Earlier this week I posted one of my favorite stories in recent memory, G-Master’s tale of his mother faking his father’s death in order to get a phone call from his sister. After much introspection and, I feel, some degree of prayer, G-Master decided that perhaps he had not adequately explained why his mother would go to such extreme measures and thus had portrayed her in a negative light. He emailed me to ask if he could perhaps provide a little backstory for us.

I think you will find that the following anecdote serves, in large part, to make the fake-death-in-church-bulletin story all the richer. And this one is a little gem in and of itself.

“Late last year, my sister and brother-in-law were having a bit of cash flow difficulty and were late on a few bills (cable, power, mortgage, etc.). Anyway, the two of them decided that the best course of action would be to cook up a get-rich-quick scheme. To wit, they formulated the following plan for themselves:

1. Hire a babysitter for their three children for the weekend.
2. Rent a car (You heard right! Three kids and they don’t own an operational car).
3. “Temporarily” exchange their wedding rings for cash at a local pawn shop.
4. Drive the rental car to Las Vegas and win thousands of dollars with their new bankroll.

The most unusual part of this story, to me, is that their plan only had four elements, and they actually managed to accomplish the first three, which statistically made this one of their most successful endeavors to date.

That’s ironic.

So, babysitter in place, car rented, and jewelry hocked, the two set sail from Denver to Las Vegas. By the way, they got a really good deal on the rental car by signing the in-state-use-only rental agreement on a car they planned to drive from Denver, Colorado to Las Vegas, Nevada. Nice.

Some hours later, they were about 60 miles beyond the Nevada state line when their rental car hit a deer, killing the deer and sending the car into a ditch, rendering the vehicle inoperable.

Stop the tape right here, and ask yourself: “What would my next move be?”

See if your decision matches theirs.

Upon determining that their rental car could not be restarted and that no other vehicles were near enough to have witnessed the accident, my sister and her husband left the scene and walked approximately one mile to a small-town gas station they had passed just before hitting and killing the deer. The two lovebirds then purchased bus tickets back to Denver, and early the following morning hired a taxi to take them to their house.

They arrived home, relieved the baby-sitter of her duties, and – get this – went to sleep, because they were “just too freaked out by everything.” When they awakened, they promptly called the rental company and reported that the rental vehicle was missing and “possibly stolen.”

Details since the night in question have been tough to come by, but reports out of Colorado indicate that both my sister and bother-in-law have since retracted their story about the vehicle being stolen, and, to my knowledge, have managed to avoid any serious criminal charges. What remained of their Vegas trip cash pool was just enough to cover the deductible on the insurance they purchased at the rental agency as well as the additional charge for driving the vehicle out of state.

My father paid their mortgage and bills for the month in question for the sake of the grandchildren only (his words).

The pawn shop still has the rings.

So if you have been asking yourself why a woman would fake her husband’s death to get her daughter to call home, this story may provide some insight.

Have a fine weekend.
G-Master”

Since the four Tylenol Allergy Sinus pills I’ve taken over the course of the day have done nothing to diminish the pulsing vise of pain and pressure on the left side of my face, I would like to receive some combination of the following unconventional, yet undoubtedly effective, treatments:

1. drilling a hole in the left side of my nose
2. smashing a rock into my left eye socket
3. slicing off the left side of my nose
4. puncturing openings underneath my left eye with an anvil
5. removing my left eye altogther

I feel that any of these options are desirable in that they would enable me to relieve All The Pressure.

OH! One more option: ripping my sinuses from my nasal cavity.

Any volunteers?

Several things as a follow up to the earlier HGTV post and a segue into a discussion of Food Network:

Mission Organization is highly entertaining – again, it’s a look at how other people live, and if this show is any indication, there are a great many Americans living in bedrooms where they can’t get to the bed and in living rooms where they can’t sit down. Fascinating. Decorating Cents is too crafty for me. As I mentioned in the comments on the earlier post, I don’t want to take a fence post and turn it into a paper towel holder. I’d rather by a paper towel holder that, you know, works.

