The week we got our puppy, I caught a stomach bug and stayed home from work one day. That afternoon, my wife called to check up on me.
"I’m okay," I said. "But guess who pooped in the dining room?"
My wife’s response, "Who?"
In good weather, my friend Mark always let his yellow-naped Amazon parrot, Nicky, sit on the balcony of his tenth-floor apartment. One morning, Nicky flew away, much to Mark’s dismay. He searched and called for the bird, with no luck.
The next day when Mark returned from work, the phone rang. “Is this Mark?” The caller asked. “You’re going to think this is crazy, but there’s a bird outside on my balcony saying, ‘Hello, this is Mark.’ Then it recites this phone number and says, ‘I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you will leave a message at the tone, I will call you back.’ So I'm guessing this is your bird?”
To keep their active two-year-old from roaming onto the busy street in front of their home, my sister and brother-in-law decided to put a gate across the driveway.
After working over two weekends on the project, Robert was ready to attach the lock to complete the job. He was working on the yard side of the gate, with his daughter nearby, when he dropped the screwdriver he was using and it rolled under the gate, out of his reach.
"I’ll get it, Daddy," Lauren called, nimbly crawling under the newly erected barrier.
My husband, a computer-systems trouble-shooter, rode with me in my new car one afternoon. He had been working on a customer’s computer all morning and was still tense from the session.
When I stopped for a traffic light, I made sure to leave a safe distance from the stop line to keep oncoming drivers from hitting the car.
I couldn’t help but laugh when my husband impatiently waved at me to move the car forward while saying, "Scroll up, honey."