Attempts At Gratitude Part One

In my Composing Personal History class we somewhat regularly have published authors and other types of people come and talk to us. On Tuesday we had a lady come in who publishes a blog in a very similar style to Hyperbole and a Half (which if you haven't read you need to stop reading this right now and look it up). So we were challenged to on our blogs write with humor. Well, I also wanted to for the month of November write about things that I'm grateful for in order to get into the spirit of Thanksgiving. You know, like I attempted to do last year but utterly failed at. So, we'll see how this goes.I'm going to attempt to draw some pictures for this, but I hope that you'll forgive me for my enormous lack of talent/skill.

Once upon a time there was me. I, being the charming social creature that I am have friends, many of which you all may know or have been introduced to in this blog. For the purposes of this story you only need to know about three of them. They are Hillary, Scott, and one who for the purposed of this story we shall call Josh.

Hillary, Scott and I had met 1,000 years ago when we were going to middle school together and we had discovered Josh in high school. The kid was great and a lot of fun, but he had the tenancy to every once and a while recede into his surroundings and metaphorically "die". Which really just meant that we hadn't seen him for a while. It also didn't help that his parents needed him to do stuff for them a lot, which seemed to keep him pretty busy.

Never ending pit of dishes he had to do.

So, every once and a while we would make spontaneous trips to his house in order to see him and go on adventures with him. Or at the very least, go on adventures ourselves since going to see him always was. The thing about Josh's house is that, well, it was full of things.


In order to get to it you had to turn down this road/drive way type deal that was off of a main road and once you did you were greeted by: at least 3 dogs, a chicken, something like 20 cats (the best of which was named Alfredo and had a Hitler stach), 5 cars, a trailer, and the house. And this was assuming that no one was home.

Ok, this was starting to take forever and I had to get to class, so try to pretend this picture
is a house with stuff and not just totally terrible

The family consisted of 5 kids, ranging from his cute elementary school sister to himself, a recent graduate, and two parents. But there were always other people around. The most consistent was a bearded man who I think was an uncle or something, but he never said anything to you. He just  look at you while you approached and then fade away.He came to be known as "the bearded relation".

Wow, who would have thought beards were so hard to make look good.
You get the idea though.

Well, one particular day Hillary, Scott and I decided that we needed to watch and mock some movie, the title of which I can't remember but I know it had something to do with magic space ships and girls that turned into horses or something. Anyway, point is, we were watching it and we needed Josh.

So the three of us piled into the car and headed over. As we pulled into the driveway/road deal we scanned the path before us to be wary of cats and relations. After a few minutes and some knocking, it appeared that no one was home. We headed back to the car, a little disappointed and still on the look out for cats and relations.

Um no, I didn't reuse my pictures...

To the side of the driveway/road thing that needs to be traveled in order to get to the house is a giant bush which does a pretty awesome job of blocking the view of the road, making it hard to see if cars are coming or not. So, in an effort to get back on the main road, we were (in the car) slowly creeping out from behind this bush. As soon as we think it's safe to go, I van appears from down the road and starts driving towards us. We wait for the van to drive past, but as it gets closer, we see the blinker turn on. Confused for a moment as to why they would be turning down the driveway/road deal, we looked into the approaching van to realized that it was full of Josh relations.

In a sudden panic to leave the house before they arrived, both to avoid the awkwardness of us leaving the house and they were arriving and in a desperate flight from the van of relations we peeled out onto the road, sped down the street, and turned into the nearest neighborhood.

After taking a minute to catch our breath, and pretty confident that they hadn't seen us, we headed back to Scott's house to watch and mock the magic space movie, unfortunately still Joshless but fortunate still in the sense that we had narrowly escaped quite easily what could have been the most terrifying moment of the week. A van full of relations.

So, the moral of this story is that in light of my grateful outlook, I'm thankful for fast transportation and get away cars. Turns out they're not just for robbers anymore. Also, wow. Time for me to take another art class.