If you have been reading some of my recent posts, you are probably aware that I have been talking about some of my exploits and experiences after being assigned to the JITC at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. My story today centers around a subject that I have not written about before. Well, that’s not entirely true. Quite a while back, I wrote a post about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Thus, my story today is not about the Ford Tempo from hell, which I have talked about a lot lately. It is also not about the new house that I had built in Sierra Vista, although it is related to that house. But today my post is more closely related to that ancient gift horse post. Now that I have you totally confused, allow me to explain. Those of you that have young children already know this, but those young children can really nag you when they want something. Their incessant nagging becomes almost like a wish list. But you know what they say about wish lists. Oh. You don’t know what they say about wish lists? Allow me to rectify that. With wish lists, or any wish for that matter, you must be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. There are exceptions to this rule. For example: let’s say that you’re out in the desert and you find an old rusty teapot. However, unless the first three letters of your name are A-L-I, the chances of that teapot being filled with anything other than dead bugs and sand are almost zero. Thus, you could rub the piss out of that teapot and no magic genie is going to pop out of it. Nope. Nada. No way in hell. You would have a better chance of playing the lottery. Notice that I didn’t say winning the lottery. You would just have a better chance of playing the lottery. Cuz those clerks at your local 7-Eleven or other convenience store will sell you all the lottery tickets that you want to buy. Of course, not a damn one of them will match the winning numbers. Cuz the lottery ain’t in business to make sure that you make money. The lottery is in business to make sure that it makes money. But I digress. Let’s suppose that your teapot actually is lucky. As I said earlier, that’s a fat chance in hell, but it could happen. Naturally, you are just like any other greedy bastard. As a result, when the genie tells you that you have a pile of wishes, well at least one anyway, you wish for $1 million worth of gold or more. Here is the problem with that wish. Remember that I told you that you were out in the middle of the damn desert. Oh yeah. But what I forgot to tell you was that you were on a hike when you found that damn teapot. Okay. Do you have any idea how much $1 million worth of gold weighs? Do you even have the remotest clue? Cuz, here’s the problem. If that genie told you that you only get one wish, you just blew it. You have no damn way to carry that gold back home. Oops. Yeah. Thus, you should carefully think things through. If you wish for gold, you are going to need transportation to haul that shit home. That means you are going to need three wishes. If the genie only granted you one wish, you would have to spend that wish to get three more wishes. Okay. Then, you wish for four-wheel-drive transportation, complete with a full tank of gas to get you out of that desert. Next, you wish for your $1 million worth of gold or more. Finally, and this is purely subjective, you can wish to free the genie, or you can wish for a long happy life with a beautiful woman. Okay. You can wake up from your daydream now. Cuz that shit is never going to happen. Oh hell no. But why am I talking about wishes and being careful what you wish for? That is an excellent question. Remember how I said that young kids can be constant nags. In fact, they’re constant nagging can almost sound like wish lists. Well, that happened with my kids. I know. I know. I said that this post was sort of related to my new house that we built in Sierra Vista. It is. We had this huge fenced-in yard. Cuz one acre will give you a huge yard. All you have to do is add the fence. In a recent post, I talked about how we totally cleaned up and re-landscaped the backyard. Once that was done, what do you suppose my kids started wishing for? No. They weren’t wishing for horses. That would’ve been an automatic NO, anyway. But they were asking for a puppy. And it may have been my fault. I let it slip to my wife that my college professor (I was working on a master’s degree at the time) had some puppies that she was trying to give away. Of course, big ears and big ears Incorporated (that’s my two children) overheard the conversation. Oops. Naturally, they thought that automatically meant that they could get a puppy. Remember the teapot? In this case, the teapot was the old rusty version, not the one with the genie inside. However, my kids didn’t see it that way. As a result, they nagged us until the cows came home about getting a puppy. Finally, my wife and I relented and took them up to look at the puppies that my professor was giving away. Bad mistake. Why? We ended up taking two of those puppies. That’s right. We took not one, but two puppies home with us, one for each kid. Oh, they sold us this good luck story about how they would do everything for those puppies. They would walk them, they would feed them, and they would clean up after them. Well, that’s what they said. That ain’t exactly the way things worked out. Like I said, you must be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. And let me tell you something. My wife and I totally got it. We got every single stinking chore related to those puppies that they could serve up. They might as well have been gift horses. Cuz, they ate like a horse, and they shit like one too. It seemed like I was feeding those damn mutts all the damn time, and we were always cleaning up dog shit. One thing that my kids did was that they walked those dogs at least once a week during the hash. And they played with the dogs out in the yard. But did they take care of the dogs? Hell no. After quite a few years of dealing with exercises in futility, I mean several years of taking care of two dogs that my children were supposed to take care of, my wife and I have sworn off future pets.
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