I told the story recently of the passing of my Grandmother and it occurred to me afterwords that while I’ve done a pretty good job of honoring my promise to my Grandmother Fisher to tell the stories of my Grandfather’s life (and subsequently of her life) to my friends over the years, I’ve not recorded them here. So here’s one of my favorites about my Grandmother Fisher. A mischievous sense of humor tends to run in my family, to some extent on both sides but especially on the Fisher side, and this is an example of that.

For many years over the course of my childhood my sister Kirsten and I would travel to Ohio for a week or two each summer to spend time with our grandparents and extended family. Both sides of the Family, Hamilton and Fisher, had their roots in Ohio – the Fishers in Akron and the Hamiltons in Wooster. We’d divide time between the families.

One year when we went out, when I was around 11 or 12, the Fishers picked us up at the airport and brought us back to their house. When we got to the house my Grandmother began to complain that she wasn’t feeling well and disappeared into another room while my Grandfather brought us into the den and settled us into easy chairs. As we chatted my Grandmother came in. Suddenly she clutched her hand to her chest and exclaimed something about really not feeling well, then leaned over and upchucked into my lap.

!!!

I looked down to find this large glistening mass of putrid green… stuff. It looked more like snot than anything else. I nearly leapt out of my chair, but meanwhile I noticed both my Grandparents were cracking up, exclaiming about the look on my face and how they’d pulled one over on me and so on. I prodded the stuff in my lap and discovered it was cool to the touch and concluded that whatever it was it wasn’t harmful.

Long story short, it was a kids toy that I had never heard of. I think it was called Slime, though I can’t recall. I do remember that it came in a small trash can, and that the following school year it was all the rage and ended up being banned from our classroom because of all the hi-jinks folks were pulling with it.

My Grandparents Fisher were fond of pranks of this nature. This is my second favorite of all the ones they ever pulled, and the best one my Grandmother pulled.

So as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ll be posting stories about my grandmother by way of remembrance. Here’s my favorite. My youngest sister Lindsey was born in our house on Seaview Avenue with the help of my Grandmother and a midwife. It had become clear that Lindsey was on the way late one winter afternoon and the family was gathered around waiting for this to happen with some anticipation. I played missile command on my Atari 2600 for hours as I waited, and ultimately ended up going to bed. This birthing business takes too long, I remember thinking. Late that night or very early the next morning came an insistent tapping at my door. It was Granny, as excited as a kid on Christmas, come to wake me up and summon me to watch the birth of my sister. It suddenly occurred to me, sleepy eyed and groggy, that I wanted no part of watching a birth take place, especially not one involving my mother, and I began trying to beg off. There was this wonderful moment of a clash of emotions between my grandmother and I – she simultaneously so excited that she seemed about to bounce out of her shoes and at the same time crestfallen that I wasn’t sharing her excitement and interest, and me, embarrassed and sheepish and trying to mask it behind a sort of sleepy irritation.

Granny ultimately gave up and me and bounced back upstairs after admonishing me for passing on the chance to witness something of such significance to the family. At a guess, this incident barely registered with her, but it’s stuck with me all these years. It is the only time I can recall seeing Granny positively giddy with excitement over something.

I shall name no names, nor will I say at which job I encountered this, to protect the not so innocent and the more than slightly dumb. At one of my places of employment we ran Apple Xserves. I’m not a big fan of them, but whatever, they’ve done their job more or less. Anyway at one point we had installed a new machine in the racks and I was busily installing its software layer. I noticed performance was pretty sluggish but didn’t give it a lot of thought, I figured I would get to the bottom of it as I went through the install process. As I walked out to lunch I noticed the screen of the laptop of a coworker of mine and one of the main system admins, a brand new laptop, running an opengl screensaver at an atrocious framerate. I made an offhand comment about poor performance and he got a gleam in his eye. ‘You know what that is? come here!’ He proceeded to show me how he had configured our brand new xserve to run an opengl screensaver, then connected apple’s remote management tool to the machine across the network, and he was streaming the video from the xserve to his laptop.

!!!

Nevermind the overhead of running an opengl screensaver on a server, which is bad enough, he compounded it by some incalculable order of magnitude by streaming it across the network. This fellow was the main web systems administrator and this was not an issue of him thinking he would just experiment with a new box – he was surprised when I started berating him for wasting system and network resources. It hadn’t occurred to him that these might be issues.

He lost access to the server that day, right after lunch.

So…like most bachelors, I hate cleaning the bathroom. One of the tools I use to help me avoid this chore is the toilet tablet, you know, those little tablets you put in your toilet’s water tank that contain cleaning substances and scents. Recently I tried a new brand that advertised itself as the ‘super blue’ tablet,’ and it led to one of those trademark Dave moments. Of course I have to share.

A couple of days after I popped the thing in my toilet’s tank, the toilet bowl water started changing to odd colors and occasionally had chunks of waxy cottage cheese looking material in it. Two nights ago I investigated and found this:

What the hell is growing in there I don’t know – it’s foul looking yet pleasantly scented. But as I was peering in the tank, the candle I keep on the back of the toilet slid into the water with a splash, spattering me and the bathroom walls with the gunk and the deep blue juice the tablet had made of the toilet water.

I flipped. The label on the tablet had warned to keep the thing away from one’s face when opening the package and to avoid skin contact with it. Now I had it all over myself, in some mad-scientist’s congealed cottage cheese form. God only knew what it was going to do to my skin. I dropped everything and stuck my head under the shower faucet to rinse it off. Then I made matters worse. I needed to get the candle out of the tank, so I got a wooden spoon from the kitchen and tried to dredge the candle out of the goop, but I couldn’t seem to fit it past the toilet bobber. In frustration I just forced it, which caused the toilet to start leaking from the hinge on the bobber. I could stop it by holding the bobber on an angle, but left to its own devices the tank was going to overflow. What to do…what to do. Eventually I decided to dash down to the basement to get tools, and I ran back upstairs with toolbox in hand convinced that the toilet would be leaking goop all over the bathroom. Fortunately I made it in time and some almost Fonzie-class fiddling with the bobber made it stop leaking.

All’s well that ends well, 2 days later and I have no shedding of skin or odd rashes, and though I was convinced the blue stuff was going to hopelessly stain the bathroom walls, it came off easily with soap and water. I have to say to my credit that once I’d rinsed myself off, instead of getting mad I just started laughing, the whole situation was just too comical. There is one lesson I’ve learned though – don’t take the blue toilet tablets, they’re toxic 😉

[I have to point out the best Dave moment I’ve captured on the blog – the jalapeno juice incident which is definitely worth a read if you haven’t seen it]

Man, it’s not my week. Or month. Or something.

Yesterday I settled in to watch the NFL conference title games. In observance of customs established while I was in college, I proceeded to cook a big vat of spicy chili. Shortly after slicing the fresh jalapenos and dumping them into the pot, I felt the urge to….ahem… perform nasal passage explorations. Purely as a precationary measure, I assure you. And what I discovered is that jalapeno juice burns like a motherfucker!. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough. To make matters worse, burning nostrils cause one’s eyes to water. What do you think I did next? Thats right. And guess what? Contact lenses are jalapeno juice sponges. So yes, I confess. I am the world’s biggest loser. Though I’ve the good graces to laugh at myself. And share it with others. And the chili was very tasty, so in the end it was all worth it.