Mmm. Samoas.

With the mild winter we've had, I have lost track of time. I had no idea Girl Scout Cookie Season has come (and sadly, it looks like, gone too). This is what I miss about working with other people. Wolfgang Candy orders and Girl Scout Cookies (and occasionally Theo's pizzas). This would also explain a few things about me, but that's beside the point. (Oh hell, I buy for my family, it's not like I could eat an entire box of chocolate covered animal crackers in one sitting. Not that I've tried, anyway...) Anyway...

I was a Girl Scout until 6th grade. Then I moved to a new town, and into a new district where the girls were so thoroughly evil that they informed me that their girl scout troop had a waiting list to get in, and I couldn't join. Stupid me. I did like being a girl scout, but I hated 2 things.

Thing 1- Camping. I do not enjoy camping unless I'm in a cabin, preferably with a toilet that actually flushes. Toilets that are a hole in the ground, covered by a cardboard tube with a toilet seat mounted on it, are not actually toilets. I do not "do" tents in the middle of the woods, where serial killers, bears, malaria-infested mosquitoes and fire ants can get in. Sorry. No. Maybe a tent on a beach, but woods? no.

The night I made my mom come get me, because the older girls tried to scare us is pretty classic in my house...

Thing 2- Selling Cookies. The village I grew up in (yes. Village. It said so on the state-provided signs) had about 15 girl scouts. Not all of us lived right on top of one another, but it was pretty much a race to see who was getting the people on your side of the highway first. If you had good neighbors like I did, they always bought a box from me, and from the other girl down the street.

Mostly, I think the people who bought, got them out of pity. See, Girl Scout Cookie Season doesn't take place in the spring, oh no. It takes place in the dead of fucking winter. And in my neck of the woods, that means snow. Lots. And lots. Of snow. If a seven year old is trudging through snow up to her waist and there is no sidewalk just to get to your house and sell you some cookies, you can't say no, or she will burn your house down. (I said I didn't LIKE camping, I didn't say I didn't learn anything there- starting fires I remembered.)

And my parents always adamantly refused to take order sheets to work with them. If I wanted to sell them, I had to make do with relatives, and setting out in the dead of night to get to my neighbor's house by say... noon, and pushing other girls into snowbanks to get to sell my whopping 70 boxes of cookies.


Heh.

Ah, sweet sweet scouting memories. Our troop leader for a few years was known (in my house at least) as the "Mad Biter". She was a bitter, evil woman, whose daughter was in my troop. (her daughter was a bit of a whack-job too.) She also had the great fortune of babysitting Odie and me. I'm five years older than Odie, so at the time, he's maybe 2 years old? Her kids are similarly aged. One afternoon, Odie, who was still at the biting age, bit one of her kids. Kids bite each other, shit happens. You tell them no, you sit them in a corner, you move on. What you don't do, as a grown-up, is bite them back. And if you DO bite them back, you certainly don't do it hard enough to leave a bruise. Because if you do, my mother will come flying at you like a banshee, and tear your face off, and you'll never be allowed to babysit us again.

Hee.

However, when you're on your own medical leave, because you're crazed, it's perfectly acceptable to attempt to duct tape your 12 year old son to a rocking chair because he's driving you even crazier than you already are. (Yeah, that was a fun afternoon, and no, she didn't succeed at duct taping him down. but not for lack of trying.)

Heh.