back to those hills
June 18th, 2007today’s father’s day postsecrets are really good. this one has several email submissions posted beneath it:
 my absolute favorite, so far: when i was little my dad told me that polyester was a small animal in australia & they would kill it to make clothes. that night i sat in my room reading the labels on my clothes for hours & threw all of the polyester ones away. Â
i don’t think my dad ever lied to us about stuff. if he did, i’ve blocked it. he could, however, do lots of funny & impressive things. maybe he can still do some of this – i don’t know if it would impress me as much. he might have to come up with new material.
Impressive Stuff My Dad Can Do (an ongoing list):
- put his thumb in his mouth and blow to slowly “inflate” his bicep.
- drive in really treacherous places like across high creeks and on skinny hillside roads that were all muddy and/or snowy and never let us die (it’s his fault that i am never 100% comfortable when i’m a passenger in a moving vehicle if the driver is not him… is not he?).
- flip his cigarette backwards into his mouth, dive under water, come back up a few moments later and flip it out.
- light bottle rockets and other stick fireworks out of his hands.
- blow the bottoms clean off of coffee cans with m80s.
- pulverize old watermelons and pumpkins with hunting rifles.
- kill a copperhead with a garden hoe.
- kill a boar like john locke.
- make a mean slingshot & deadly blowgun (for me!)
- shoot ben in the ass with a paintball gun.
- build a whole barn all by himself.
there is a category on the etsy forums for whatever people want to talk about that’s not etsy related (see, other people stay up late and waste time online, too!), and a current thread going is people sharing their stories of weird coincidences. all of these six-degrees-of separation and objects-coming-back-to-you stories blow my mind. one woman bought a rubber doll at a fleamarket, and when she undressed it to scrub it down she found her name in ink on the doll’s back in her mom’s handwriting. her mom confirmed that she’d lost that doll when she was three – fifty years ago – in a move, but that it was definitely hers. another girl’s boyfriend bought a beatles record on ebay that had his dad’s name written on the back – his dad confirmed that it was part of a collection he’d gotten rid of years ago.
“My sister and I were at a stranger’s estate sale recently, and she ran up to show me this handmade fabric children’s book that she just knew I’d love. Turns out my boyfriend’s grandma had made it nearly 40 years ago!”
“I’m currently in the process of buying my first home. While waiting for the home inspector to print off his report, I putzed around the kitchen. When I opened the fridge, I found a bag of coffee purchased from the small, local shopped in which I’ve worked for almost 9 years. The bag had my handwriting on it! I sold my sellers French Roast. :)”
my contributions:
1.) one of my earliest memories is playing in the backyard of family friends when i was threeish, and a woman and little curly-blonde-haired boy passing through. my mom’s friend said “wave hello to jason!”. when i was twelve the school in my town consolidated with the school in the next town, and i developed a huge junior-high crush on…. a taller, still curly-blonde-haired jason. didn’t piece it together until a few years later when we were actually “dating” and looking at his childhood photographs at his mom’s house one afternoon.
2.) i went to a stop on the very last lillith fair tour sometime in high school, and it rained fiercely for most of the afternoon and evening. a couple of (scraggly, ampitheater) rows to my right, ten or twelve people had made a mudslide of the makeshift path/walkway as the grass got beaten down… spent a good hour taking turns bellyflopping into the mud and sliding down the hill. when i started college – hours and hours from home and that venue – a girl who lived on my hall and myself eventually became good friends, and one day found out that she was at the same concert, and that the mudsliding women were a couple of rows to her LEFT.
3.) my husband and i are from the states – west virginia – and we currently live in toronto, ontario. last fall we were a couple weeks shy of going home for a friend’s wedding, which we had had to choose over ANOTHER friend’s wedding that was the same weekend, same town. my husband was chatting with a woman in one of his classes about undergraduate work, and he mentioned that he did a bachelors & masters in wheeling, west virginia. “oh, i am going to a wedding there in two weeks! how strange!” … she’d been invited, by the groom, to the wedding of the bride whose day we were missing out on. she brought him a souvenier mug from the reception location : )
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i know i have more of those. i’m going to have to think about them. i guess the way i met stephanie, my old roommate, is a weird one. it was the first fall that i was dating mikey and we had a class together. we were doing some group work and when we finished i was chatting with a friend about going to wheeling to visit my boyfriend that weekend. i didn’t know this then, but she’s angie’s best childhood friend. we found out a few weeks later, and she told me that the day she’s overheard me mention the nameless wheeling boyfriend, she wanted to ask me if i was talking about mikey iafrate, even though she had NO reason to think that i was.
i am done with my job a week early (surprise, i didn’t know) because mohammad decided that since a bunch of people are going on vacation all in a row, he wanted to spend this last week before it all starts training a new girl that he’s going to try out. he felt bad about it since i’d thought i’d be working my regular schedule (five more days) until we go home, then be done to start the new job as soon as we get back… so i had this bag of a bunch of jewelry & a few other things hoarded in the back to buy here and there, and he GAVE it to me. i couldn’t let him but he wouldn’t let me out of the back room until i took it. very nice of him. plus he wrote me a check for four days of vacation since i didn’t take any while i worked for him. he’s the best retail boss ever. i might pick up a few shifts again later in the summer if i need it/he needs me. yay new jewelry for free!
so i have a week and a couple days free to work on etsy like mad, clean like mad, benefit-loose-end-tie like mad, and housebreak this dog hardcore. she is THERE… i think she will be 100% trained by the time we go home, so i hope she doesn’t lose it then. she’s been really good since we got her with going outside (and she eventually did broaden her Grass To Go On areas to pretty much anywhere), but it took her a long time to tell us that she needed to go out. we’ve spent months guessing. a few weeks ago she started letting us know if she’s just had an accident on her papers, because she got it in her head that going out was a reward for peeing on the papers. BAD. if you crate train a dog hardcore (which i don’t have the heart to do) they are supposed to be fully broken by five months, and if you do what we are doing (in and out, routine, but keeping papers down, too, instead of locking them in a crate when they’re alone) they are supposed to be broken by about nine months. she will be 8 months old in a few days. i never thought she’d get there, but i think she’s got it. this week off and being with her 24/7 should lock it in her brain. we took away her papers totally about a week ago and have blocked her in a small section of the apartment except when we’re watching her, and she’s only had a couple of accidents since.
in other baby-development news, i’m told that simone is walking. i’m dying to see those kids, and everyone else. i’m so excited that i’m already not sleeping.
i should be sleeping.
but one lost question:
