That One Time We Shot A Guy With a BB Gun...

My sister in law Nicole always says that crazy stuff happens to me and Jonathan because we are good at telling stories.  So tonight he and I were reminiscing about our first year of marriage and all it's debacles and I was reminded about a few particularly funny events that occurred after we moved into our first house as a married couple.  If this post seems totally left, field...you're right, it is.  But it made me laugh tonight so I thought I would share it with you... ;)

We moved into 415 Buoy when we were 23 and 25 years old.  Just a few months after getting married.  We moved out of a teeny tiny one bedroom apartment into this amazingly awesome rent house that I actually miss frequently...

And man, we had some good times in that little house.  Here are some of the highlights:

"Rachel can you cut my hair.  I think I want a buzz cut..."

• So I get out the scissors and decide it would be funny to cut his hair as close as possible with the scissors first before getting the clippers after his head to even it all out.  I'm snickering the whole time I'm cutting and he has no idea what I'm doing.  I don't keep an eye on the time and then suddenly realize it's time to go to church.  We have to leave *right then*!  But Jonathan has a head full of chunks cut out of his frock and is looking something like a burn victim/cancer patient/fledgling.  I am literally DYING of laughter.  He goes to the mirror and stares agape at his head and says "What. The. Heck??"  And then he dies laughing too.  So we throw a hat on his head and go to choir practice.  People were...confused...to say the least...

"Oh crap...I think we shot him!"

• We used to LOVE to watch the birds on our bird feeder in the backyard.  But it was always quite disturbing when we would find a dead (or half dead) bird lying underneath the darn thing.  It was also quite annoying to have to wrangle said dead/half dead birds away from Matilda when she would grab them and try to play with them.  We figured out that a neighborhood tomcat was coming into the yard and using our birds as play things.  We needed a plan...this carnage was just getting to be too much.  Jonathan's grandfather was apparently a beastly good aim with a BB gun back in the day and would scare the neighborhood cats out of his yard with it.  We decided to try our hand.  But we needed target practice.  So we sat on our back deck and shot the BB gun at targets like a couple of backwoodsy hoodlums.  We were both TERRIBLE shots.  I shot the top of the copper roofed bird feeder by accident and thought that was pretty cool.  It made the coolest little *ping* sound!  So we kept shooting at it.  The BB's were ricocheting off into who knows where.  It was so much fun!  Until...  We hear "OUCH!!" from the neighbor behind us.  He's been hit!!  So we scramble and HAUL BUTT into the house to hide behind curtains and wait for the paddy wagon to come and take us downtown for assault with a...deadly?....weapon...

"We suck at the BB gun.  We need live bait..."

• We decided we had to lure this cat into the yard in order to actually hit it with a BB.  A live bird was obviously the best choice.  But our ideas there were foiled.  So we decided to take one of the dead birds out of the yard and use it to lure the tomcat.  What to do, what to do?  Ah!  Fishing line.  We strung that dead bird up by fishing line (you know...optical illusion...) right in the corner of the fence.  It was brilliant.  The thing hung there looking as if it were levitating.  SURELY this was our ticket to getting that pesky cat into the yard and interested for long enough for us to ping him with a BB and teach him a lesson.  Days went by.  No tomcat.  But the bird was still swinging there by his imaginary noose.  Until...  Our friend and neighbor Jamie came to pick up his lawn mower that we had borrowed.  The three of us were chatting in the backyard until Jamie's attention was stolen by "something strange".  He squinted at the back fence and shook his head and squinted again.  I thought "Oh no...he's seen it...".  And he says, "Um...is that?...I think...yeah I think there is like a dead bird hanging out of your tree back there.  What the..."  Jonathan and I are bug eyed.  How do we come off looking clever and not like a couple of kooks?  Jonathan says, "Oh, it's bait for a cat," and Rachel says, "Yeah.  We strung him up there so the cat would think it was levitating."  Nailed it.  He *definitely* doesn't think we're crazy...  o_O  We promptly cut the darn thing down and gave it a proper dead bird's funeral...

"The neighbors are saying there is some gnarly chicken in your driveway..."

• We survived Hurricane Ike in that little Buoy house.  Well...the house weathered the storm while we hauled buns to OKC.  While packing up the house in a frenzy we thought "Meh.  Don't worry about the stuff in the freezer.  Even if the power goes out it will come back on in a few hours.  As long as it stays shut the stuff will stay frozen or at least cold."  So we left it.  When we returned 2 weeks later, the power was STILL out.  And our house smelled like...well...rotting things.  We had to do something.  So we staged a garbage can at the back door in the garage.  We wore surgical masks.  Jonathan would suck in a huge breath, hold it, sprint into the kitchen and unload as much as he could out of the rotten freezer into the garbage can, sprint back, and "tag me in".  Then I'd do the same.  Each time after a "run" we would stand there dry heaving in the driveway until it was our turn to make another run.  Finally we had a garbage can full of rotten meat and veggies and an empty fridge.  We quadruple bagged that nastiness and put it on the curb for the garbage men.  We showered and went out for dinner obviously.  We got a call from our landlord several hours later: "Ummm...I just got a call from one of the neighbors.  Apparently there is some 'gnarly chicken' in your driveway and it's made its way into other peoples' yards.  They aren't happy.  What in the world are they talking about??"  Well...we *knew* about the "gnarly chicken"...but how the heck was it in "other peoples' yards"??  We came home and figured it out.  A neighborhood dog was confused as to why we were throwing away this veritable smorgasbord of meat delicacies that had been aged to perfection.  He decided to tip our trashcan over and share the wealth around the neighborhood.  We could smell the "gnarly-ness" as soon as we opened the car door.  Rotten meat for the win...

Ok, ok.  I'll stop.  There are probably several other stories I can tell about living in that house.  But for now, I hope you're laughing as much as I did writing this.  What a trip down memory lane...