The Stolen Tale of the Rattlesnake tacos

This is my sister Clementine.  She thinks she's better than everyone else.
Some people call it self-esteem.  I just call it delusions of grandeur.  Just look at the expression on her face.  Do you see what I mean?  She's perfect.  She can do no wrong.  She can't help it. It's not her fault.  She was born that way.

She's got this special God given ability to tell these fascinating stories and keep her audience entertained.  It's too bad that she's a compulsive liar.  Nobody seems to care or to know about the fact that she's completely full of crap.  Maybe she's lying, maybe she's telling the truth.  There's just no way to tell.  She is so believable.  It is because of her amazing charisma that she got this job cooking for gourmet food for army generals.  Those guys just adored her, or at least that's what she says.

This one time they asked her to make this fabulous dinner for some important Japanese generals.  You know how Japanese people are they just love to eat daring exotic foods like poisonous puffer fish.  So they asked her to make rattlesnake. To us here in The Republic of Texas, it's just food.  But if you're from Japan, it's ethnic food.

My sister, Clementine, had never cooked a rattlesnake before in her life, and to be honest with you, she's terrified of snakes and other slithery creatures.  She had no idea what to do with this thing, so she just stuck in in a big pot of boiling water, hoping to God that she would think of something while she chopped up the jalapenos.

As she was chopping, the pot foamed up and bubbled over the top and the snake started slithering out of the pot.  She panicked and freaked out because she thought that maybe it was still alive.  She reached for a pair of tongs  and shoved it back in, but it kept slithering back out again.  She boiled that thing for twenty minutes and the dad gum thing would not stay in the pot, so she pulled it out with a pair of tongs in each of her hands and threw it onto the counter.  Then she chopped it's head off and cringed.

I don't know how she managed to rip the skin off and pull the meat off it's bones.  I guess being in the army made her tough.  While she was chopping up the meat for the tacos, her hands started stinging and swelling up. This is when she remembered that rattlesnakes are poisonous.  She thought for sure that she had forgotten to pull out some sort of venom pouch or something and was certain that she was about to die.  She didn't call the ambulance.  She isn't that stupid.  Almost, but not quite.

Instead she did an internet search on preparing rattlesnake.  She couldn't find anything so she just laughed and figured that her hands were stinging because the jalapenos were hot.  She told this story to the Japanese generals and they laughed, ha ha ha.

Clementine swore that she would never cook a rattlesnake again.  She said that the next time someone asks for it, she's just going to use chicken and say it's rattlesnake because it tastes the like the same freaking thing and nobody will ever know.

Pain Doesn't Really Hurt

There is  a modern day group of women who, in order to prove their womanhood, have gotten together and decided to give birth to their young with absolutely no pain killer.

Going through such excruciating pain is supposed be an uplifting wonderful experience.  So why don't more people opt out for the Novocaine and laughing gas when they get their teeth pulled?

More and more women are having their babies at home these days to have a bonding experience free from the hustle and bustle of those horrid hospitals.  They really do it to save money.  So why not pull your teeth out at home?  I did.  It was such a wonderful bonding experience, that I decided to keep them and wear them on a necklace.  My sister did.  That's where I got the idea.

For some reason, people freak out when I show them my wisdom teeth.  I only had 2, though.  That's nothing.  My husband has eight of them and they are still in his mouth.  I asked him if I could have them when he's done with  them.  He gave me this horrified look.  What?  I don't get it.

Okay, I'm totally kidding about the teeth thing.  I had pain killer  when I had those teeth pulled.  But I did give birth to twins with no pain killer.  I was supposed to have a C-Section because one of them was breech.  However,  my kid's butt was halfway out of the birth canal by the time I got to the hospital. I didn't get an epidural.  I didn't even get a freaking Tylenol.

Why is childbirth supposed to be this wonderful and beautiful thing?  It feels like your arms and legs are tight to different freight trains that are running down the track at full speed in opposite directions.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

No pain no gain.
If you want to be muscular and have those six pack abs that drive girls wild you have to lift weights until the point of utter exhaustion, your muscles hurt for days.

If you want to hot and sexy, you gotta go with out eating long enough to get to the desired weight.  You have to be able to endure the stomach pains for a while.

If you want to be a doctor, you have to endure the pain in the brain that you get when you try to comprehend organic chemistry.

But childbirth?  Why is is so important to go through all that pain for nothing?  I didn't even get a trophy for that, or a medal of endurance.

Take this mop and shove it

If you want to have a million dollars, all you have to do is save a dollar a million times.
In order to save a dollar a million times, you have to be able to cut back on anything that is not absolutely necessary.  Grocery stores can nickel and dime you to death.  It all adds up, you know, so you just gotta cut back on anything that you can avoid buying.

You know what I don't buy?  Mops.  That's right.
 I have 2 reasons for this.

1.  Mops don't get the floor clean enough.
2. Mops are something that you have to buy over and over again.

If you buy a mop, you gotta keep buying the refill mop heads.  Then when they break, you have to buy a new one.  This gets so frustrating, that a person can wind up spending loads of money on the best new fangled mops and swiffers that come on the market.

I just got sick of it over a decade ago and I switched to the scrub brush method.  It's what they use in a lot of restaurants, so that's what I use.

I cook a lot, and food tends to get stuck in the floor, I have found that this method gets the floor cleaner than the mop method.

All I do is spray the floor with the sprayer (Or dump water on the floor if the sprayer breaks)

Then I squirt a little Dawn on the floor and scrub away.

Then I wipe it all up with a towel.
Here's the tightwad wood floor cleaning method.
Pour some Murphey's Oil Soap on a wet towel

And then rub the soapy wet towel all over the floor.
It covers more surface area than a Swiffer, and it's cheaper too.
That's just one of the many ways that you can save a few bucks at the store.
If you don't like my scrub brush, then you can just shove it up your butt!
This guy did.  His name is Mr. Grey.

You might not be able to see it from the picture, but he had a stick shoved up his rear.
Oh?  I guess you think that I've got just a tad bit of angst towards authority figures.  Well, I suppose I do, indeed.  You want to know why?  Well, I'll tell you why.

It is because of all the anal retentive history teachers, such as this one, that I could never make higher than a "C" in a freaking history class.

Every time I got back a graded history assignment, it would be covered in these little red marks, all over it. He would circle all the places where I forgot to put a comma.  He would count off for improper grammar.  I guess someone forgot to tell him that he was teaching a U.S. History class and not second grade grammar.
This one time, Mr. Grey commented on my homework.  He said that my handwriting was sloppy and I needed to make all my letters the same size so he could read my homework without getting an aneurism in his eye balls.

That's when I got this terrific idea.  You see,my dad had nice handwriting and I always thought that it was because he wrote in all capital letters.  So I wrote my next homework assignment all in capital letters.  I was so proud of myself because it was the neatest assignment that I had ever written.  I thought that maybe I would write in capital letters from then on. Boy was I wrong.

When I got that homework assignment back, Mr. Grey counted off points for every single word in that homework assignment.

Mr. Grey lived in a big purple house and had 14 grown children.  He woke up every morning at exactly six o' clock and he didn't own an alarm clock.  He just woke up all on his own because he's soooo perfect.  I can tell you all about Mr. Grey and how he feels about the way the women of the nineties dress.

I know nothing about U.S. History because I always remember all the wrong things.
I also know nothing about History because all the History teachers that I have ever known have put all sorts of trick questions on their tests to screw with me and make history far more difficult and complicated than it actually is.

Loads of people make things harder than they have to be.  Especially when it comes to saving money.
If you want to save money, don't cut coupons, don't drive around town and waste your time hitting all the sales.  Keep it simple.  If you want to save money, then don't spend it.  Then you don't have to work as many hours and you can spend your free time doing things that you actually do enjoy...like drawing on your little brother.

You know what happened to Mr. Grey?
He retired at the end of my Freshman year of high school.  Isn't that just my luck?

Lord it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way

Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.
Thus sayeth Willie Nelson….
Frankly, I have found that being humble is just hard even if you aren’t perfect.  There is nothing in the world more degrading than pure humiliation, and I have endured a lifetime of it.

The hardest part of saving money, is the part where people all think that you’re poor and pity.  People automatically assume that if you look poor, you are poor, and you always will be.

It seems to be sometimes, that all the “nice” people want to make sure that they hang around with all the right people in the social groups in order to succeed in life.

Meeting these standards can get expensive and can really drain the bank account on a regular basis.
If you have a high income, it’s very important to show it off in order to socialize with the elite.
You must

1. Drive a BMW or a Mercedes, or other expensive car
2. Always keep your nails and feet properly manicured
3. Buy an expensive haircut every six weeks
4. Buy expensive clothing on a regular basis
5. Buy the nicest house the realtor will sell you
6. Socialize regularly at places that cost lots of money
7. Go on Cruises at least every other year.
8. Hold parties to impress your friends.

If you suddenly start to save money, people think that you are either having a tough time financially, going through marital problems, or are suffering from strange syndrome very similar to the one Ebenezer Scrooge had in “The Christmas Carol”.

Saving money is not entirely socially acceptable, and doing so makes you a bit of a social outcast.
People treat you better when you dress nice.  They take your advice, they honor and respect you.  You can say what you like, and if it’s a bit weird, then you’re just an eccentric.

If your clothing is patched and you have a Band-Aid on the huge dent in your car, the “nice” people avoid you like the plague and think that you are a crack head ignoramus.

This one time, I was at my kids school dance and I was talking to this rich lady.  Her name is Nancy Palace Soda.  As soon as this lady saw her other rich friends she just walked off while I was talking to her.  You know why?

She saw my house right after I moved in.  We’d got a great deal on a foreclosure, and hadn’t fixed it up yet.  She’d seen my junky car…

…and just assumed that I was a pauper, not good enough for her elite club of snobs.
Well, screw her!  I almost gave her the evil eye and used my mind tricks to make her husband lose his job or cheat on her or something.  But I didn’t.  I don’t do mean stuff like that anymore.
So why do it?  Why save money when you really don’t have to?

There is a time in everyone’s life where they really hate their job and want to quit.  But they can’t because the bills are far too high.  So they have to keep trudging on through misery.

Sometimes this is not the case, and unforeseen tragedy occurs, they get laid off, the company closes down or moves away.  Then what do you do to pay the bills?  It can be very stressful.  Then a person really is poor.  This is embarrassing.

Saving money and paying off debt is just a means to an end.  If you do it long enough, you just might not have to be frugal anymore.

I still think up money saving ideas.  It’s fun.
Here’s my latest:

I like to have my dishes perfectly spotless, and sometimes it seems like the only way to get them that way is to buy those expensive Cascade Tablets that cost $4.00 per week.

I like to cut back where I can and I’m always trying to find a way to wash my dishes cheaper.  That’s when I found this:

This is a bottle of Dawn power clean detergent.  Five minutes of soaking in this is like soaking your dishes overnight.  So I mixed just three tiny drops of  of it with about a cup of water, stirred it around, and threw it in the dishwasher.  I ran the light china cycle of my dishes, and they came out virtually spotless.

It seems to be that a lot of my money saving ideas end up breaking my appliances.  I'll let you know if my dishwasher breaks.  I wouldn't be surprised.  Everything in my house keeps breaking. 

My very eager mother just served us nine pizzas

The guy in this picture is really short. Does that mean he's not really a person?  Does size matter?

Speaking of short people, this is CD Holder

(That is actually his real name.  I've heard that it stands for constant dick, but I think that's just a rumor.  It suits him though.)
CD Holder was the shortest guy in my high school. He was a couple inches shorter than me.  He wasn't short enough to be a midget, but not quite tall enough to play basketball or reach the glasses out of the cabinet without getting a chair or climbing up onto the counter.
This is Melissa Heeler

She was a wee little lass.  I would say that she was short enough to be a munchkin in "The Wizard of OZ".  She wasn't a dwarf or a midget or anything, just extremely short.

There is a habit among most people, to just say every thought that pops into their head. It is for this reason, that so many people are great at mind reading.

If you want to do well in social situations, and get along marvelously with your peers, the thing to do is keep your mouth shut and plaster on the poker face.  Stating the obvious is considered rude and downright annoying in our society.

When I was in high school, I did not know this.

One cold and rainy autumn morning, I was prancing down the hallway  in a cheery delightful mood and I saw something that I had never seen before in my life.  I was so excited with this thrilling experience, that I stated my observation loud and clear so everyone around could see what an amazing brilliant observer I was.

I saw CD Holder and Melissa Heeler walking side by side, hand in hand in the hallway.  So I said "Oh my goodness gracious, isn't that so adorable."

They both looked up at me and shot me the evil eye.

