ORIGINALLY WRITTEN DAVID VOGEL
Imagine a rock the size of a pineapple. The rock has a semi-soft outer “crust.” Now imagine that rock hitting a huge shovel.
Now imagine that rock being your head, and the shovel being the back-hoe on the tractor in your backyard.
Well, that’s what happened to me.
In case you are wondering, the reason my family has one of those monster machines in our backyard is because we are having a new porch and escape window added to the back of our house.
I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing-in fact, I was looking at the ground and seeing if I could make footprints in what used to be a grassy backyard.
Suddenly, wham! The top of my head slammed into the backhoe.
My body fell one way as my glasses flew the other. I ended up with very bent and scratched glasses; I also got a new pair.
Yes, it was the week of vacation, the time when your mind turns from thinking about what you’re doing, and starts thinking about what you’re going to be doing.
My family left for vacation 4:59 a.m. Tuesday morning. We came back the next Sunday evening.
While we were in Colorado, we did many things, such as go to the Garden of the Gods, hike, go to the Air Force Academy, and, of course, shop.
We probably could have shopped at the gift shops a little while more, except my brother always wanted to go back to our cabin and watch TV. (He gets that way when the TV channels are like a menu at a cheesecake restaurant.) Where we stayed also had a heated pool, in which we spent a lot of time also.
In Colorado, we saw a lot of deer, and we didn’t even have to go to the mountains to see them!
One of the funniest places we saw deer was in someone’s front yard. We saw four: one was lying on the ground, one was yawning and just starting to lie down, one was eating off of a tree, and the other was looking straight at us. All of those were bucks.
Sort of makes you wonder why they call it “wildlife”…don’t ask why.
Then we saw a few deer dart across the road right behind us. We saw another deer while hiking in the Garden of the Gods. We weren’t more than 10 feet away from her, and she just kept eating off the bush like she was used to people….
That brings me to this joke: What’s black and white, has 16 legs, and, just with its presence, gets rid of deer and hikers?
The answer is four skunks.
While we were looking at the deer, we heard a rustle in the bushes a little up the trail. The deer looked up and then kept eating. But then the rustle came again, the deer looked up, saw the skunks, and took off.
Thank goodness the skunks went up a different trail than we were on, but they did stink. I’m happy to report, however, I was not sprayed.
The people who ran the cottages we were staying at said that a couple days before we came, a bear came down by the cottage we stayed in. They said it dumped over the Dumpster (is that why they call it a “Dumpster?”) and left a trail of McDonald’s trash back into the hills.
Sounds like home.
Don’t ask why.