Moving on.

I love to cook, and as a result, I also enjoy Food Network. I’ve written before about Paula Deen…and what’s so funny to me is that while one might think that my mama would also love Paula Deen, she doesn’t. In fact, when she was here last week and I was watching Paula’s show, Mama mocked her. MOCKED HER. At first it caught me off-guard, but then I realized what was going on: Mama is a wonderful cook in general, a wonderful Southern cook in particular, and I think she feels like Paula has stolen a little bit of her thunder. Mama went on and on about how Paula’s recipes weren’t any good and implied that Paula’s accent was fake and basically did everything she could to try to burst my Paula bubble. I wanted to tell Mama that it’s not a competition :-) – that the fact that I like Paula doesn’t mean that I like my mama’s cooking any less, but I thought better of it and just let Mama rant. Regardless of Mama’s feelings, I will continue to TiVo Paula’s show.

Now, what I’m about to say may be the subject of some controversy, especially if book sales are any indication, but I’m going to put it out there anyway: Rachael Ray grates on my last nerve, and yes, I got the food pun. I’m sure she’s a lovely, optimistic person. Lord knows she’s loud. But she talks in too many abbreviations for me.

She will say something like, “Okay, guys, before we get started we need to grab some onions and olives from the fridge, and I’ll get the mayo, too, because we’re going to combine it all with some EVOO* in the pan, and you will want to eat it 24/7, I promise you. Because it’s DELISH, guys – it really is!”

*EVOO = extra virgin olive oil. Isn’t that obnoxious?

In short, she makes me want to throw things. And she makes lots of hot sandwiches. And when she tastes her final product, she rolls her eyes and nods, like she’s thinking, “Oh yeah, RACH – that rocks!”

Okay – I have to shut up now because I’m supposed to be somewhere at 3:30 – but I welcome any additional thoughts in the comments.

Stacy’s comment about staying up until 1 in the morning watching HGTV reminded me that I have neglected to write about The Very Best Network In The History of Television. There are no words strong enough to express my love for Home and Garden Television, but suffice it to say that my love is deep, it is wide, and it is boundless. I adore it.

I can’t remember when I started watching, really – I think Stacy was the one who first told me about it. Like Sister and me, he inherited our mother’s fascination with other people’s homes. In fact, when we were growing up, there were basically two measuring sticks that Mama applied to people: the cleanliness of their home and the quality of their cooking. Oh, it was fine if someone lacked one or the other, but people who could do both well immediately rocketed to the top of Mama’s list. So whereas most people grow up in sort of a devil-may-care environment in terms of cleaning and cooking, we grew up with the certainty that a clean home and a delicious meal were testimonies not only to your housekeeping, but to your character. Therefore, even if Sister, Stacy or I lived in a box – we’d decorate it. No doubt in my mind. Well, Suzanne and I would decorate it. Stacy would hire an interior designer and then complain about how much everything cost, all the while telling everyone around him that he was “BROKE! BROKE!”

Anyway, I digress. I’ll save all my domestic hang-ups for another post and move on to the topic at hand: HGTV.

There are some shows I enjoy because of the design ideas. Divine Design is awesome – I think Candace Olsen has incredible taste, and her rooms always look completely transformed. I also really like Designers’ Challenge, although sometimes, depending on the homeowner, the results can be a bit unfortunate. Curb Appeal is good, too – I’m usually impressed by the final product because I have no vision, no vision at all when it comes to a landscape. I did not inherit my daddy’s talents in that area, though Sister and Stacy certainly did.