Now that I think of it, this incident might have been the reason why CD Holder went a little crazy shaving my head at summer camp, and it might have been why he was so eager to throw a phone at me in the Lollapallooza incident.

I really don't understand why it's so bad and insulting to be short.  Being short might be wonderful.  You don't have to eat as much food and can save loads of money.  You can buy clothes in the children's section.  They get all the good clothes.  So what's the big deal.

But alas, I guess they hate it because they are not considered real people by the rest of the world.
Modern Day Scientists have recently redefined the qualifications for being a real person.

1. You have to be tall enough to reach the gas pedal in a car.
2. You have to be tall enough to look the teller at the bank in the eye when making a deposit.
3.  You have to be tall enough to dress in the adult section at Macys.

If you do not meet all three of these requirements, you are not a real person.
Oh, I suppose that sounds pretty nasty, don't you?  Well it is.  I made all this up.

Do you know why?

Because a bunch of geeky scientists who have nothing better to do with their time, all got together and decided that Pluto is not really a planet because it doesn't have enough gravity to keep all the asteroids away from it.  Pluto is not orbitationally dominant, so it no longer qualifies as a real planet.

So my very eager mother just served us nine....

The mnemonic rhyme no longer works anymore thanks to the big headed know it all scientists who think they're better than everyone else.  That is sooo not cool. I'm a tad bit offended that Pluto isn't considered real anymore.  It orbits the sun.  It's round and has a moon!

But no, it's just not good enough to qualify as part of our solar system.  It's not perfect and so we cast it aside like a leper at a debutant ball.

Everybody has to do with what the scientists say, because they talk in mathematical equations that are so complicated that everyone thinks they are the smartest people in the world.  But guess what!  They're all a bunch of idiots who wear stupid looking clothes.

So I have decided to make up my own rules.
Rules to be a real person

1.  You have to admit that Pluto is a real planet

I fell into a burning ring of black holes

The guy in this picture is Dax Powell.

I don't remember what the chic's name is.  She's just some boring pretentious twit.  The only exciting thing she ever did was wear a silly hat.

    Dax Powell played baseball for Denison High School.  He was a left handed pitcher.  According to the stories that my dad told me day and night, Dax Powell got signed on to play baseball with the Houston Astros.  Apparently, major league baseball teams will give their left testicles for a left handed pitcher.

     Had Dax Powell been from another town or another family or another time, this might have worked out for him.  Unfortunately, his left hand was involved in a tragic accident after high school, and he had to give up baseball.

    There is there is a black hole in Denison,TX.  It sucks away all the dreams and great ambitions from everyone around.

  But speaking of Dax Powell, he was in my 11th grade English Class with with Ms. Bowen.  (She had a baby that year and nearly died from blood poisoning).

    I just thought thought that Dax Powell was adorable.  I bet if he asked me out back then, I could have used my super powers to make him a major league baseball player.  Who knows, maybe I'd be sitting in a mansion somewhere lounging by the pool.  I doubt it. Back then, I carried around too much negative energy for anything wonderful to happen.

This one day, Dax Powell came up to me and made fun of me.  He told me that he was driving behind me earlier that morning and I was driving so slow he thought I was his grandma or something.
I got to thinking about this, and I wondered if maybe I was driving a bit too slow.  So the next morning while I was driving my sister's boyfriend, Mikey to school,

I sped up a little.  I drove 33 miles per hour, instead of the regular 30.

     And lo and behold, I got pulled over for speeding.  I didn't know that it was a school zone.   I didn't even see a school until the cop pointed it out.  It wasn't even a regular school, it was a kinder care and it was in the middle of the parking lot.  It would have been nice if they had put up a sign or something to let people know to slow down.  I tried to explain this to the judge, but he really didn't care.  He made me pay $78! 

The nerve of some people.

Guess who I went to high school with?

Vanilla Ice!

Do you remember Vanilla Ice?  You know that song "Ice Ice Baby?"

  Okay, I'm totally pulling your leg.  I didn't go to high school with Vanilla Ice.  I think he went to high school in Dallas, and he's a lot older than me.  But he did move to Sherman, TX.  Sherman is the rival city of Denison TX and only 15 minutes away.  It's still close enough to the black hole in Denison to suck away the life energy from people.  Shortly after he stopped at a gas station in Denison, Vanilla Ice became a nobody.

