Ramblings Of A Neurotic Housewife – Kimberley Zuehlke Anderson

I remember many years ago going to Cub Scout meetings with my Dad and my brother.  My Mom had her ‘Tops’ meeting at the same time so I would alternate, one week I went to Cubs and listened to a bunch of boys promise to ‘Obey the law of the wolf cub pack to dibb dibb dibb and dobb dobb dobb” and the next week I would sit at ‘Tops’ and listen to a bunch of women talk about how they REALLY didn’t think they had gained that 1.8 pounds in the past week and maybe the scale was just out, again.  I must say that I enjoyed Cubs a lot more.  What can I say, it was a room full of mostly cute boys who were nice as pie to me because I was Akela’s little girl.  Cub Camp however was a different story.  I went to a couple of them and must admit that I didn’t have the time of my life.  Being chased through the trees and bushes at Silverland by the uglier of the Cubs, mice in the cabin where I helped make hot chocolate, going to the haunted little shack to see my Dad stick a flashlight under his chin and make horrific death sounds scaring the crap out of me every time, getting too close to the lagoon and falling in and sharing a tent with my Dad while he snored louder than a chain saw and farted up a bloody storm from the hot dogs and beans.  Not exactly fun times for me. 

 I have had some very good things come out of my days of being a Cub Scout groupy.  I can tie one hell of a reef knot!  Right over left and under, left over right and under.  It could come in real handy if I do ever change careers and become the dominatrix Lady Lichtenstein.  I also learned to be prepared.  That totally explains the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet at work and my purse.  My purse has a mini can of Lysol spray, Oxy Clean stain remover, perfume, Brush-Ups (cloth tooth brushes), pills for constipation, pills for the shits, headache pills, anti-nausea pills, a minimum of six kinds of lip gloss and lip balm, a notepad and pen, gum and mints, anti-bacterial hand wipes and gel, tooth picks, hand cream, and the list goes on.  My filing cabinet drawer has all of that plus mouth wash, goo-gone, tea, packets of raw sugar, tweezers, scented candles, a moose shaped lighter (for my candles), Q-tips, eye glass cleaner, a lint roller, dusting cloths, deodorant, Fruit To Go bars, band-aids, safety pins, Tupperware Midgets with pre-measured amounts of iced tea mix, inserts for my Starbuck’s Create A Mug, and that list goes on and on too.  I’m sure you get the picture, I’m very prepared.  The other cool thing I got out of Cubs was knowing Ben. The dude who decided I needed to have a blog to put my stories on, who designed my web page and who got me doing something I had dreamt about for many years and really enjoy doing.  Thanks again Ben.  You rock!

 Anyways, I actually have a story to tell you.  Brandt decided a few years ago to join Beavers.  I remember all the fun Kent and Dad had (and I sometimes had) and thought it was a great idea.  I remember the guys in Cubs and Scouts in High River all being so cool and cute and thought Brandt would fit right in.  Well, uuuuummmm …… this was REAL different.  This was no cute Cub pack, it was a whole whack load of little nerds!  That first night 90% of the Beaver Colony were wearing floods, at least 75% had the social skills of a stick, 88% of them had some sort of weird facial tick and the rest were just goobers.  I had a good inkling that most of these kids were here because they very closely resembled an actual beaver.  You should have seen the chompers on these little freaks.  It was a dentist’s wet dream in that room.  And trust me, the parents weren’t any better.  I’ve never seen so many pocket protectors in one room at the same time.  And the tan elastic waisted, polyester rugby pants were EVERYWHERE!!  On both men and women!!  It was like a polyester factory blew up or something, there was polyester galore.  Very scary stuff indeed.

