Don't trust grandmas.

I live in Washington state and one of my sisters - I'll call her Crami - lives in Bend, Oregon. For those of you who don't know, the Bend area is considered "high desert." It's cold and snowy in the winter and hot in the summer.

My other sister - I'll call her Gleneetra - and our kids went down to see Crami for a few days during the summer. It was very hot and very fun.

One day we decided to go floating on the Deschutes River. We used two rafts: one for the kids and one for the "adults." It was a four-hour trip that was spent just lying in the raft on a calm river and lazing away the day.

After about an hour or so into the trip, we decided to race the kids around a grassy split in the river. Gleneetra and her eldest daughter were paddling our raft; Crami and I were watching the kids.

I noticed a raft full of old ladies coming toward us. I didn't pay much attention because I was watching the kids and watching my sister try to get her daughter to paddle differently - and hey - they were old grandma-type ladies out for a leisurely paddle.

All of a sudden, one of the grandmas shouts, "Get 'em, girls!"

Those old ladies, complete strangers, unloaded water cannons on us! They completely soaked us! We were so shocked at being ambushed by a bunch of grandmas in a raft (and because we had no water weapons of our own), that we could only hunker down in the raft and take it. Being younger and stronger, we were finally able to put some distance between us and the geezerettes.

Can you believe it? It was shocking. Just shocking. Despite the fact that it cooled us down and actually felt good.

And the worst part? We lost the race and had to endure the shame of being beaten by the kids.

Grandmas in a raft can't be trusted.

My dog Josephine is mischievous. One of her favorite things to do is to do something bad so that people will chase her and she can play keep away.

For example, she’ll grab a pen or stuffed animal from one of the kids’ rooms, and then run over and wait at the top of the stairs. She knows that they'll come after her because if they don’t, she’ll make a complete mess by chewing up whatever it is that she's stolen. As soon as the kids come after her, she bounds down the stairs and runs to the other side of the dining room table - the perfect keep-away place.

Josephine’s mischievous streak doesn’t extend only to grabbing things from the kids’ rooms. She loves to dig holes in the yard – big deep holes that a bear could hibernate in. And if anyone dares to fill them in, she’ll dig a new hole right next to the one that is in the process of being filled. She is truly a knucklehead and she’s lucky that she has me for a mom because there aren’t too many people who would put up with some of the stuff that she does.

Mind you, she’s not mean or spiteful; she just likes to play and be busy.

I had purchased a roasted chicken from the grocery store (they come on a black tray with a domed plastic cover and you purchase them hot from the deli). The other morning, I took the chicken from the fridge and sliced off a few pieces to add to Josephine’s morning meal of dried dog food. She loved it. I then went upstairs for a few moments (can’t remember now why I went up there – maybe to get my vision enhancement devices or maybe to get the kids up). When I came back downstairs, there sat the black tray on the counter.

Empty. No chicken. No chicken anywhere.

I looked at Josephine and she just looked at me with this blank look on her face. I saw no chicken bits hanging out of her mouth, no bones on the floor, no greasy mess on the carpet. I looked all around, thinking that maybe Josephine stole the chicken and hid it behind the couch or in a plant or something. No chicken. I looked at Josephine again, smelled her breath, and looked for bits of chicken in her teeth. Nothing. But even if there had been, she’d already been eating chicken with dog food earlier so that would ruin the chicken-in-the-teeth test and the chicken breath test.

So tell me. How does a dog eat a whole roasted chicken, bones and all, in the space of a minute and a half without leaving a single trace?

Obviously, it doesn't.

The chicken reanimated itself, grew a new head and feet and wings and flew away. It’s the only answer. Except for one small thing. Josephine now crows at daybreak each morning and has been seen pecking at the ground in the back yard.

I borrowed a scrunchy from my sister, Gleneetra, while we were at Crami's because I left mine at home. I gave it back to her one evening, but then we couldn't find it on the morning that we left. We must have searched for that stupid scrunchy for 20 minutes! I was feeling badly because I thought I'd lost it. After coming to the conclusion that it went to the same hiding place as all left socks, we stopped looking.

Two days later I got a call from Crami telling me that she'd found the scrunchy. She asked me to guess where she'd found it. I guessed and guessed, only to be told "no" each time. So finally I said with as much elegance as possible, "In a pile of crap outside."

"Close!"

great

"In a pile of puke?"

"Yes!" Apparently, my sister's dog, Hoss, had stolen the scrunchy out of the travel bag, ate it, and then proceeded to barf it up two days later. At first Crami thought he'd thrown up a banana. But then she looked closer and saw that it had a waffle weave. The scrunchy.

I suggested that she wash it and mail it back to Gleneetra. I never heard whether she did that or not.

