Summer Camp

My 10 year old is off at a week long church camp. There is this cool program they use where they take pictures of the campers throughout the week. Then they post tme on a web site. The same web site also has an 'email' program, where you can send a (one way) message to your kid. They print them off and pass them out during meal times. There is a disclaimer on the email thing that says "Do not send significant bad news to your camper through email." I chuckled about how horrible that would be to actually do that. My wife told me that they read the emails before they pass them out. This little fact inspired me to write the following letter:


I've got some bad news to tell you.

Last night I heard the cat meowing, so I got up to let her out. On my way to the door, I accidently stepped on its tail. Needless to say, she got mad, turned around and dug her claws into my shin and wouldn't let go. I started shaking my leg as hard as I could, but the dang cat wouldn't come off. She had her claws from all four feet dug into my shin deep! I started hopping around on one leg trying to get the cat off, but it was hanging on tight and wouldn't budge. As luck would have it, on about my tenth hop, I came back down, but instead of landing on the floor, I landed on your sisters barbie car. Coming down hard on one foot, my foot got jammed under the little dashboard of the car and wouldn't come out. As you can imagine, once I landed on the car, it started rolling across the room. I've got a cat stuck on one leg, and my other leg stuck in a barbie car and I'm picking up speed as I'm rolling across the room. I'm heading towards the wire rack with the board games in it, and as I pass the fireplace, I reach down and grabbed the fireplace poker. I started jabbing the cat to get her off of my leg. As one might expect, this made the cat even madder, but she didn't turn loose of my leg as I thought she would. Instead, she started running up my leg. With every step up my body, she's digging her claws deep into my flesh, so the pain is moving up my body.
About the time I reach and crash into the wire rack, that cat reaches my head. Having nowhere to go further, it clamps down even tighter, right over my face. As I crash into the rack, the board games go sprawling everywhere and I land on top of them in a heap.
Now, I try to stand up, and as I put my hands down to the floor to stand up, my hand goes down through the connect four board. Two of my fingers go through one hole on the board and get stuck. Now I've got a cat stuck on my face, my foot stuck in a barbie car, a connect four game stuck on my fingers.

I stumble up to my feet and swing around, trying to head for the door, praying that I'm going to be able to get the cat off my face once outside. Unfortunatly I've still got the fireplace poker in my hand (the one without the connect four game stuck to it). As you can imagine, when I run past the fishtank, the fireplace poker, hits the side of it and shatters the glass. 10 gallons of water then blow all over the livingroom floor.
Once I finally get to the door, I drop the fireplace hook to grab the deadbolt to unlock the door. Not really paying much attention to the fireplace hook, I dropped it, point down, onto my foot (the one that was not stuck in the barbie car). Now my 'good' foot is bleeding.

I take one step backwards, to pull the door open and I realize the water from the fishtank has caught up with me. The living room floor, now covered in fish water, is quite slick, and I loose my footing and fall forward through the screen door out onto the porch. I'm standing on the front porch in my underwear with one foot in a barbie car, a connect four game stuck on my hand, one foot bleeding from a fireplace hook, and a cat stuck on my face. Now, I reach up , with my good hand, and am able to grab ahold of the cats tail and pull it off of my face. I start yelling and cussing, as I sit down to get my foot taken out of the barbie car, get the connect four game off of my hand. When I stand up, I look up and see that the old couple that live across the street are on their frong porch staring out at me. I just wave and turn around and go back into the house. I spend the next hour scooping fish into a bowl (I got them all before they died), picking up glass from the floor, wiping up fish water, cleaning up blood from my foot, picking up board games. I get back to bed and mom says "Where have you been?"

"I was letting out that stupid cat!" I yelled at her.

In a confused voice she said "But, we don't have a cat!"

So the bad news is - we still don't have a cat (and I'm not planning on getting one anytime soon)!!!!