A Post From the Stylish Hippo

Yes, yes, some explaining is in order after a title like that. I know. Bear with me.

My sister and her family are all visiting from the Midwest, up here socialising with my family and my other sister's family for Chrissie. Hilarity and chaos ensue whenever these people visit, let me tell you.

Yesterday my mum, my sisters, my nieces, and I all went out to the mall to do some shopping. Why, you ask? I have no idea. I don't understand people who shop just to shop. Wandering on foot for hours and hours looking at things I cannot afford to buy is not my idea of a good time. But I digress.

The Mothers, as my nieces and I call them, went off in search of bargains, while my nieces and I (Lyssa and Hattie) decided to ramble aimlessly. (Random question: how can one *decide* to ramble aimlessly?) We went from store to store, looking and admiring and getting our little paws all over everything from make-up to beaded prom dresses.

When we meandered into the prom dress shop, ostensibly to pick out our fantasy dresses we might possibly like to wear to some nebulous social event in the future, Hattie made me laugh really hard by picking up one of those illogically pretty pumps with tall clear plastic heels.

"Look," she giggled, sticking her hand through a round hole punched in the middle of the clear plastic of one of the heels. "These are shoes you should wear to church. They're holey shoes!"

I do love a good pun.

After cruising the mall for a good five or six hours, my sister realised she needed to pick up something from a nearby hardware store. She drove to the store and left all the rest of us in the van while she bought the needed item. MISTAKE! LOL!

Because she'd heard it played so many times in the stores while they were shopping, my other sister started singing "I'll Be There" over and over again, except that she couldn't remember most of the words, so she just substituted "I'll be there, with the love that, uh...doodle do...de do do doodle do..." The rest of us burst out laughing.

Then she pulled out a little first-aid kit from under the seat in front of her. She and Lyssa (her daughter) started fighting over it, pulling on it and grabbing things out of it until even Hattie yelled at them to stop being so immature. "Mo-om," my sister pretended to whine to our mother in the front seat, "she's not being nice. Make her stop. *I* want the first-aid kit, Mom! Why does *she* always get it?"

This is my grown-up (?) sister for you. ;)

Then I jumped into the fray with the story of one of the great composers (can't remember which one) who had a wife who thought she could sing. She began to practise one morning when the woman who lived in the flat below theirs left for work. When the woman came back from work in the afternoon, the composer's wife was at it again. "Oh Lord," the woman cried, looking up at the top of the building and crossing herself, "it's four o'clock and the baby still isn't born yet!" (Shamelessly pirated, though paraphrased, from Victor Borge's very funny book My Favorite Intermissions. Go read it.)

We went on and on in that fashion, with Hattie whacking Lyssa and me over the head with her sneakers, my sister persisting in singing her version of "I'll Be There," my mum flipping open the cell phone to beg my father to come get her out of there, and all of us laughing fit to kill. It was a great time.

Lyssa came back to the house with us after and stayed overnight. We watched a movie with Mum and Dad, then talked for an hour and watched an hour's worth of Jerry Bruckheimer's King Arthur. At 1 a.m., we decided that that was enough and went to sleep, saving the rest of King Arthur until today. Before we went to sleep, though, Lyssa brought up something that had happened the last time she was visiting: she and I had gone shopping on our own, and we were in one of our favourite stores.

"Does this look too...I don't know...trashy ghetto?" I asked her, holding up a glittery shirt.

"No, no, it looks...kind of stylish hip-o!" she answered, trying to answer me in the same singsong I had used.

I doubled over laughing. "Are you calling me a HIPPO?"

"NO! That's not what I meant! Stop it!" she protested, giggling.

Ah, that was fun. That phrase, "stylish hippo," will forever live in our vocabulary.

Oh yes, before I forget, I am very remiss: little Charlie Crowe's second birthday was on the 21st of December. Happy birthday, Charlie! So cute! :)

I'm signing off now...

My little baby

Is she not the prettiest thing you have ever seen?!

I am free!!!

Wow, I can't believe it. Finally I am free from exams, studying, writing papers, reading books I really didn't want to read in the first place, and even...believe it or not...shopping!!!!!

I had my last final a week ago. Imagine, if you will, being asked, in the space of two and a half hours, to write three essays on the relationships between and among the theories and viewpoints of John Henry Cardinal Newman, Charles Darwin, and Matthew Arnold. FUN! It actually wasn't that bad; we had fun, because our professor is a fun person. Just after we started the exam, he was handed a sheaf of papers on which were the results of the final exams of another class he'd just finished teaching. He immediately began perusing them at length, and started shaking his head after just a few moments.

"If you got a 34 on your final exam, would you kill yourself?" he asked in a hushed voice (whether due to the fact that we were taking an exam or to the fact that the student had gotten such a low grade, I don't know).

The entire class started snickering at his comment.

"I mean, really," he went on. "Well, I guess this student and I will be seeing a lot of each other next semester -- and whether he wants to or not, since it's a required class. I really didn't want to see him, either, so the feeling's mutual."

Half the class was scribbling madly, and half were reclining in their seats laughing silently (0r almost silently). I was one of the latter, ashamed though I am to say it.

