kris stories

Terrorists win

Blog Instead of being asleep at 08:21 on 2 October 2008, kitt created this:

Kris comes home from work each day with a different story to tell from lunch or some adventure during the day, whether dodgeball, ultimate, cards, games or management related. For the longest time, I was mildly envious of his stories. He'd come home and talk about the energy of his work group and all these great conversations and his day. I'd tell him about my day, which usually consisted of conversations what went something like "No, Bella, no. No. No! NO!" or maybe "Annie! No lick. No! No lick!"

Intellectually fascinating, eh?

Fortunately, working in the office three days a week has helped my evening story telling abilities immensely by providing good material (think "Project Strap-On"). Kris' stories are still better, though. I need to either take these guys out to lunch, head out drinking with them, or go mountain bike riding with them. Of course, the latter would provide THEM with more material that me.

Last night, Kris observed that the Republican agenda of instilling fear and cowardice in the American public has succeeded in permeating everyone's unconscious thoughts. His work group was at lunch at a good, local Chinese restaurant. The restaurant is known for a tasty fish dish, of which everyone (but Kris, who knew better) wanted to have.

So, one of Kris' coworkers, the Chinese guy, orders for the group when the waiter comes around. He has a hard time ordering four of the same dish, one for each guy but Kris, as the Chinese culture is one of community dinner: each person orders a separate dish and everyone shares the dishes, family style.

When the coworker ordered four orders of the same dish sheepishly, another coworker piped up, "This is America, man. We have to have our own dishes. If we don't, terrorists win."

Up a pole

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 20:21 on 1 December 2007

Mark and Megan came over tonight to visit. They brought half of dinner; we made the other half. While we were socializing after dinner, the television was on, providing background noise. At one point, we noticed they were talking about remodels, and noticed they were talking about an inconvenient structural pole in the middle of the room.

Mark commented he used to have one of those inconvenient structural poles in the downstairs of their house. I didn't recall it, so Megan explained where it was before Mark explained how he removed it after installing stronger cross beams in the ceiling.

Kris then told us of the structural poles in his parents' basement. When he told us that, as kids, he and his friends would close all the doors and played hide and go seek in the dark, I thought we were in for a good story about how one of his friends ran into the pole in the dark. It was a new story, so I was immediately interested in hearing it.

He started laughing before he was even able to start the story.

Turns out, during one instance of hide-and-go-seek, he decided to hide at the top of one of the poles. So, he climbed up, and spent the next ten minutes trying to stay at the top of the pole, first with his hands, then with his feet, then back with his hands, anything to stay at the top of the pole.

I couldn't help but start laughing with Kris, imagining this young kid, climbing up quickly, trying hard to stay up on the top of the pole. I'm still laughing. I think I could laugh for days on this one. Yay, new story!

Stuart Foreman

Blog Instead of being asleep at 22:16 on 23 July 2006, kitt created this:

At dinner tonight, Mark started telling one of his college stories (his story to tell, but the summary is: he and his friends killed a rabbit with a BB gun from the dorm balcony, cooked it at a barbeque (tastes like chicken!), was tattled on by the women downstairs, ordered to volunteer at the local Humane Society, tried to do said volunteering at the local Humane Society but were refused because of the reason why they had to volunteer, and ended up volunteering with the campus gardener, who offered them $1 for every rabbit they killed). At one point, Kris leaded over to Megan and asked, "Have you heard this story a million times before?" She laughed, then said yes, but it was okay, because she listened for differences in the stories, to see how they grow over time.

She asked me if I did the same with the stories from Kris that I hear over and over again. I laughed, and said, "No, I just pull out my phone and try to keep up with him while typing it in." I then asked, "Want to hear one?"

I figure Kris isn't going to blog his stories, but some of them are just so so funny. The best part is, of course, the fact that Kris just laughs when he tells the story, so, yes, a lot of it is in the delivery. If he starts typing up his own stories, I'll stop. Until then, I'll keep transcribing.

Megan said, yes, she'd like to hear the story, so, in his words, Kris' story of Stuart Foreman:

Stuart Foreman was the name of our catcher in high school.

We had a rule that a runner heading to home had to slide if there was going to be a play at home. They had no choice, they were rwquired to slide.

my junior year, we were playing our arch rival, James Wood H.S., In one play, the runner starts coming into home. Our catcher caught the ball, and turned to meet the runner. The runner was this 6" 200 (220 in one version of the story) pound guy. Our catcher was like 5'7", 170 (180 in a different telling) pounds, stocky and built like Eric Newman.

So this runner comes in, and our catcher is holding the ball (out in front of himself, both hands around the ball) when the runner keeps charging.

So our catcher goes HUNH! picks up the runner, body slams him to the ground, touches him with the ball, spikes the ball,and walks back to the dugout.

The guy immediately stands up, like he wants to fight. The whole bench is waiting at the end of the dugout, just waiting to rush the field, while the umpire is throwing warnings around.

Immediately warned both dugouts to stay in their dugouts.

Someone asked, What were you doing?

Me? Oh, I was laughing hysterically.