Being Goofy is Okay. It Doesn't Always Have to Be On April 1st

Sam and I just realized April Fool’s day is almost upon us. Here are some prank ideas we “borrowed” from other web sites:

Go to a Toys R Us as an adult and insist on riding all the big wheels, bicycles with tassels hanging from the handle bars and Barbie electronic jeeps. If someone tells you those are for children respond with a stern face and say, “I see what this is really all about.”

Be a time traveler. Approach a stranger panting something delirious about just arriving from somewhere else and you’re frantically trying to figure out how to get back. Pretend the floor of your office is hot lava. Leave the house in costume any day that is not Halloween. Jump into a pool with all your clothes on.

I once jumped into Pend Oreille Lake with my clothes on, right after Kathleen and I were married. I nearly drowned.

You could walk around the house naked and when your spouse asks what you’re doing say, “The fan blew all my clothes off. It helps to have the ceiling fan turned on at the time. If your wife or girlfriend leaves her bra on the bed at night, while she’s brushing her teeth put the bra on and see if she notices.

Here’s a goody. When you're riding in the car, if there’s a car in the lane next to you roll down your window and start mooing (not mooning). Of course I did something similar on the Oakland Bay Bridge one time, yelling at a guy that he had a flat tire. I was a little embarrassed when he nearly crashed so I had to speed off before he caught up to me.

If you live in a suburb or city, go to the park, climb up a tree and start talking in a different accent to people who come close.

You can do the old standbys: short sheet a bed, put salt in the sugar shaker and plastic wrap the toilet bowl. I also like swapping the signs on the men’s and ladies’ restrooms, adding food coloring to milk in a cardboard container, switching the push and pull signs on doors. A couple of wicked ideas include hiding food in a trash can and taking it out and eating it when someone comes by. How about replacing Oreo cream filling with toothpaste? Adding several odd appointments with alarms set to go off during the day to a co-worker’s computer calendar is pretty wicked too.

You could place a pair of pants and shoes inside the only toilet stall in a rest room to make it appear someone is using it all day. Every so often, when I’m outdoors I like to look up and smile for a satellite picture or just look intently at the sky. It’s amazing how many other people will suddenly be doing the same thing.

One last Idea for inexpensive entertainment: during rush hour sit in your parked car and point a hair dryer at passing cars. See if they slow down. I stood out in the street of my neighborhood one time with pad and pencil after this teenager made several speedy passes up and down the road. He got the message.

I like to jam on the car brakes and yell as loudly and panicky sounding as I can, “Oh shoot!” (actually the other S word, but I’m being nice) when my passenger has fallen asleep. Sneaking up behind a fellow CHP buddy sleeping in his patrol car and bumping his car hard enough to make him think someone had suddenly rear-ended him was always a hoot too.

Okay, so you probably heard that saying, “a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire words of Shakespeare.” Now, thanks to the internet, we know those monkeys are really just writing silly blogs.

Sam and I may sometimes be in our own little world. But that’s okay; they know us there.