Traveling Through the Wormholes of Time

In a beautiful land filled with castles, queens, and princesses there lives a man who sits all day long in his wheelchair formulating scientific equations.  He can't walk, talk, or even move.  But he is not on welfare or government aid of any kind.

He is like an X-man.  He is one who walks among us...well...not really because he can't walk at all.  He is highly esteemed among the scientific world for his braniac skills. Who is this man?
He is Stephen Hawking.  Don't feel sorry for him, though, he has cheated death.  The man can't even move and yet obtained a doctoral degree and has written a best selling book. He just thinks he knows everything just because he can do mathematical equations in his head.

Okay.  I used to think that he was way cool, because he's like, supposed to be, like, you know, the smartest guy in the world and everything, but if he's so smart, then he would have figured out a way to walk again.
But then again, maybe that's the brilliant part.  He's figured out a way to shut off his motor neurons so he won't have to wash dishes and fold laundry and sit in traffic.  This lack of movement disease has given him all the time that he needs to formulate equations and solve the mysteries of the Universe.

His Ultimate goal is to discover a way to travel through time.
Yes, that's right.  He wants to travel into the future and find out a way to cure motor neuron disease, then miraculously walk and become rich and famous. But he's already rich and famous and now all he has to do is rise up and walk.  But he can't, because now his muscles have atrophied.  But what if he could...does he really need a time machine to do that?

Time Travel...............................
...this is the ultimate paradox.  They say that it isn't possible.
For one thing, time doesn't exist.  Time is an illusion.
The only thing that exists is man and his ideas.

Why do so many people want to travel back in time, or forward in time?
Some people want to back in time and meet important people and learn from them so they can be more successful.  But everything that has been important enough to learn from them has been written down in books.  And just because you travel back in time long enough to meet Benjamin Franklin or Dennis Tittle, doesn't mean that they will talk to you.
There are important people around right now, most likely they don't want to talk to you either.

But what if you traveled back in time and met your formal self and tried to give yourself advice and tips on how to be rich in famous.  Would you listen?


You see, it's a paradox.
If I drift back into my memories, I can travel back in time through past events and tell my children of all the stupid horrible things that I have ever done.  Then they can be wiser as they travel through the future.

Here's the other time travel paradox:
Before disaster occurs, it will always happen to those around first as a warning of something that may befall you, if you aren't careful.  The only problem with this is the fact that so many people lie and cover up what they have done wrong in order to look smart.  So you have to look carefully and accurately and become an ace at detecting lies.

Dottie is a perfect example of the time travel paradox.
Dottie taught school for a very long time and then one year, she was forced into early retirement because of the wicked wicked school officials that falsely accused her of having a filthy classroom, and being cruel to some students.  (Dottie would never do that, the nerve of some people)
When you retire from teaching, you get two options
You can get $70,000 all at once to invest or you can get small amounts of it every month for several years.
Dottie just took it all at once, and spent it all at the Casino.

Dottie seems to think that she really can double her money at the Casino.
I have  heard from people who have come back from the future and told me that they have lost all of their money gambling it.  I have heard people say "I used to have all this money, and now I have nothing to show for it...if only I had invested it in something that would make me money"
...isn't that like time travel...couldn't I learn from that?

But sometimes you hear tales of things that can and will happen to you.
Dottie had a teacher friend that took the $70,000 all at once and spent every penny of it.  She warned Dottie that this money was not taxed.  She told Dottie that she needed to find an accountant and make sure she saved part of that money to pay to the government.

But alas, Dottie did not listen.  Uncle Sam came knocking at her door very soon and asked for that money.  But she had left it all in the slot machines at the Choctaw Indian Casino in Oklahoma.  They wouldn't give it back.

Time travel happens all the time.  You just have to listen and watch carefully to everyone around you.  There are warnings all the time.  You can't heed all of them or you will go crazy.  But if you are careful and attentive, you can use some things to your advantage.

If there was a time machine sitting in your living room, would you hop in?  Where would you go?  It doesn't matter how you get there, it's the outcome that is most important.

There is nothing new under the sun, so it goes.  Whatever road you want to travel, someone else has been down that road before.  So find someone who has succeeded and do what they did.  If you can't, find a loophole that enables you too.

You might not be able to sit in a time machine, but you can travel through wormholes (loopholes).