A tribute to my dad

So here we are half way through the week. It has been somewhat delightful for our area. The days have been cool and sunny and in the evening the rain came. It says it is supposed to do this for the next week. It has been hard this week settling down to working again. I have to admit I have not even looked at my beads since I got home. I haven't opened the door to my studio and I haven't done much in the way of house work. That is about to end. I have a library that is a real disaster and needs more shelves and a large desk that my husband and I can both share. I have a bathroom to finish. I have a lot of work to do for my business such as building up the inventory and arranging storage space in the garage for my things. Then there is all those items in the garage that need painted and well the garage itself needs painted and well the list just goes on and on....
So enough of the list lets see if I have a story for today.... Ok so it is almost Father's day so I will tell a story in memory of my father. My father was a major prankster. He loved jokes and would spend days and days contriving them. He also was a school teacher. He taught high school science and yearbook. He loved teaching as well as jokes and could take as well as give. But anyway, One Halloween my school created a mischief night. This night was when you would end up with your house being toilet papered, windows being soaped, and we always ended up with an outhouse being dumped at the end of our driveway! For a fundraiser for FHA we sold insurance and if you bought the insurance and your house was tp'd or soaped or whatever, the FHA would come to your house the next day and clean up all of the "mischief" that they made. My father secretly bought the insurance from the FHA advisor so the kids would not know he had purchased some and for weeks when he was approached about the insurance dad would smirk at the kids and say that the dogs and his guns were insurance enough against any "mischief". Well, Halloween came and sure enough so did the mischief makers. The first batch to show up were a group of guys. They soaped all the windows except the living room where we were watching TV. Then they tp'd the trees and strung toilet paper everywhere. They were pretty proud that they used 10 rolls on the house and that dad didn't catch them. Thing was, dad watched them the whole time and when they finished he was standing by the door of their car. They laughed about how much mischief they did then dad invited them in for doughnuts and punch. He had posted the insurance on the inside of the front door at about face level. After the boys had their snacks they turned to leave and the insurance paper was right there. They each turned a little white, dad laughed and told them he would see them in the morning. The boys weren't laughing quite so much when they left. A little later that night the girls decided to visit. They were a little more devious. I must explain that my father also trained field trial dogs and we had a kennel with about 10 dogs in it off the back of our garage. I was out feeding them that night with our two house dogs (blue healer, and dingo mix) when I hear laughter out in the wheat fields. I ran in and told dad and he grabbed the blank pistol and ran out in the back yard. You have to understand that it was pitch black outside that night. The moon was almost non-existent and the girls were trying to crawl through the plowed fields with out a flashlight. Dad steps out on to the back lawn and starts yelling to the dogs (who were in the house so they would not attack) to go get those girls then he starts shooting off the blank pistol. Of course the dogs in the kennel started barking like mad and the girls not knowing any different thought my dad had grabbed a gun and the dogs was going after them through the field. In truth he was laughing so hard he could hardly stand up. Well, those girls ran back to their car. One of them was a little slow and she got locked out of the car. We picked her up in the pickup when we chased the other car down the road about 5 miles. She finally pulled over into a driveway of a friend of ours. It took dad and the girl we picked up almost 5 minutes to get the girl who was driving to open the door. When she did dad invited them to come down for doughnuts and punch. They were really white when they got to the house. Dad had terrified them so badly that I don't think the one girl drove again for a full month!! They did laugh really hard when they saw the insurance policy and dad showed them what mischief had been played on us by the boys. The next day the boys came and cleaned the mischief up and the house looked as good as new. Our school never did mischief night again. But for that one year it was both a huge fundraising success and a terrifying experience for a few of the participants who ended up out-pranked by the best prankster of all. R