Vacation Explanation

(1999)

Hey Folks,

You’ll never believe what happened while we were on vacation, but I’ll tell you anyway. First of all our teenaged son didn’t go with us. He was supposed to be housesitting. Instead, he had gone to Ohio and back – twice. That’s why we couldn’t get him on the phone when we called from Florida to check on him. When we drove into the driveway we noticed that something had torn up our lawn. Figuring there was some logical explanation, we went inside with the first load of luggage.

Imagine our shock as we discovered that our son had leased the house to some of his friends while we were away. Nothing like a little entrepreneurship, huh? The windows were sweating and so were we when we first walked in. Our sweat quickly froze, and so did our blood. We gasped in horror at the mess. Someone had been partying, but forgot to clean up. They were probably Eskimos since the A/C was turned as low as it would go, and it was 50° on the indoor thermometer. We opened the doors to let the house warm up. That’s when we noticed the trash on the back porch. The partiers had left bags and bags of garbage, and the neighbor’s dogs had torn it out all over the deck.

That’s not all….
There were spots all over the living room carpet and we still can’t figure out what produced them. I felt like mama of the Three Bears when I said, “Somebody’s been using my shower. And somebody’s been sleeping in my bed, and somebody’s left their shoes.” Later we found out that one of our son’s friends, who was dating a married woman, had got into a fight with her husband (probably at our house). My Son brought him to our house to recuperate after taking him to the hospital for stitches.

That’s not all…
Sometime during our week away, our next-door neighbor went nuts. He cranked up a bulldozer about midnight one night and crashed through his own fence, taking his kids swing set with him. He proceeded to tear up our lawn as he drove through the neighborhood creating mud dunes and pushing over trees. The next day he tried to run over the Town Hall employees who came out to issue a cease and desist order. The poor guy ended up in a mental institution and was reported as having said, “None of this would have happened if Expressy had been here!” What the hell did he mean by that? I hardly knew the guy!

Well about our vacation: my sister-in-law instructed her children not to touch the emergency pull chain in the bathroom at the condo because the police would be there in a flash. She said that a lot of elderly people stayed there, and the chain was to help anyone who had fallen in the tub get medical assistance. I bet the kids were wondering how an injured, naked old woman would get up and pull the chain, then lie down again to wait for help to arrive. Well, I hung my wet swimsuit on the emergency cord the next day. It made a nice retractable clothes line. Never a dull moment!