"What is it with pet stores? I swear, don't any of them ever stay in business?" she asked as she began dialing another pet store (either the seventh or thirty-seventh she'd tried).

We all shrugged: Jess, Jeff, and I. Not a clue was to be had amongst the three of us. This question was so far out of our area of expertise that it wasn't even worth opening our mouths. Meanwhile, Sarah dialed yet another number. This time, she'd found a still-existing pet store with an employee that was available to speak with her."Hi. I was wondering if you have dwarf bunnies?"

He is legendary in this house; his steps are stealthy and quick. You'd think that you'd hear him when he pulls up in the driveway, but his vehicle has a degree of silence and stealth that many secret agents would envy.

The brown suit is just a disguise, and we know it; what better way to disguise a ninja than as a UPS deliveryman? After all, they are friendly and harmless! How much can one fear a man whose job requires him to drive an enormous truck with no doors, while wearing the drabbest shorts known to man?Not to mention the socks pulled up, unfashionably, to his knees!

In your world, UPS men are pasty-skinned men in bad socks and orthopedic shoes, men who look down from their wind-tunnel truck cabs and wave at children in nearby cars. They are the harmless purveyors of heavy packaging. (Hey, Clark Kent was a reporter, and that seems an obvious little gambit to us now.)

In my world, it's a little bit different.

I can already tell that this particular entry is probably going to get me in trouble. So, let me sit down with a cup of hot chocolate and my comfortable Friday-night-slobbing-around-the-house clothing and just tell you like it is. You know, the kind of talks your mother used to have with you when you were too young and too stupid to understand that just because Aunt Bertha was really really fat didn't mean that you were allowed to come right up to her in front of her and her thirteen grandchildren to tell her that she was fat. On her birthday, no less.

There's a saying about happy and unhappy families which follows along the lines of "all happy families are alike, but the unhappy ones are all unique." It applies to more than just families. Major life events are like that, as well. After all, what's the fun in retelling the events of a perfectly normal and happy day?

No, we're much more interesting when events both bizarre and unexpected happen; we're at our most unique in the microseconds when we realize that life has just completely and utterly deviated from whatever predetermined plan we thought we were working under.

Most of my friends know that I have broken my right wrist twice, and most of them know that I broke it the first time while trying to fly a kite on a rainy day. Fewer know the story of the second break, despite the fact that it's a much more interesting and amusing story.

Given that several of my friends grew up in northeast Arkansas, I would make a yearly Christmas-break pilgrimage to visit them and their families. My general rule: see as many people as possible, cause as little fuss as possible, and stay no more than two nights at any one house. Even under those circumstances, I could easily be gone for a week.

In the years that have passed, I've managed to forget all but the most amusing—or embarrassing—moments that occurred during those trips. I distinctly remember the drives Monica and I made back and forth to Paragould, and my complete and utter inability to use my normally-excellent poker face against Matthew. Matthew, of course, beat me senseless at poker and made me laugh the entire time.

(Luckily for me, I know Matthew well enough to know better than to play poker against him for money. Ever.)

Native, lifelong southerners don't quite know what to make of snow. Snow is, of course, that mystical white stuff that seems to fall in fourteen-foot clumps onto remote places like Buffalo, New York, and the upper peninsula of Michigan. This would be a problem, except that it's a demonstrable fact that nobody (the Abominable Snowman excepted) actually lives in the UP of Michigan.

As for the eighteen people living in Buffalo, New York: you're out of luck. Have fun digging; we'll see you in August. Say hi to the polar bears on your way out, willya?Snow is inconsistent with southerners' natural states of being. We react to it like pampered house cats—when thrown outside amidst the mess, we stand there, shell-shocked, for a few minutes, and then begin twitching our hands uncontrollably to try to shake the cold stuff off. (If you've ever seen a house cat thrown outside in the snow for the first time, you know exactly what motion I'm trying to describe.)