Can You Laugh at Yourself?

Last Sunday Paul Faulkner came at spoke at church. He asked the question "Can we laugh at ourselves when we make mistakes." My answer to that question is yes, I can laugh at myself but I know you all like laughing at me much more. Most of the time I hate telling people about my "blonde moments", but after this sermon and the story he told, I feel compelled to share. Some of these have happened in the past but I have to admit that the majority of them happened within the past couple of weeks.

Blonde Moment #1-The Pillow: If you sit in the front or middle seat by the door of the new church vans you have absolutely no place to lay your head and try to sleep. So, on the way home from New Orleans we got the bright idea to put the cooler inside the van by the middle seat and then put a pillow on the cooler so that you could lay down in the seat and have a head rest. I was the first person to test our idea and it worked great until I sat up to make a smart-aleck remark and then threw my head back down on the cooler only to find the very hard surface of the cooler instead of my nice soft pillow which had fallen off when I sat up. I think the person I made the remark too thought it was poetic justice.

Blonde Moment #2-20 Questions: This one also takes place in the van. Our van decided to keep the driver awake by playing the game 20 Questions which turned into more like 250 Questions. The questions were getting pretty deep and personal so someone threw in a nice easy question to give people a little mental break. Someone asked the question "Name your favorite actor." I jumped in with what I can only say was a sleep deprived remark and said "Make it your favorite male actor." The whole van got quiet and then finally someone said "Ummmmmm Suzy honey, that is what actor means." I got that look people often give us blonde when we make mistakes. The look that says oh you poor thing. Your hair color is not your fault. It's OK.

Blonde Moment #3-The Camera: My uncle gave me his digital camera to take pictures with while we were in New Orleans. On the second day he gave me new batteries just in case I needed them. About lunch time I had to replace the batteries. It took me a while to figure out even where to put the batteries. Once they were replaced, I couldn't get a picture to show on the display. I worked and worked and finally Stacey took it from me and she played around with it and we still couldn't figure out what was wrong. Finally Kevin who has innocently been standing nearby asks "Is the problem that you can't see a picture." I replied "Yes." Kevin says "Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that you still have the lens cap on." This cannot be classified as a truly blonde moment because Stacey was right there with me. See it happens to brunettes too.

Blonde Moment #4-The Printer: I was at work making new fliers to put in the Model Home. I was printing off the fliers and couldn't figure out why they weren't printing in color. I printed off at least 2 or 3 and tried on each one to figure out why it wasn't printing in color. It finally dawned on me that my printer was not and has never been a color printer. All of you can just SHUT UP!

Blonde Moment #5-The Shoes: This is Tammy's favorite blonde moment so it had to make the list. A few months ago, I am at Payless with Tammy, Bryon and Isaac. Now for anyone out there not familiar with Payless, their main marketing tool is BOGO. Every commercial stresses BOGO and all the women have BOGO on the brain. So, we are at Payless and they are buying Isaac some new play shoes. They find some for him and Tammy asks if anyone else needs a pair of shoes because it is buy one get one free. Man....I really hate to tell this......I said "I would but it is only on the BOGO brand and I don't see anything I like." Here comes the look again but it's much worse coming from my engineer brother-in-law. Tammy says (she is speaking slowly, by the way) "Suz....BOGO is not a brand, it stands for Buy One Get One Free."

Finally, my ultimate (at least recently) blonde moment.

Blond Moment #6-The Phone: A few weeks ago I am getting ready to leave work and I am standing in a co-workers office and my phone rings. I flip it up see who is on Caller ID and decided this is not the proper place or time to take this call. So I hit the mute button and the co-workers proceeds to bombard me for information on who the call is from. I finally get frustrated with her questions and start to tell the story about the person on the other end of this phone call, when all of the sudden I hear this very faint "Hello." "Hello." After a year I finally learned that when your phone is flipped open and you hit the mute button it actually connects the call instead of sending it to voicemail. There is so much more to this story, but the rest of the story could be a whole blog entry on it's own and I think I have embarrassed myself enough for now.

Plus, I can feel you all starting to give me "THE LOOK." Just stop it right now!