 There was this one family that to this day can still make us shudder just thinking about them.  There was the Mom, Dad, a boy and a girl.  We figure they must have been to Disneyland at some point because all four of them had these Disneyland jackets.  They were these 1980 style special hum dingers that they always wore, all four of them.  ALWAYS!!  The body part of the jackets were a light denim, the back had these huge embroidered Disney crests on them and I’m pretty sure the fronts of their jackets were embroidered with Geek 1, Geek 2, Geek 3 and Geek 4.  The sleeves were my favourite part.  They were this awesome white pleather!  They were always so …. white …. and shiny.  We figure they must have spent their Sunday evenings polishing the pleather for the upcoming week.  You want to talk about real talent?  Well, these people had talent coming out their ying-yangs.  They somehow managed to find identical pairs of acid washed jeans for all four of them!  Wow!  That’s an amazing talent.  Finding matching jeans when the sizes range from Dad’s beer belly accommodating and extra long legged men’s, to Mom’s bubble butt hike them way up over the post baby gut to give you a sexy crammed up the ass crack style, to junior’s husky boy fit that nicely wrap around his “one too many Oreo cookies” waist and the pair small enough to fit little sis and her one leg that was shorter than the other.  Even more talented was their family hairdresser.  All four of them had matching mullets.  They were perfectly coiffed at the back to give that stand out ‘ledge’ at the base of their heads before the long hair began cascading down their necks and shoulders.  I do however sometimes wonder, maybe it wasn’t a hairdresser’s magic, they may have used a Flowbee at home to get those special frayed ends to their hair.  That’s a very 80’s thing to do.  Now that I think about it I guess their mullets weren’t exactly the same because Mom had a wonderful perm added to hers.  Gotta love that Ogilvie home perm look!  Sadly, this family seemed to be looked upon as the cool dudes by the others in the group.  FYI, Brandt’s BRIEF encounter with Beavers was over six years ago and about a year ago we saw Wonder Family out and they were still wearing their ‘Disneyland/I want my mullet back’ uniforms.  And the pleather was still just as shiny as ever and Mom’s perm was just as lovely as ever.  I turned to Merlin, wiggled my eyebrows at him, glanced at Wonder Mom and back at him and said, “You know you waaaaaant it!”  He said he threw up in his mouth just a little bit at that point.

 About five weeks into Beavers there was a special evening with a ceremony welcoming the boys into the group.  The evening was being ran by one of the female leaders.  She was a real peach I tell ya.  She was sporting these awesome skin tight, two sizes too small men’s jeans that gave her this nasty, angry looking camel toe that commanded attention from anyone within 20 feet of “IT”.  Ack ack!!  Sorry, I was gagging at the memory of it.  Ack.  She was walking around with a large furry, stuffed beaver puppet on her one hand.  For some reason I find it necessary to note at this point that her lip was hairier than the beaver.  Apparently she’s never heard of lip waxing.  The boys were in a semi-circle waiting for the leader to come to them so they could put 50¢, their weekly dues, in the beaver’s mouth.  So there she is, prancing up to each boy one by one making these weird beaver-ish big chomper teeth sucking sounds (while making her own buck teeth whap up and down on her lower lip) asking, “Who wants to feed my beeeeeeeeeaver?” (really dragging out the word beaver) all the while making the beaver puppet fiercely gnaw away at the boy’s fingers as they very hesitantly stuck their quarters in it’s mouth.

 If that wasn’t disturbing enough she was instructing the boys to, “Feel how soft my beaver is.”  Good gawd woman!  She would continue to interrogate them with, “Do you want to pet it?  Do you want to pet my beeeeeeaver?  It’s sooooooo soft.”  All the other parents are oohing and aawing at the beaver stroking and feeding, taking pictures and wiping away tears of pride while Merlin and I are crying because we’re in physical pain trying not to burst out laughing.  Yes, we do have warped minds, but you have to admit that this was WAAAAAY beyond normal.  I swear, it got to a point where her voice started getting all smokey and sexy when she approached the parents, both the Dads AND the Moms, asking them if they wanted to pet her beaver.  She was stroking that beaver in a way that made the hair stand up on the back of our necks.  It was verging on soft porn rape the way she was groping the poor thing!  We were expecting to see a pole sprout up from the floor, a disco ball to drop from the ceiling, the lights to dim and the song “Let’s Get It On” start playing in the background so “Bushy Beaver Betsy” could show us her performance she had prepared for amateur night at the Top Hat (the local strip club here in Lethbridge).  When the evening’s festivities were winding down we grabbed Brandt and escaped as quickly as we could.  Two seconds out the door and Brandt says to us, “That lady and the beaver really creeped me out.  I don’t want to pet the beaver again.  Do I have to?”  Merlin replied with, “I wouldn’t want to touch her beaver either.”  Thank goodness Brandt was young and innocent and had no clue what Merlin was referring to.  At this point we couldn’t hold it in any longer and we both busted a gut laughing like we’ve never laughed before.  Picture us stumbling through the parking lot holding our sides as we laughed and made the chomping beaver sounds asking each other, “Who wants to feed my beeeeeeeaver?”

 We were going to find another not so freaky Beaver Colony for Brandt to join but the evening kind of traumatized him.  As per his choice, that was Brandt’s last night as a Beaver.

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