Twenty-Six Point Two

Some may know that I am foolishly preparing to run the St. George Marathon with my sisters. I don't know if I can do it, but I am going to give it a shot. I need to lose a few pounds and learn to run a little faster and longer. My goal is to finish the race before they close the course after 6 hours. It sounds easy, but I run so slow, I wouldn't make it at my current pace. On Saturday, my sister and I ran a 5K. That was my first ever race. It was fun, but painful to see how fast some people run. I guess that will give me some motivation to keep pushing myself. I ran it faster than normal and finished in 31 minutes, but I was tired. I prefer a 12 minute mile. The guy who won the race finished in 16 minutes. That's cruising. So if you see me running around Riverton and I look like I am going to die, call Tara and tell her to bring me a hotdog and a TAB or Diet RC Cola for nurishment.
I am also taking contributions. I decided to run this race for a cause. My cause is the Aerosmith Guitar Hero video game. I need it and thought it was a worthy cause. If everyone donated $10, I would have enough for the game after the first 8 donations. Any extra funds will be donated to a video manufacturing company of my choosing.

The Night of the Gigantic Flying Creature

A couple of nights ago I woke up to a weird beating sound. I looked at the clock and it was almost midnight. I usually stay up most nights to about 11:00pm or midnight, but on this night I was out at about 9:30pm. Maybe it was because Tara hit the sack at about 8:30pm. She wasn't feeling too good being great with child and all.

So I check the clock and it's midnight. I hear this beating and bumping sound above me. I flip on the lamp next to the bed and through my half asleep, glazed-over eyes I see this thing flying at the top window of our bedroom. We have a vaulted ceiling in the bedroom and this thing was pretty high. Earlier in the week we had seen some humming birds flying around the flowers. Then I remembered that Hondo across the street had a humming bird in his house that he had to catch. I don't deal with animals well. I am sort of not fond of animals or as Tara more appropriately says, "you're a wuss Dave." I can't argue too much. I'm not afraid of a humming bird, but I don't want to touch it or pet it, or even deal with it.

I woke Tara up to show her the humming bird and told her that I was going to call Jeff. I can call the Jamiesons at any time of night. They are up late, two or three in the morning kind of stuff doing who knows what. Anyway, I am about to call Jeff and the flying beast drops from the ceiling coming right at us and lands on the lamp. I look and this thing is a huge, Jurassic park moth.

Okay, I am totally freaking out now. The Incas used to make poisonous blow darts from this moth. It was yellow and black with huge fangs and crap. No way am I going near that thing. Every step we took closer to this thing and it starts flapping it enormous wings. I feel that you may not understand what this thing looks like. Imagine that Satan created a moth. Now imagine something much worse. Seriously, this thing was evil. It even hissed a couple of times. Tara is the one who gets rid of the spiders in our house. I'm not so much afraid as I am disgusted by little creatures. Okay, maybe a little afraid, but I was not going to call Jeff to come over and take care of Lucifer's moth. Instead, I made sure that Tara was wide awake to take care of it.

Honestly, I tried to kill it or at least stun it. I threw a wet wash cloth from a considerable distance and hit it directly. It didn't even phase it, it just flew around at us spitting acid. Tara was ticked that I made her get out of bed to kill a moth, Satan's moth, but when she saw it, even she was a little concerned. It didn't help that she is eight months pregnant, but I thought that she could take out her pain and anger on this moth. She grabbed the flyswatter when she should have grabbed a shotgun. This thing was bulletproof. Here are some short video clips of our midnight experience with death.


Scene One: Finding Courage

Scene Two: Flirting with Death

Scene Three: The Moth Won't Die and Dave is Tired

Final Scene: Regroup After Failure, A New Strategy

Tara ended up stunning the creature with repeated and violent flyswatter blows. Then she grabbed it with some toilet paper, totally suicidal, and flushed it down the toilet. I even flushed the toilet several more times to make sure it wasn't coming back. I still can't use that toilet.

They Used to Call Me 'SLOTS'

I related this story to some of my neighbors and Jeff demanded that I post it. It is embarrassing, humiliating, and gross. Plus, as a public service announcement, don't let your kids put coins in their mouths. I am warning you in advance, the following is way above 'G' rating, so continue at your own risk.

Anyway, a couple of years back, Tara and I bought a family season pass to Seven Peaks Waterpark in Provo. The park is cool with lots of slides that go straight down. These slides are popular, but if you have ever gone down one of the slides you will understand the meaning of ATOMIC WEDGIE. Seriously, you get going so fast down these slides that they have a landing strip of water that is flat along the ground for about 50 yards. Every person that stands up from those slides has to take a moment to re-adjust if you catch my drift.

So, on this particular day I brought my 12 year old cousin with my family. We decided to go down the super steep slide. She went first, but as she was about to go down the slide, the lifeguard made her take off her homemade board shorts. Apparently, there is a rule at the park that you can only go down those steep slides with actual swimwear. Her shorts were cut off sweats that they thought would get damaged by the high speed. So she took off her shorts and held onto them on the way down. Now it was my turn. I shot down the slide faster than I have ever gone. When I hit the bottom of the slide and started to slow down, I felt a sharp pain in my derriere. Obviously I was realizing the pain from my anticipated ATOMIC WEDGIE. I stood, re-adjusted, and jumped off the slide. I noticed that my cousin went back to the slide. I looked and she was picking up coins from the bottom of the slide. She had lost the change in her sweat shorts as she went down and wanted to retrieve her loot. I told her to get out of the way before she got hit by someone flying out of the slide.

The walk back to our beach towels was painful. That ATOMIC WEDGIE must have done a number on me. It hurt to sit down and I didn't go down one of those steep slides for the rest of the day. We stayed at Seven Peaks for another 5 hours that day before we started for home. The ride home was also irritable. I just couldn't get comfortable in my seat. I even wondered if a slide-induced ATOMIC WEDGIE could leave permanent damage to my body.

It was a long day, so we got home, threw the kids in the tub, and put them to bed. I smelt like a mixture of chlorine, sweat, and sunscreen, so I jumped into the shower as well. As I opened the door and stepped into the shower (remember I am completely buck at this point) I heard a "clink clink" on the shower floor. I looked down only to find that I had dropped a quarter from some mysterious place. It ends up that when I went down that slide, after my cousin had dropped her money, that I picked up a souvenir along the way. This explains the severe pain I went through for about 6 hours and I may be the first person to have experienced an EPIC & POSSIBLY TERMINAL -THERMONUCLEAR WEDGIE (several grades more severe than the famed ATOMIC WEDGIE). Let me make myself clear, do not under any circumstances let your children place coins in their mouths!