The monkey made me do it

It runs in the family

My Dad, who I love despite his frequent (obsessive, some may say) use of horrible puns, is even more odd, goofy, accident-prone and good story-prone than I am.

In his days as a forester, he almost got killed by convicts working in the kitchen by mistakenly ordering whole potatoes instead of pre-grated hashbrowns for breakfast. He also famously dropped his expensive radio down the honey hole, FISHED IT OUT AGAIN (he claims it had just been serviced and wasn't gross)(mm-hmm), cleaned it as best he could and brought it to the radio technician asking him to fix it. He was well-known for drawing funny Snoopy illustrations for the covers of reports.

When we were children, he starred in a series of children's musicals at our church as "Psalty the Singing Songbook", complete with a gigantic cardboard and foam costume that threatened the lives of any child who dared to share the stage. My sister, brother and I were always in the shows, and soon developed a lightning-fast ducking reflex for every time Dad turned around.

He has been building my parents' dream home/retirement complex (I like to call it their compound) for almost a year now. He bought a piece of land near a town with more cows than people (my parents like the rural life) with a nice view of both Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier, and proceeded to develop the beast into something livable. He dug a well, built a road, got a guy to install a septic system (thank God he didn't try that on his own - it's scary enough seeing him on a CAT digging ditches for the well drainage. He got one stuck in the mud, of course). He got a friend to bring his bulldozer over and flatten out some of the bigger bumps on the property, and then to drag a bedspring over it to flatten it out even more (oh, I wish I were kidding). There are still a couple of big piles of stumps and boulders around the property, but I think my dad is now planning to torch them when things dry up again and plant flowers in the rest of it to turn them into some sort of landscaping.

They rented an apartment for the first months of construction, but once my dad finished the "Shop" - a supposed future wood shop/garage with space for three cars and an RV, with a bathroom (with shower) and oven and fridge and washer and dryer - they decided that the rent was too much and instead moved into what will be their garage, using their RV as a backup living space. The shop has two queen beds with dressers, a living room area with sofa and chairs, and a dining area (all open to each other, which makes it a little odd). The RV has a queen bed, full kitchen, and living/dining areas. My mom calls this "roughing it". I call it more living space than I've had in any of my apartments for the past five years.

The house they've been building is beautiful, of course, but VERY TALL. The living room ceiling is cathedral and about 20 feet high, with peaks of roughly equal height at either end of the house and a 2nd story bonus room over the garage. This is funny because my dad is hugely afraid of heights and had a big problem while building our last house, which was a 2-story as well. This time he's bought some nice scaffolding, but no amount of tiny aluminum bars makes 20 feet in the air comfortable for him. I helped him nail on some of the higher siding a month or so ago and the two of us would pale noticeably whenever the scaffolding rocked a little too much. He finished up all the high parts on his own a couple weeks ago, thanks to my brother and a sudden inspiration. What they worked out was a complicated system incorporating my dad's gigantic truck, my brother's rock climbing gear, and lots of rope. Basically my dad wore the harness and somehow hitched himself to the truck over the house, and that arrangement gave him the stability/courage to work on the steep roof and finish off the outside of the house. I'm still laughing thinking about how that must of looked to their hick neighbors. I hope they got pictures.

And if you doubt the extent of his bad-joking, I have culled a few examples.

1. (From an e-mail a couple weeks old, dealing with car issues I've been having lately) "Did you know that drinking brake fluid can become habit-forming? There's an ingredient that makes it so. It doesn't work on me, though - I can stop anytime..."

2. (From another random letter) "My wife was in labor with our first child. Things were going pretty well when suddenly she began to shout, "Shouldn't! Wouldn't! Couldn't! CAN'T!" "Doctor, what's wrong with my wife!" I cried. "It's perfectly normal," he reassured me, "She's just having her contractions."

I can't go on. It hurts my comedic soul to even put those two up there. Love the guy, though, and will continue to try and do humor interventions until the puns = not funny message is received.

posted by LadyJay @ 8:21 AM