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7:41 p.m. - 2005-01-23
I missed the snow party

I Was Lazy This Weekend

I was so lazy this weekend, I completely missed the snow. I watched it fall through a foggy window in my warm Scotty Dog P.J.s. Mike got out of bed when he heard the snow plows come and went outside to move the car so they could plow out our parking space. All the other neighbors were out there too. He came back in to goad me out of my PJ's and join the neighborhood because an impromptu community event was creating itself.

Neighbors who normally ignore each other were helping each other dig out, brush off and get the cars out of the lot so the plow could do it's job. I heard a snowball fight broke out. Everyone was exhilerated and having fun, but I stayed inside in my Scotty Dog PJ's because I could.

I do feel bad that I missed out on an impromptu community event. They don't happen very often. As a matter of fact, the last one was over 15 years ago.

We had a huge multi-family garage sale. Our entire development of 120 homes was involved. Everyone had their garages open and their junk out. After a little while, someone went and got a Party Ball...you know, one of those massive plastic balls full of beer in a wax paper box. That party ball didn't last long and everyone took turns buying the next party ball. Before long the entire culdesac was stone drunk, and it's a good thing it's a nice neighborhood because the kids were running around God knows where playing and doing whatever they wanted, completely unsupervised.

We live across a side street from a hospital. Ouside of the hospital is a large pond. On the day of this garage sale, the pond was scheduled to be pumped out and drained of water. I think they were going to do some sort of correction to the structure of the pond. They ran these huge, black, flexible tubes about 10 inches in diameter from the pond, across the parking lot and into the forest preserve where there was a pond to drain the water into.

Now sucking this pond dry meant sucking any critters living in it through the tube, across the parking lot and into the forest too. One of the drunken neighbors noticed that a crack had sprung in the flexible tube and was spewing water, geyserlike, 50 feet into the air. One of the kids noticed that the parking lot was full of small flopping fish, most about 3 inches long.

All the drunken neighbors went running into their houses to get buckets and whatever else we could to put the flopping fish in. The plan was to catch the fish coming down from the sky in the bucket and then give the full buckets to the kids to run them down to the lake to save the fish.

There were thousands of fish spewing and falling faster than a parking lot full of drunks could catch them. We were stumbling around the parking lot with buckets like we were in a sick game of "Catch It and You Keep It". There we were laughing and catching fish, slipping and stumbling on the ones that didn't make it. The kids were on a mission....to save the fish. They handled their parts of the job very seriously and were quite proud of themselves for having saved so many fish.

Catching flying fish is a tiring job though and we could only save so many. After a while we ran out of beer. Someone had to go get more. A while after that we were too plowed to care if the fish lived or died. The kids continued in a valient effort until after midnight when the parents, close to passing out. Made them come in.

Some of the neighbors who were playing in the snow yesterday were there when the drunken fish catch happened. My next door neighbor, a young lady of 24 was one of the little kids catching the fish. She grew up, became a teacher and bought the place next door.
Now I do wish I had put my clothes on and joined the party, then again, how often do I get an excuse to stay in my scotty dog jammies.

P. I. Yarnsmith

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