After a few minutes of silence, he shook his head again in bemused disbelief. "Listen to this," he began, and we laughed, knowing something funny would be forthcoming. He had asked some question about Russian history; the choices for the answers were, I think, Peter the Great, Boromir from Lord of the Rings (he's a huge fan), Ivan the Terrible, and John Calvinski (obviously a made-up name borrowed from the illustrious John Calvin). The student picked the last as his answer to the question.

The class roared with laughter at that one, even those who were still trying to scribble away at their essays (the rest of us had given up trying to write and were simply enjoying the wit of Dr Scott).

After another pause, Dr Scott looked up with a slightly ashamed gleam in his eye but an amused twist to his mouth. "I should not have told you all that. That was not very nice. It's not compatible with the ethics statement of our Christian college. I am very sorry and I will try to restrain myself."

We snickered.

"But really," he went on after taking a breath, and we all laughed.

"No, I'm not going to say any more," he sighed.

The students exchanged glances of private, knowing amusement. Some of us began glancing at the clock to try to guess the approximate time of the next outburst.

"Honestly, now -- " he began a few minutes later, and roars of honest mirth sounded throughout the small room.

Finally he was able to quell his urge to blurt out what other ridiculous answers the student had written down. We were very close to finishing the exam when suddenly he whimpered, "I'm hungry. I need General Tsou's chicken! I think I may faint if I don't get General Tsou's chicken from the China Prince within the next half hour!"

Now, this is a hulking great bear of a man, 6 feet 3 inches tall (1.905 metres?) and built like a football player. The idea of him begging for General Tsou's chicken was not an idea we could resist laughing at. The pathetic whine in which he delivered his entreaty was even more entertaining.

He looked at us all with a half-defiant, half-pleading gaze. "Call the restaurant," I encouraged him, glancing up from my muddled mess of ideas that were sort of related to the exam.

He whipped out his cellular phone. "OK. OK, I will." So he called and ordered General Tsou's chicken, then snapped his phone shut. Suddenly apprehensive, he looked at us again. "You won't cheat, right? Well, you can't cheat. How can you?"

He was right. It was an open-book exam; how could we possibly cheat?

So with another bit of urging, he took off like a rocket out the door, heading for the nearby China Prince and General Tsou's chicken. Then he stuck his head back in. "If the dean walks in, by any chance, tell him I felt weak and that I stepped out for a minute and that I'll be right back. Because it's true! If I don't get General Tsou's chicken, I will be very, very weak! And I will be right back."

He was as good as his word; within minutes he was back with his precious General Tsou's chicken, happy as a lark. He even brought fortune cookies for all of us who were still taking the exam! What a nice professor!

From there I went on to write seven solid pages of literature interpretation for my next exam. After that, I felt as if I'd need to have my hand replaced with a steel hook. IT HURT!!!! For the next three days, I couldn't do much of anything with my right hand. *sob*

LOL! What a big baby I am. But five straight hours of exams during which one must write essays? Well, I did choose to be an English major! ;)

So, brave readers, how are you all? SFL, are you happy now? This finally gives you something new to mull over. I am very sorry for torturing you by not posting. You will be happy to know that I am finally done with school for a few weeks and therefore you shall be treated to more posts than you have had in the recent past.

Yay!!!! I'M FREE!!! (Well, until January 9, anyway...)

"Doe, a deer, a female deer..."

OK...here is the reason I have not posted in so long...

Actually, there were two of them. This would be a representation of the one that DID make it across the road. The other one, however, had a bit of a run-in with my car.

That is not a picture of my car. But my car did get a nice little owie like that one.

The poor deer. I felt so bad. I couldn't help it, but still I felt bad.

It was a dark and stormy night...well, OK, it wasn't stormy. But it *was* dark. There was a car in front of mine, so I couldn't have my bright lights on. If I had, I probably would have seen the deer in plenty of time. As it happened, the deer jumped out to cross the road precisely between that car and my car. I saw movement as the taillights of the car in front of me faded, and I thought to myself, "What is THAT?"

In the same second, I had that thought, slowed down, and saw for sure what it was. Two young does were crossing the road! I slammed on the brakes and tried to slow down, but couldn't slow down enough to miss the second doe. I hit her with a solid *THUMP*. Fur flew up onto my windshield and sailed in clumps over the top of my car. I felt a bump as the right side of my car rolled over her.

I had almost stopped by that point, but after hitting her and then running over her, I felt that there was no point in stopping, getting out of my car in pitch blackness, and possibly getting run over myself.

I started crying as I drove away. Well, actually, I sobbed all the way home. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," I kept saying over and over again.

That poor thing. She was trying to get away from me, but she didn't quite make it. I read a series of books once about clans of warrior cats living in the woods; they called the road "the Thunderpath."

The first doe must have run for the woods as fast as ever she could, looking for the other deer. "Oh, Mama," I can hear her panting, "I don't know what happened to Aunt Myrtle! We were just crossing the Thunderpath, Mama, the way you taught us. We waited until the car went by and then we started across. But, Mama, there was one right behind the first one! And Aunt Myrtle...she was right behind me! Oh, Mama -- poor Aunt Myrtle!"

The mama deer must have told her daughter what my mum told me..."It happens, dear. It happens all the time. You mustn't feel bad about it."

I still do, though. Now I am commonly known around school, work, and home as "Killer" or "Deer-Killer." I shall never live it down.