This Joy’s Life

My mother is now part of a secret society.  Well, no, it’s not really a secret, but what they do, I couldn’t tell you.  They claim to go out to lunch, a group of 50+ year old women wearing audacious red hats and purple clothing.  You may have heard of them, even seen them one afternoon while out to lunch yourself. They call themselves The Red Hat Society.

What do they discuss during these lunches? Besides lunch, what other types of gatherings do they attend? Do they have to memorize passwords like “The crow flies at dawn” or “The cow is in the cornfield?”  Where do they find all those red hats?  And don’t they know that red and purple don’t match?

These questions and more I can not get my mother to answer.  When asked who else is in her RHS group she vaugely responds “just some other women you don’t know.”  When asked what they are going to do that afternoon, another vauge response, “Oh, you know, the usual.”

By the looks of the above picture, the almost defensive stance, with her hand on her bag like she might, just might, be packing heat, I have to wonder what “the usual” really is.  Craft Stores around the country, be on notice! You may want to focus the cameras on those silk irises priced at 40% off.  With deals like that, your local RHS chapter may have you in their sights. I’m just saying.

Here’s hoping a mug shot of my mother on a Wanted poster doesn’t end up on the nightly news any time soon. If it should, mom, you know you can crash at our place in Seattle for a while, but they’ll come looking here for you soon enough. They always start with who you know.

Does Clara’s Dora doll look a little bit evil to you right now?

Do you think I should be worried?

If you see an article like this in the news, go immediately to the police with this blog post:

Seattle Mom Tragically Slayed

A bizarre homicide has rocked the quiet Normandy Park neighborhood of Seattle-area resident Joy Fisher. There are no suspects at this time and the only info being released by the local authorities is that a Dora The Explorer doll with a rather large head, belonging to the deceased’s daughter, was found near the body. . .

Gwen says I have too much time on my hands.

Having accomplished the goal of putting a WalMart at every exit along every highway running through the state of Alabama, Super WalMart’s are now being built just blocks away from what remains of their predecessors. Total number of deaths are uncertain, numbers are still coming in.

What’s really more sad than seeing a humongous WalMart complex and parking lot abandoned for a gigantic Super WalMart and parking lot mere miles down the road is that fact that I have so easily fallen into their commercial trap. I have spent a total of 24 hours in Calera, Alabama (near Birmingham) and in that time I have passed at least 4 WalMarts within three exits and have been inside 2 of them.

It’s like some voodoo mind trap. I want to despise WalMart for taking over in the nations small town’s, running out the mom and pop shops that give each town some character. I want to spurn them for cutting down our forests and for putting those annoyingly bright spotlights on their roofs.

And yet, I love WalMart. So cheap, so always open, SO MUCH STUFF. Stuff I never knew I needed to make my life run smoother. Coming out of WalMart I find I have a sense of control in a world full of chaos.