Thanks, Friends

I owe what's left of my sanity to my friends. (The losing of said sanity is being blamed on the kidlets, but that kind of goes without saying.) Friends lift you up when you are feeling down. They make you laugh when you least expect it. They help you to take conversations down the oddest paths sometimes, but it always makes sense at the time. They understand you are not serious when you threaten to run away and join the circus.

I have a group of friends that waits together while we look for our kidlets to exit the school building at the end of the school day. We tease each other for running late ("Naptime ran long today, eh?"), poke each other when we see someone's child looking for them, and joke about things that we probably should take seriously.

Today's random jokes were pertaining to some sort of natural flavorings ("essence of beaver bottom"--a friend's description, not whatever it was actually called) that were found in some oddball food. At least it was not a type of food I would ingest. One of our group had found out that something was supposedly harvested somehow from the rear ends of beavers. Combine this conversation with one on "no poo," ("Quick! Add some Miralax!") which is, according to one of my friends, a type of shampoo for people with curly hair, and it makes for some fairly odd juxtapositions. Throw in random mentions of rat scrapple, what hot dogs are made of, and meat packing plants in general, and one might never want to eat or clean their hair again. But we were laughing so hard that it completely took the disgusting factor out of the equation.

It's days like today, when I am tired, cranky, overwhelmed, and seriously not in the mood to deal with anything that I can most appreciate my friends for their ability to shake me out of my funk. The next time I eat something unidentifiable in origin, I shall recall our beaver rump conversation and probably laugh my fool head right off my shoulders. Thank you, my friends.