Someone told me marijuana was an herb!

So here I am sleeping (finally) and enjoying a wonderful dream where everyone is happy and all of a sudden my mother turns into a monkey! That's right. A MONKEY! Now something in my brain tells me it is not normal for a mother (especially mine!) to turn into a monkey so I slowly wake up and come to some sort of consciousness only to discover that the noise is outside our house and YES it sounds exactly like a monkey. You know the "oo oo oo oo oo WAH WAH" sound they make (Picture Cheetah from Tarzan). So not only did it wake me up but it woke Dan as well and he decides to get up and open the shop to let me sleep in. I asked him to kill the damn bird before he left but evidently he could not find it because shortly after he left it started up again. I covered my ears and got another couple of hours of sleep. This peri-menopause stuff is awful! What is it? God decided that a woman needs to have something to replace the sleep deprivation caused by children so he just adds a hormonal stew that takes care of any need for sleep?

So I am a little groggy today. I didn't post yesterday and I wanted to tell a story that my girlfriends daughter reminded me of when we went out to her 21st birthday party on Sunday. Dan says I have so many stories to tell but when I go to post I cant remember them. (That's why I tell them when people are around. So they can remind me of them when I need reminding.)

Now before I begin this story let me say that I in no way condone drugs. Let me also say that I grew up in the 60's and 70's and that anyone who knew anyone who grew up in those days has to admit that you are naive to think a person could grow up in those decades without ever experimenting with at least some drugs. Given that and the fact that Dan was in the Navy in the late 70's when it was found that over 75% of the military regularly used recreational drugs it is really naive to think that I would never have experimented just a little. In truth that is all I experimented. 3 times as a matter of fact.

Everyone we knew smoked pot! Everyone! when we were first married. Every party was pot and beer. Every visit with friends ended up with pot being smoked and beer being drunk. I did not drink a lot of beer (Still don't) and I did not smoke pot. I didn't smoke (PERIOD). But after about 6 months of being exposed to all our friends experimenting I decided there had to be something to this pot thing! So Dan helped me try smoking it. YUCK!!! Did I mention I don't smoke? And well my body did not like it at all and needless to say, I did not get any in my lungs and to even begin to feel affects was not happening. So about a week later we went to yet another party and this time someone had made brownies. I LOVE chocolate! So I decided that this was definitely a way to try pot without smoking it and I helped myself to a medium sized brownie. Imagine Chocolate covered hay! Now I Love Chocolate and I have eaten chocolate covered grasshoppers and ants and truly enjoyed them. Actually chocolate covered ants taste like chocolate covered rice krispies! But I am sorry I just don't do hay! YUCK!

Now determination is my middle name and well I just had to know what was so special about this wonderful herb. Herb? Did someone say Herb? After much deliberation I decided that if pot was a herb that it could be used in cooking just like a herb. So I proceeded to cook up 5 pounds of chicken thighs in BBQ Shake 'n bake and 1 whole oz of pot, ground very fine. (I was so proud of myself. It looked like oregano!) When Dan came home for dinner I gave him a piece of chicken and filled his plate with fixins and I did the same for me. Then I told him about what I had done. He went white! He was very upset, particularly about where I got the marijuana (which we won't go into here), and how much it cost. $80 was a lot of money to us back then. We both ate our meal, then Dan left and went back to work and I cleared off the table and put the rest of the five pounds of chicken thighs on a large platter and put it in the refrigerator. I still did not feel any after affects but I suddenly had the munchies. I decided I wanted some more chicken and I wanted a nice soak in a hot tub so not to deny myself I grabbed the plate of chicken and went upstairs to fill the tub. Did I mention it was 5 LBS of chicken thighs? I cant recall much of that evening. Dan left at about 5:30PM to go back to work and I probably started the tub filling at 6:00PM and getting in the tub and starting to read a really good book and eat chicken thighs. I do remember trying to get out of the tub about 1 hour later when the water started getting cold. Unfortunately the tub and grown and the sides of it were about 3 feet taller than when I got in and the floor was doing all sorts of interesting gyrations... So I emptied the tub and filled it with more hot water and waited for Dan to return home from work....at 10:30PM.

It's here that Dan likes to pick up the story. He actually has to because I don't recall much after about the first hour in the tub. Dan says he came home at 10:30PM and is surprised to find there are no lights on in the house except the bathroom light which is at the top of the stairs. When he closes the door he hears this small voice coming from the bathroom crying out "Dan... Help please! I am stuck!" Dan tells that he got to the top of the stairs and the first thing he notices is the large dish of chicken bones sitting next to the bathtub. When he sees me sitting in the tub looking like a very red prune with eyes totally dilated he realizes that Rene ate the "whole" bag of pot on top of the "whole" five pounds of chicken. It was all he could do to help me out of the tub because he was laughing so hard! It was all I could do just to stay on the bed because it decided to roll and try and buck me off. Now I have had this same phenomenon happen when I drank to much but after an hour or two it went away. This night I spent the entire night hanging on to Dan and clutching the edge of the bed. It was not a good night! In fact it was awful! It was also my last experiment with drugs and to this day I have to admit that I truly don't see much use for them.

Experimenting on Whidbey Island.