Well friends, I have to admit, when the wife and I sat down to play cards with my mom on a Friday night, I wasn’t exactly excited about the direction the night was headed. But, if I’ve learned anything over the years (and really that’s quite debatable) it should be that when my old home town of Collinsville, IL is involved, anything can happen.

At about 10:30 or so an impressive amount of noise started coming from the neighbors house. Now, this is nice little dead end street and the wookie and college guy (if you don’t know who that is a: consider yourself lucky and b: go read about my neighbors) were hundreds of miles away so this actually came as a bit of a shock to me. I stepped outside to the porch to check things out and realized the house next door was playing host to a fairly noisy party. No big deal, I mean it wasn’t too late, and it was a weekend so I went back inside to continue the Chinese water torture erm… playing cards.

Well apparently I had caught someone’s attention next door because a few minutes later there was a timid knock at the door. I open it to find a young Tommy Chong on the other side. “Hey man… uh we’re having a party over there (thanks chief, I hadn’t quite figured that out yet) and dude, if we’re being too loud just let us know. We’ll all take off or whatever, we just don’t want to have the cops called on us.” I assured the cached-out pot-head that it was no big deal and I didn’t plan on calling the cops, closed the door, and figured that would be the end of the story

I’ve got to say, I’ve never gotten such a kick out of being wrong. About an hour and a half later my dad asks me to go outside and find out why the cops are walking around our front yard looking in our cars. It didn’t take me long to put together a pretty good idea of what had happened and sure enough, when I got outside 4 cop cars were scattered along the street and there was an officer taking down the license plates of all the cars parked along the street. I asked if everything was ok and he said they were just having some problems with the party next door (go figure… I mean the stoned guy seemed like he really had it together, I can’t imagine how something could have gone wrong there). Anyway as we were talking, I heard some noises coming from the back yard. I went inside, grabbed the dog and her leash (I needed an excuse to go back outside) and went out the side door. Within seconds my dog had taken off down the hill next to our house and gone into a point at the corner of the house. About the same time I hear a muffled “… a freaking DOG!” come from the back hill of our yard (that is covered with brush, bushes, and poison ivy). As I’m starting to put two and two together, I notice that the dog is still intently pointing at something sitting next to the house. I walk over and find a purse (containing a now ringing cell phone), and a pair of high healed shoes.

Being the good citizen that I am, I of course picked up the purse and shoes and walked back to the front yard to find one of the cops.

“Officer, um I found these in our back yard over there and I’m pretty sure there are people on our back hill”
“(laughing)So you’re telling me some girl is running around back there in all that crap without any shoes on?”
“It sure looks like it.”
“Oh this is priceless”
“Do you want to take my dog with you to help find em? (hey, I was proud of her)”
“(laughing harder now) Honestly, the girl is running around without her shoes or her purse. Do you really think we need the dog?”
“Point taken”

Sure enough, half an hour later, we see the officer ushering a no-longer-shoeless girl across our front lawn and into the back of a waiting police car. So the moral of the story is boys and girls, if you DO ever happen to find yourself running from the police, you’re probably better off taking your shoes with you. Oh yeah, you also might want to avoid the poison ivy as well…

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