Lasers

   While I was planning on writing yet another blog on my cat(s), several of the eleven voices in my head piped up and voiced their fears that I might start to sound like my cousin and her husband sound about their (I grudgingly admit) half-way adorable baby. So, while my cat's behavior is funny, I'll treat you to a story about my man-child father.
   I can't remember exactly how many weeks back it was, because let's face it, I've been out of school for a month, so I barely know what day of the week it is at any given time. But it wasn't too many of them ago that my mom and I decided that it was time to go buy tomatoes and marigolds (and peppers) for the garden. Tomatoes because they are tasty and we've always grown them, and marigolds because they're just so goddamn happy as flowers go.  We did it as a semi-planned, half-on-a-whim quest.
   With tomatoes and flowers on the brain, we left the house in the Honda, our shiny blue car that doesn't get used much because I like driving Moose (the Mercury) more. Stopping at the hospital on our way out of town, so I could be forced into the driver's seat, much to my chagrin, I killed the engine twice before we got back on the road and took the long, less traveled route to our preferred nursery.
   There's a reason why I don't like to drive the Honda. "Oh, and what reason is that, awesome and wise Shqueer?" you ask (if your name is Tyler). Well, the flesh of the matter is that I am crap at driving manual transmission vehicles. If I were the supreme ruler of everything in the universe, I would give any and all stick shift vehicles a death sentance. As much as I love the Honda for being the nice, new car, I hate it in equal amounts for making things harder than they have to be.
   So, we get to the nursery and buy our tomatoes and leave. I spent some time loitering around the flowers, because, really, I like flowers.  Once everything was paid for and put in boxes in our trunk, mom took over with the driving, much to my unexpressed glee, and we sped off down the road to Albany, listening to ABBA. I neglected to mention that I jacked that CD from Moose, didn't I? Trust me, this fact is important. Your life depends on knowing that I like to listen to ABBA with my mom. No really.
   In Albany, we go to Home Depot, because they have some kind of sale going and we're just savvy like that.  We buy a bunch of marigolds, yellow ones, orange ones, yellow one with red spots, and after a short-lived, failed search for a particular type of Gerbera daisy, we leave again.  Mom mentions that my aunt wanted us to get her a pair of tomatoes, so we drive out to her itty bitty house (that I want to steal from her after she's done fixing it up).
   Her green Jimmy's sitting out front, so, using logic, I conclude that she must be home and we go to knock on her door. Nothing. We call around to the back yard, wondering if she's out there doing stuff. Still nothing. We try the gate near the door - it won't open. By this time, we're just looking for a hose so we can water the plants and leave them, maybe with a note if we can find paper and a pen. The gate on the other side of the house doesn't work, either, so we go back to the car and sit there for a minute or so.
   Mom gets the bright idea to call my aunt, so I give her my phone - commenting on the fact that its battery is low as I do - and she punches in the number and presses call. It rings once and dies.
   Shrugging, we leave, deciding that the tomatoes we already bought were so puny, in comparison to the ones we bought her, that we were going to go back to the nursery and buy a few more of the individually sold ones for ourselves. On the way back, we stopped at the library because I was having ACDC withdrawals and thought maybe they'd have something by them to borrow. No. If they have any at all, it was checked out when I was there. I got Aerosmith and Bon Jovi instead. Both of those are poor, poor substitutes for ACDC.
   So, rocking out to the best of my ability to Bon Jovi - because, hell, I only knew one Aerosmith song at the time - we return home.
   Mom pulls into the driveway just as the front door slams shut and my dad walks around the corner of the porch looking for all the world like he thought we were dead. Of course he was pissed off. We didn't leave a note and he didn't know where we were and- and-. "You were supposed to be sleeping." Yeah, well, he woke up when his phone went off when we called, he says. I tell him that's not possible because my phone's been dead since Mom used it to try to call my aunt.
   He'd been all over town looking for us. Worried sick, apparently.
   He even called the police because he thought we were in trouble. He thought we'd gotten into a wreck. Because the first person I'm going to call if I get into a wreck is him, not the police, the people who can actually help me. The police, of course, told him to stop being ridiculous (citation needed) and that he couldn't file a missing persons report for 24 hours. We'd been gone for four at the most.
   Despite the fact that I should have been touched that he cared, I couldn't stop myself from laughing about it.  It was ridiculous. The one time he's not supposed to wake up, he does. The one time Mom and I decide to run off while he's asleep to avoid the inevitable bitch-fit that happens every time he goes shopping with us, he makes a big deal about it. I'll admit, if I had time to steal a CD from the other car, I certainly had time to write him a goddamn note, but god damn. There is such a thing as overreacting, and that was it. I found it so absurd that keeping myself from laughing would be like asking me to go back in time and save the Titanic.
   A later look at my phone showed that, yes, Mom did accidentally call Dad instead of my aunt, so there's that. Now whenever I want to go somewhere with Mom, I have the ability to joke about not leaving a note - something that we, as a family, don't do on a regular basis as is - and calling him just long enough to let it ring once and hang up and the like. Because if there's one thing I have fun doing, it's making inside jokes at my father's expense.
   So, how about you and I take a trip to the beach? We'll 'forget' to leave a note, take the wrong car, and call only to hangup after the first ring. Then we'll have tons of fun while my dad is running around town, calling the police, getting pissed off that he can't file a missing persons report before we get back, and generally overreacting to the fact that omg we're gone! What? That doesn't sound like fun? Oh, fine, we'll leave a goddamn note. Yeesh, you're such a wet-blanket.