You might be wondering why I'm telling you such a disgusting story. Well, it's because I believe in sharing lessons learned. And the lessons here are:

1. Scrunchies don't go to the same place as socks.
2. It's always the dog.

My sister came up to visit in October. She lives in Bend, Oregon – a 4 or 5 hour drive depending on traffic and the weather. On Sunday, we decided to go see a movie in the town of Centralia, WA (where my mom lives & where I grew up). The original movie theater closed down several years ago, but there is another “theater” in town that’s hooked onto one of the oldest bars in the town (haunted and everything – the bar, not the theater though maybe it is, too). Tickets are only $3, but at that price we knew not to expect too much. I mean, who goes to the tavern for a movie?

We entered the Olympic Club and smiled politely at the bar guys who looked at us as we walked in. Personally, it has been a long time since I’ve been in a bar and I'd forgotten about that kind of scrutiny.

Anyhoo, the theater was a big room full of upholstered chairs (like at a dinner table), overstuffed chintz chairs, tall wingback chairs, loveseats and couches. And a few tables were mixed in. It was REALLY weird.

So my sister and I sat on a loveseat and placed our glasses of water on a small side table. We chose to sit on the walkway aisle since to sit anywhere else would have meant having the back of a tall wingback chair or couch right in front of us. And I did prefer to actually watch a movie rather than stare at the back of a wingback chair. Oh, did I mention that you could order food from the bar and eat it during the movie? That’s what the tables were for.

All during the movie, the kitchen brought in food for people who’d ordered their food before the movie started but didn’t get it before the movie started. So the “theater” wasn’t dark dark like a regular theater because the waiters had to be able to see the plastic number cards on the tables in order to know where the food went.

Periodically, the wait staff would roll the cleanup cart in and take away people’s dishes. I don’t know why they didn’t just wait until AFTER the movie to rumble down the aisles. Maybe it just didn't occur to them that they were a distraction. Maybe they never thought that they made better doors than windows. Maybe they didn't consider that dirty plates could wait to be picked up.

But apart from the strangeness of it all, the movie was pretty good. Reese Witherspoon in "Just Like Heaven." It was the most interesting three dollars I’ve spent in a long time.

I have to tell you about something I saw the other day. The office of my primary client is located on a street that has a slight incline.

Well, I was looking out of the window and I saw this man trudging up the sidewalk across the street. He was pulling this short overweight Welsh Corgi along behind him. I could tell that the poor dog was exhausted; its little legs were about 7 inches long compared to the kind-of-tall man’s legs. And the guy was walking uphill in trudging giant steps.

I was just thinking about that poor little tired dog when the guy leaned out toward the street, laid a finger aside of his nose (much like Santa!), and blew a noseful of that which rhymes with “spot” out into the street! It sprayed out of his nose like the water from a whale’s blow hole!

I was so grossed out.

All y'all have a nice day.

Josephine loves to play keep-away. It's her favorite thing next to counter surfing.

I'd taken some mini quiches out of the freezer (they're in trays of about 20), and microwaved a few of them. I left the tray on the counter because I knew I'd have to make more.

I left the room for a couple of minutes, and when I came back, no quiche.

Josephine had managed to grab that package of frozen quiches (which I'd pushed quite far back on the counter) and gobbled them all up. It didn't seem to matter to her that they were frozen. There were little watery puddles on the floor along with the empty tray.

"Josephine!" I said in a scolding manner. She slunk into the room and looked at me with those brown eyes of hers. At which point I told her that it was very bad of her to have eaten them frozen and that she really should have mopped up the watery puddles from the floor. At which point she opened her mouth, loudly licked her chops, and then looked at me again.

I'm not sure if she was saying, "I'm sorry, but they were so good I couldn't help myself." or "Boy, those were good. It's about time you left something decent up there."

My husband asked me the other night if I'd eaten an entire half of a pizza. Apparently, there'd been half of a pizza on the counter. I was a little put out, as I've never eaten a half of a pizza in my life. I mean, I like to stuff myself once in a while, but usually with maple nut ice cream, not with half of a pizza.

Josephine.

I did something this year that I consider almost sacrilegious. I went out and bought an artificial Christmas tree. I know! I’m bad! But I was getting tired of the spiders that come into the house with the real trees. And the dust and the needles and dinging up my door frame getting the tree in and out. And the $80 each year for something that we just throw away in a few weeks’ time. I’m now officially the black sheep of the family. I was only the gray sheep before.

But the tree is so pretty. It’s 12 feet tall, comes with white lights already attached (so I can add my own multi-colored lights or just keep it white), and it’s nice and wide and made of realistic-looking plastic needles. I guess I’ll have to hang a couple of those pine tree car deodorizers in it to make it smell real, too.

I feel like such a fake.