The Great Outdoors

I have been visiting the country for nearly three years now and I can honestly say that today was just chock full of education. Most of which I did not want. But like that extreme close-up video they show you in fourth grade of a baby being born, I will never get some of these bits of knowledge to dislodge from my brain.
The day started off like every other day I spend in the country at Romy’s house, except that I woke up later than usual. It’s amazing how tiring nearly eight hours of non-stop Boom Blox playing is on an old lady like me. And towards the end of the night we weren’t even trying for points, we were just seeing how many different ways we could knock the animals over with a bowling ball.
There is an event out here called Truth and the Outdoors, which is a really cool event that is like a Christian hunting and fishing expo. We walked around for quite a while, visiting all the booths, eating samples of what I can only hope was beef and collecting as many free pens as possible before we came upon a soap maker’s booth. I am a sucker for good smelling stuff. So whenever there’s a booth like that I have to put my poor nostrils through the ringer, smelling every soap they make, some even twice. And conveniently this goat’s milk soap maker had at least one bar open of each scent marked “sniff me.”
Don’t mind if I do.

.
And I did.
There was peppermint, lilac, honeysuckle, leather, natural, eucalyptus and twig and berries.
Wait….what?
There, mixed in with all of the other soaps, was a basket full of twig and berries soap, complete with a “sniff me” sticker on it. I can’t say for sure whether the soap was twig and berry scented (hope so) or for twig and berries (hope not).
Either way I had no intention of sniffing.
Innocent word mix up, right? Perhaps. Or perhaps this part of the country is full of dirty birdies.
I had made plans to meet someone (that’s a whole other story) to sell something to a guy who found me on Craigslist so we left the expo for a few hours. As we were driving through some pretty landscapes, we passed a dog groomer’s on the main road. The name on the sign made me do a double take.
The business’ name?
Doggy Styles.
Yup. Because I’m going to drop my poor little innocent Yadi at a place called Doggy Styles. Is this like a Hustler club for dogs?
I don’t know and I will never find out.
And last and certainly not least, today I learned that country people have odd turn-ons. We stopped at a feed store/animal supply store (named Dickey Bub) to pick up hay….there’s a joke there that I won’t tell, but I digress. As we were walking through the store I happened to look up from my phone just in time to catch what looked like a country version of Victoria’s Secret.
Dickey Bub’s Secret?
They had a whole display of camouflage lingerie. There were underpants and bras, teddies and lacy thingamajigs – ALL CAMO!
That’s sexy? There’s some country hunter guy out there that wants his woman to blend in with the forest? That’s sexy?
I can’t even process what that means other than it seems like maybe hunters out here are turned on by…other hunters.
So I always get really excited and take note when I learn something new. Today I learned all sorts of new stuff. Stuff that I could have gone my whole life and not learned. Stuff that I will never need to know. Stuff that will not change my life in any way.
And that folks, is what education is all about.