The Hawg gets fooled

Yes, I went ahead and pulled my April Fool's trick on my wife -- I hid her soap last night because she's the first one to take a shower in the morning.

She wasn't happy. She told me I wasn't funny at all, in fact. I emailed a picture of a bar of soap to my wife while she was at work today just to annoy her a bit (she's ex-Army and that's playing with fire). Ah, but she got me back by taping down the handle on the kitchen sink sprayer. I got soaked and laughs were had by all.

I think she's won this round, but I'll be back next year with something bold. All I need is a minister, a paramedic, an undertaker, a totaled car that is the exact replica of mine and a policeman with a sense of humor.

I'm still working out the details. I'll fool my wife but good next year.

Meanwhile, some wacky blogger went and pulled an April Fool's trick on me. I was looking at the traffic stats on Today.com for another blog of mine, Straight Shooting Real Estate, and noticed that my blog had been stumbled.

Great news, right? Well, kind of. Yes, my real estate blog is listed at StumbleUpon as a pornography site. Ah, someone out there has a sense of humor, seemingly. That's funny as hell.

Lessons learned

As I mentioned right here, I bought a shiny new bicycle. Rather than going to a bicycle shop and purchasing one, I bought it online.

That was a stupid mistake. Why? The gears weren't set right when the bike arrived, meaning I could only use 12 of my 21 gears. I didn't want to mess with setting everything up because I read that my chain could fly off if I got something wrong. That would be a problem.

So I took it to a bicycle shop tonight and should have it back tomorrow. I'll be out some money for that and I also bought a new seat because the one on my bike is terrible. I started adding everything up and figured out that I could have spent just a little more money at the bicycle shop and would have something that was already set up and ready to go.

I'll be glad to get my bike back so I can start zipping around the neighborhood again, but I'll be heading to the bike shop when it's time to buy something new (I saw a couple of bikes from Fuji and Giant that I'd love to own).

Oh well. I did order a couple of bells so my wife and I can go around the neighborhood on our bikes and annoy people with them. Maybe we should ride around, ring our bells and yell at kids.

"You kids think you're pretty cool with your rock n' roll and your funny books," we could holler. Great fun.

My daughter learned something new this week, too. She's on a softball team again this year (the appropriately-named Maniacs) and had a game last night. My daughter had the ball and was running to tag a girl that was running to second base.

She looked like she was tired of chasing that kid, so she stopped, rared back and pegged the poor child right in the back with the softball (yes, she's about as aggressive as my wife). My daughter learned that merely hitting a kid with a ball isn't enough to get her out -- you've got to tag the base runner or get a force out, seemingly.

I told my daughter she simply wasn't allowed to hit a kid in the back with a softball.

"I didn't hit her in the back, daddy."

"Yes you did. I was watching you!"

"I didn't hit her in the back. I hit her helmet."

Maybe she hasn't learned as much as I'd hoped.

Now, my daughter is on a team for seven and eight-year-old girls. The opening session was the other night and we were treated to a parade of the softball teams here in Saline County. The division for five and six-year-old girls is a hoot.

Now, a lot of the teams for older girls have fairly aggressive names -- the Maniacs, the Callahan Crushers, Chaos, etc. That's not the case for the teams for the youngest girls, one of which is called the Pink Ponies.

I couldn't help but think that's not exactly a name that strikes fear in the hearts of opponents, is it? The Pink Ponies? I hope those girls form a great team and stomp everyone who opposes them.