me: Yep.

Deputy: You know where he is?

Me: Oh yes, he’s not gone anywhere since yesterday.

Deputy: Great! (gets very excited, and goes to get rifle from car) Usually they run away before I get there.

So I show him the skunk. It’s about 6 inches from the window. Deputy says, “hmmm, can’t use buckshot that close to the window.” He fires at the skunk. Killed it the first time. I watch it spray its spray directly on our house. And smell it. Deputy shoots it twice more, “just to be sure.”

So it’s dead.

Me: What do I do with it now? The ground’s frozen. Can’t bury the thing.

Deputy: Hmmm. (thinks about 5 seconds.) Just throw it out with your trash.

Well.

So I go down there with some gloves, a shovel, and a 3-layer trash bag. I almost gag several times, the stench is so bad. I haul the thing off to our trash bin. Then I go inside to shower.

Uhoh. Our house smells worse than I do. I shower, then get back to work ASAP.

Call back the county health department.

Me: Uhm, what do I do with a dead diseased skunk? The deputy said to throw it out with my trash.

County: Hmm. Nobody has ever asked that before. I’ll have to call the state.

… 30 minutes later …

County: The state says, “We don’t know. I guess if the deputy told him to throw it out with his trash, he should.”

Me: I don’t think they’ll take our trash if it smells like a rotting diseased skunk, and has a decomposing animal in it.

County: Well, you can at least try.

They took it.

The rest of the afternoon, about 1 in 5 people walking through my office area would stop. Sniff the air. Look around, confused. Finally ask, “does anyone smell a skunk down here?” My co-workers took great delight in saying that it was me, and also in reminding me that I could take a sick day for this.

Now our problem was the house. Even though the skunk was never indoors, the place reeked. We spent two nights at my parents’ place, and our clothes smelled like skunk. Everything smelled like skunk. A combination of an ozone generator, “Skunk-Off”, and an exterminator’s chemicals helped control it, finally. Closets and the basement still had a smell for a month, and we could smell it at least once a week in the basement for 6 months.

You can’t imagine how helpful people want to be when they hear of skunk issues. I got an amazing variety of hints of what I should have done to prevent the smell. Here are some:

  • Just wait for it to die, then haul it off
  • Flood the window well, drown the skunk, then haul it out
  • Trap the skunk, then be very quiet while you life it out of the window well
  • Seal off the top of the window well, then run a hose from your car’s exhaust to the window well, suffocating the skunk.
  • Trap it, then shoot it.
  • Pour tomato juice on the skunk.
  • And of course, the “combo plan”: trap it, then haul it up quietly, then lower the trap (quietly) into a bucket of water to drown it.

To this day, on warm, moist days when we’ve been gone, our noses remind us of that Valentine’s Day two years ago. And we decide which state we’ll visit for that day this year.