I'm Sure the Walrus Took My Bucket

I'm too pooped after the horseshow yesterday to do anything other than rant about my mother-in-law here. I've written two rants about her latest and deleted them because I don't think they make me or the world a better place. One day I may assemble all of her wacko, rude and unintentionally funny voicemails and post them somewhere. But not today. So I'm going to put up the post from today's smellshorsey instead. I hope, if you don't already know about lolcats and lolrus, you'll get a laugh here. I'm deleting the horse show results part because if you wanted to know about them, you would have already gone to smellshorsey.

But yesterday, like most horse show days, I felt like the lolrus. If you don't know what a lolrus is, thank you. I just found out last week and have been laughing ever since. A lolrus is like a lolcat, and if you don't know what a lolcat is either, thank you. I thought I was the last to know. I just found out last week and am now addicted.

You can read The Complete Walrus Bucket Saga here. (The star walrus/seal died last week, which I'm sure won't stop his search for his bucket.) If this link doesn't first make sense, read this first.

You've probably seen lolcats. I've had them e-mailed to me. Some were immediately funny. Some I didn't get at all. Now that I have been to I Can Has Cheezburger, I Get It! And I think it is Extremely Funny. (It took a while for me to follow what was going on. Click around and you'll figure it out.)

Anyway, back to the horseshow. No, even farther back than that. Let's go back to when Lily joined Pony Club.

Pony Club is a great organization and I wish that Lily could participate fully. The monthly meetings are sometimes a couple of hours from here (you have to trailer your horse to meetings) and the rallies even farther (geographically -- and they take a weekend). The meetings are sometimes too hard to get to for a Sunday afternoon but very valuable if you can make it. I hope one day she can be an active member again. 

Pony Club teaches children (and their parents) how to do things Exactly Right. This requires that you have All the Equipment. For one of Lily's first meetings, they sent a list of the things she needed to bring. Included on this list were FOUR buckets.

Four buckets for one pony? I'd kept two horses here for several years with two buckets. And I suddenly needed four buckets to take one pony to one meeting? What the heck. It's just a couple of buckets, though when you go about needing to have double of what you already have horses can get expensive. So I went to one of my local feed stores to buy two more buckets. I ran into a man there having to buy a lot more stuff for his daughter to take to the Pony Club meeting, which was probably easier for him since he was a bank president.

I picked out pretty blue buckets, very much like the one the lolrus had. We wrote Lily's name on the buckets along with the initials for her Pony Club chapter. Too bad the lolrus didn't have fingers and a paint pen -- he would have had a much better chance of hanging onto his bucket.

For the record, I don't know why Lily needed four buckets. I figure one was for food and one was for water. That's reasonable. She said one of the other buckets was to keep water in in case there was a fire, so she and the other children could keep the barn from burning down. I find this alarming. A 9-year-old armed with a bucket is not a firefighter. I'm not sure anyone knows what the fourth bucket was for. Maybe the lolrus.

These two new blue buckets are our favorites. And it seems that everyone else loves them, too. Because every time I go somewhere and take one of these buckets, somebody takes it.

It has her name written on it. About three inches high. But somebody always takes the bucket.

Mind you, they are not stealing it. Though it is full of water and parked within Buddy's reach as he waits for his classes at horse shows, somebody always thinks it is their bucket. We do a bucket search and rescue at every outing. If Lily's name weren't on it, we would have lost it long ago.

It disappeared TWICE yesterday. So that meant that twice during the show Lily and I were fanning out across the show grounds looking for a blue bucket.

Lolrus, I feel your pain! I has bucket! Somebody taked my bucket!

Lily found it the first time, several trailers over. She dumped the water out of it and brought it back. Whoever had it probably thinks somebody stold their bucket.

The second time it went missing, I found myself following a woman I slightly know as she carried a blue bucket across the show grounds. It's always awkward accosting someone over your bucket. You feel small, petty and suspicious. "Excuse me, is that my bucket? Excuse me, I think you have accidentally stolen my bucket."

You gots mai bucket. I wants it now.

Turns out is was HER bucket. Oops.

Next time I buy buckets, which at the rate these keep disappearing may be soon, they will be a color no one wants. Not a pretty blue. They will be the most ghastly, garish buckets I can find.

We found the bucket. It had gotten mixed up with a riding school's batch of buckets. I didn't leave it out for Buddy anymore. I hid my bucket.

Mai bucket. Keep hans off.

Comments

[Anwyn]

The levels to which people will take "not paying attention" never cease to amaze me.

Are you sure getting it all off your chest about your mother-in-law wouldn't make you better? And we'd be sure to be empathetic, so that will make *us* better ... :)

[Lori]

I'm with Anwyn -- wanna hear it!

[Lori]

I'm with Anwyn -- wanna hear it!

[Anne]

Anwyn,
I believe that some people don’t notice things. I believe they don’t have the ability. I can move the furniture around and my husband will know it’s different but can’t tell me how. Every dress I wear is new to him.

I used to travel to horse shows with a woman who couldn’t tell her stuff from mine. I wrote my name on everything and it would still get mixed up with hers. She wasn’t stealing – she had duplicates of what I had. She just was “not paying attention” and I’m not sure she could. She was a kind and thoughtful person, and somehow managed to be a high school chemistry teacher.

The world is made up of strange folks. Such as my mother-in-law….

Thanks for the invitation to vent. No doubt I will at some point.

[sista cala]

Those blue buckets are kind of like all the black suitcases on the baggage claim belt. Maybe you should tie some sort of rope onto the handle of the bucket. Then on the end of the rope, put a plywood name tag. Maybe that's overkill, but it is a thought.

[Anne]

Sista Cala, I am all about overkill. That's a great suggestion. Thank you!