There are other shows that I like because I am fascinated by seeing the inside of strangers’ homes. House Hunters and Designed to Sell fall into this category. I actually TiVo House Hunters – I’ve seen each episode so many times that by the time Suzanne Whang gets the homeowners’ names out of her mouth, I can give a brief plot summary. David always gets tickled when I “call” the episode in those first few seconds by saying, “Oh, they’re the couple with no room and she has to sit in a child’s chair to type on her computer” or “They’re the couple that lost their dream house the first time but then it came back on the market right when she found out she was pregnant” or “That’s the man who lived on the houseboat and then got a condo so that his daughter could stay with him on the weekends.” House Hunters has a new format this year where they actually reveal the prices of the homes – and it is about time, I say.

Designed to Sell is a fun because it teaches us that an alarming number of Californians 1) don’t clean their kitchens regularly 2) don’t make up their beds before camera crews come into their home and 3) get $600,000 for a two bedroom bungalow anyway.

And then there’s a completely different category of shows, the ones where the end result is so hideous, so wretched, that you can’t imagine anyone would like it, much less pay for it. Design on A Dime is almost unwatchable to me, but when I do watch – usually in the middle of the night, in the midst of an insomnia stupor – I always expect for two things to happen: 1) for the female host to literally disappear before our eyes, because apparently she saw herself on the first few episodes, deemed herself chunky (which she wasn’t), then promptly launched a plan to starve herself, and 2) to hear, as the homeowners shut their door, Loud Crashing Noises because all the poorly constructed projects made from particle board collapse to the floor like a veritable house of toothpicks.

However, the best of the worst is, without a doubt, Room by Room. Shari and Matt are a couple of wacky midwesterners who approach every room with the same design elements: wallpaper borders, textured carpet, and stencils. The results are tragic – tragic, I tell you. However, somebody must like it: they’ve been on the air since 1988, and Shari has the mock-turtleneck collection to prove it.

Discuss amongst yourselves…Merritt, I know you have an opinion on this one.

Real-life humor, in no particular order:

1. “I like mustard on my crackers.” (overheard by Sister and Barry, 2003)

2. “When I was a competitive ice dancer…” (overheard by Diamonds, 2006)

3. “delicate charcoal drawings of Ron Polk” (a B-Diddy original, 2006)

4. “If my daddy wants to think that about me, that is his business.” (overheard by BooMama, 2001)

5. “That’s how it come up, that’s how it went down – good God, life’s a soap opera.” (overheard by BooMama, 2001)

6. “All charge card charges must be authorizated.” (sign in Holly Springs, MS, 1993)

7. “How much did you pay for that? Well, you forgot yo’ change!” (an Elise original, 1989)

8. “You don’t want none of them retarded baby!” (a nurse, to BooDaddy, while drawing blood to see if our blood types were compatible, during my pregnancy, 2002)

9. “The VCR is not working! I turn it on and all I see is this blue screen with HHMM, HHMM up on the TV! HHMM! HHMM!” (David’s mother, to me, 1997…and the “HHMM” would of course be the prompt to enter the, you know, TIME in Hour and Minute increments)

10. “DEAR GOD – Thank you for these many blessings you have STOWED upon us.” (overhead by Sister and Barry, 199?)

11. “…and I told him that if he was man enough to lay out all night, he was man enough to get out of bed and get on to work this morning. And he could drive hisself!” (overheard by BooDaddy, 2002)

12. “Hon, get me a to-go box. You KNOW I can’t eat all these fries.” (overhead by BooDaddy, 2005, while eavesdropping on a country music star at the local Dairy Queen)

Post your own in the comments.

And after looking back over my list, I am truly, deeply grateful that I live in the South.

Yesterday I mentioned some of the things I overheard while I sat in a hospital waiting room this week. My friend Tracey emailed me with a story of her own – and it cracks me up.

We were visiting Sis’ dad in the hospital and we went downstairs to get something to eat. As we were sitting there eating our dinner, we overheard a woman talking to her family on the phone saying, “you just aren’t going to believe this – Daddy ain’t dead, daddy ain’t dead he has been revised by the respirator – praise god he ain’t dead!!”