My Boyfriend's Back!

When we were working on the renovations to our house in Manchester, we had a varmit problem. We had groundhogs! Several of them. Mommas with babies. Big babies! Not wanting to kill them, we set about trapping them and relocating them to the local "huge federal property with LOTS of woods and streams and fields".

What's this got to do with boyfriends? Glad you asked...

Mike (being a big fan of the 60's show, "The Beverly Hillbillies") has teased me about having goats, hogs, chickens and other assorted farm animals on our property. His reasoning is for food, etc. Me (NOT being a fan of "The Beverly Hillbillies") decided that if I name something, we're not going to eat it. Then we realized we had groundhogs. So Mike decided that the first thing I could fix with the critters on our property could be "Groundhog Guts Stew", a la Granny. So I, a la "Ellie Mae", named the first one I saw Gregory, which has now turned out to be ALL the groundhogs' names... male or female! So I kept telling Mike about seeing Gregory all the time.

Enter my sister's sister-in-law, "Kathy" (Name has been changed to protect the innocent!). I love her. She's adorable, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. I used to go eat at the restaurant she worked at and it would never fail that she would always come out and ask me how the work on the house was progressing. I was always happy to tell her the latest accomplishments, set backs, screw ups and how the work was flowing. After some months of this, I finally told her to stop by one day when she was off of work and I would be happy to show her around the house and show her what had been done, planned to be done or just fell off our schedule all together.

So she did. It happened to be one weekend that Mike had come up from Texas, too.

So Mike and I were on the front porch talking and enjoying the late spring afternoon and how much we were having fun with all the work being done on the house. When she pulled in the driveway, I walked out to meet her and welcome her to our renovation in progress. As we were walking back to the house, I noticed that "Gregory" was out in the field eating some grass. So I mentioned to Mike that I just saw "Gregory". He jumped up from the front porch, ran in the house and got the pistol. As soon as he came back outside, he asked me where I saw "Gregory". I told him to the side of the house, so he headed around the other side of the house to "sneak up on him". (Its not as easy as you think it would be to "sneak up" on a groundhog). So here I was, yelling at Mike not to shoot "Gregory" as I could see the entire Manchester Police department swooping down on us for a discharged firearm in the city limits. (This was done at the house a few years before we bought the house and it almost gave his grandmother a heart attack! Police, fire truck and ambulance showed up when a report of shots fired were reported!).

So... back to Gregory...

As I was yelling at Mike not to shoot "Gregory" he was walking around the corner of the porch when "Kathy", who was standing next to me during all this, (out of the blue) asked, "Is that yer feller"?

Insert a huge "duh" moment here.... I'll wait.

It was all I could do to keep from laughing in her face and I thought Mike was going to shoot himself in the foot he was laughing so hard as he RAN down the side of the house so "Kathy" wouldn't hear him laughing! He never did get a chance to shoot "Gregory"!

To this day, whenever we have a new groundhog around the house that needs to be trapped and relocated, I'll tell Mike that "My Boyfriend's Back"! Then we laugh until our sides ache!

"Gregory" taken today.