Mooney and the Ice Bucket Challenge, Talbot's Peak Style

 

Erma Bombeck was a really funny lady. I know, you’re probably wondering how I even know her name. I’m a 26-year-old witch. I was raised by an Egyptian demi-god after my black magic addicted mother traded me to him in exchange for her drug of choice. I’m mated to a beta werewolf and step-mother to his pups from a previous mating (though since their original mother is less than worthless, I don’t bother with the ‘”step” part. I’m their mom, period. I just didn’t give birth to them.) Erma Bombeck was a typical American housewife who wrote some really funny books about her life back in the ‘70s. The lady’s been dead since I was a little girl and I didn’t exactly grow up in a way that would have exposed me to her sense of humor in the first place.

That was before Amazon launched its Kindle Unlimited program. Like most mothers of young children, money can be a little tight to come by for unnecessary things like recreational reading. Now, most moms would simply go to the library. I cannot do this anymore. My adorable boys would follow me, because that’s what wolf pups do. They follow their mothers everywhere, especially places their mothers don’t really want to be followed. I have not gone to the bathroom without an escort since school let out for the summer.  (And you thought you were getting itchy for school to start up again!) Now picture that kind of devoted followership while trying to look for a good book. Not happening. Say what you want about the big corporate e-book dealers, it’s been a life saver for me.

The biggest problem with Kindle Unlimited is the selection of books. Most of it is not geared toward anything I would normally want to read. My friend Gloria and I spend probably as much time looking for KU books as we spend actually reading them. You know what gem we found? Erma Bombeck, 1970s humorist extraordinaire. It’s been forty years since most of these free books were published and they are just as relevant now as they were then.  Don’t believe me? Check out her book, “If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?” Copy write 1979. The first line of the intro goes like this: “I’ve always worried a lot and frankly I’m good at it.” It’s almost like she had wolves for family, too!

Let me tell you something, if I could somehow bring her back from the dead so she can come spend a week or two in my house, she’d have enough fresh writing material to keep her busy for decades. Take last week, for instance, when my sweet, loving sons decided their dad needed to participate in the ice bucket challenge.

First off, I need to fill you in on a few things. Brett and Coby are eight-year-old litter mates, which is

not exactly the same as fraternal twins in humans but it’s close. They refuse to be called by their given names, instead answering only to Loki and Thor. They adore their father to the point of hero worship and like all wolves in a pack environment, they also love pranks. But they don’t exactly understand the nuances of human things like fundraiser challenges, nominations, and timing. Well, that’s not strictly true; they got the
timing just right but not in a good way.

My mate, Mooney, is a funny, quirky guy who can be a bit of a banty rooster, except that he’s 6’4” and 250 lbs in his human skin and not the slightest bit stringy. Human weight translates directly to wolf weight when they shift, so he’s freaking enormous in the fur. He talks the talk, walks the walk, and backs down from a true alpha wolf every time. Anyone not an alpha wolf had better watch out. He’s a beta, not a furry carpet to be walked on. He does love the boys very much, though, which is probably the only reason we still have children.

Last week, we had an… incident involving a mad scientist, rogue mutant werewolves, and a monster that was a mix of human, mammoth, and werewolf. That last one was running around stompling everything it couldn’t eat or shit on. I don’t know who started calling it the hellephant, but the name stuck. Long story short, the town’s top alpha, Dante Hancock, managed to muster a team that effectively stopped the stompling hellephant before it destroyed the town of Talbot’s Peak but not before it ate half the vegetation between town and the highway. What goes in must come out, and that all needed cleaning up, too. Since Dante’s crew took the brunt of the assault, Nick, my mate’s brother and the alpha of the McMahon Pack, volunteered to head up clean-up efforts.  This landed my mate head first up the hellephant’s ass looking for unexploded ordnance and anything else of value that Atcheson may have eaten. (Yes, the hellephant has a name. He started off as human, though he was a pain in the rear even before Morlaxion captured him for his mad experiments.)

So Mooney came home after a long day of being buried up to the waist in waste from both ends, though not at the same time, thank the Goddess. He how hot, tired, stinky and cranky. All he wanted was a shower, a meal, and some quality down time. Instead, as he walked in the back door to our home, he triggered the trap Loki and Thor had laid for him.

The little scamps had filled a five gallon bucket with mostly ice because they didn’t know when he’d be home exactly. Thanks to making homemade ice cream over the summer, they knew that if they added some rock salt to it, the melting ice water would be colder that the 32 degrees Fahrenheit ice water usually is. It had a good hour to sit and stew before Mooney walked through the door. That would have been bad enough, but the pups did not stop there. You see, the ice bucket challenge is supposed to be filmed so it can be posted on the internet, so they also swiped a motion sensor security cam from the Pack’s stash and aimed it at the door. And then, because why not go all out if you’re going to do it at all (werewolf mentality in a nutshell) they rummaged through the Halloween decorations for the melted witch prop, set it to the side of the door, and then tied a string to the bottom corner of the door so that when the door was opened, the prop would be dragged right into the path of the falling ice water. And then they put a chunk of dry ice under the prop so that it would start smoking when it was disturbed.

Did I mention that I’m a witch? Or that my mate is a wolf? It almost didn’t matter that they were making a pun on “The Wizard of Oz.” Mooney saw motion, got a face full of salty ice water and hellephant poo, which promptly ran down the back of his shirt. Once he managed to peel himself off the ceiling, he saw a smoking pill of witch robes.

He came unglued.

I know this because we have video evidence, which I am trying very hard to keep from reaching the internet. I have a feeling that Mrs. Bombeck would have had a field day with all of this, but since she’s no longer with us, you get my interpretation of the events instead.

On the upside, I do now know exactly how much my husband loves me and how quickly my kids can put themselves in their room out of a sense of self-preservation.