Dorkus Dingbat and the Corn Maze

So Dorkus Dingbat got to go to a corn maze in October last year. She doesn’t get to go to them very often, but when she does go she always has a good time. Even though she’s always as lost as a goose (Dorkus Dingbat can’t find her way out of a paper bag, by the way).

Dorkus Dingbat has a lot of single friends (all of them are very much single for a reason . . . kind of like Dorkus . . .), and they all went with Dorkus to the corn maze.

Dorkus ended up sticking with Friend1 (I’m going to call her Friend1 because Dorkus has had a very long day and can’t think of a better name for her at the moment; but if she ever reads this she’ll still know who she is) and Singing-Girl (that’s lame, but that’s what Dorkus is going to call her). So Friend1 and Dorkus and Singing-Girl hung together because they were waiting for people to get to the maze–some of them were late. But that was all right. Except Singing-Girl didn’t want to wait and hooked up with another group of single people and went deep into the maze.

Well, Dorkus and Friend1 didn’t know that she had left. And Singing-Girl gets just as lost as Dorkus does. So . . . for the next half hour, Dorkus and Friend1 walked in circles around the maze crying out, “Singing-Girl! Singing-Girl!” But they couldn’t find her. The only person they found who answered was a man named Bob. Dorkus and Friend1 realized that wasn’t Singing-Girl, so they didn’t talk to him.

In the course of their wanderings, searching for Singing-Girl, Dorkus and Friend1 ran into PowerBarMan and Crazy-Kid Lady, two more of their single friends. And, now it’s very fuzzy, but the four of them were acting very silly–mainly because they were so incredibly lost (PowerBarMan probably wasn’t, but Dorkus, Friend1, and Crazy-Kid Lady are a lot louder than he is).

Anyway, they didn’t notice (or maybe they weren’t paying attention) but some of the paths they were taking were pretty narrow. But it was dark–very dark–and all the corn was trampled on the sides so it looked like a path. But they didn’t really think about it.

Let me stop here and say–IT’S A MAJOR NO-NO TO GET OFF THE PATH IN A CORN MAZE.

At least, at this corn maze it was. Apparently. Because Big-Mean-Scary-Corn-Patrol-Man chased us down and shone a flashlight in our faces and lectured us like we were little children because we stepped off the path.

Now–if it had been anybody else, they probably wouldn’t have cared. But–Dorkus Dingbat HATES getting in trouble. Especially with Big-Mean-Scary-Corn-Patrol-Men who carry flashlights bigger than her head and talk to her like she’s five years old. Dorkus Dingbat nearly cried! And Friend1 was right there with her (because Friend1 hates getting in trouble too).

So, the moral of the story, at least the moral that Dorkus Dingbat could figure out was to always always ALWAYS stay on the path in corn mazes–even if it looks like a path, it might not be! So don’t take any chances, otherwise the Big-Mean-Scary-Corn-Patrol-Man might come get you and shine his giant flashlight in yours eyes.

The only other option is to be able to run faster than the Big-Mean-Scary-Corn-Patrol-Man . . . . . . but as clumsy as Dorkus and Friend1 are? No. That wouldn’t have been a very good idea.

Dorkus Dingbat and the Bed Bugs

So in reality, Dorkus Dingbat is a true lover of history. She’s a real patriot too.  Since she was in high school, she had been hoping to get to Washington, D.C., and in July of this year, she and her brother, Sparky, had the chance to do it! So they did!

Dorkus and Sparky loaded up Sparky’s car and drove to Washington, D.C. together. They stopped in a Super 8 Motel in Greenfield, IN that first night. It looked like a very nice place, although the town was a little odd. They ate at an Applebees and went back to the room to rest. As they were watching TV, Dorkus was working in a notebook, and she felt something crawling on her. She spied a funky little flat brown beetle crawling on her hand. She thought, Well, that’s strange. A funkly little flat brown beetle. And she smashed it, thinking that it had just come in on her luggage.

Dorkus stayed up working in her notebook for a while, so it was very dark by the time she climbed into bed and went to sleep. She and Sparky woke up early-ish and got back on the road. Dorkus didn’t start feeling really itchy until later, when she noticed welts breaking out all over her left arm. She purchased some anti-itch cream at a Walmart in Virgina, but it wasn’t helping much.

By the end of the day, Dorkus and Sparky reached Gallaudet University in Washington, DC where they were staying at the conference center (after they had a terrifying drive into the city on a terrifying city street, which made Dorkus decide that navigating in Washington, DC is more difficult than any other place she had ever traveled), and as Dorkus was settling in for the night, she realized that the little red welts had turned into LARGE red welts and went all the way up to her shirtsleeve on her left arm, a few on her right arm, a scattering around her neck, and a number of them on both her ankles.

At first, Dorkus thought it might be poison ivy, so she used all the bandaids she had to cover all the welts up. She didn’t think much of it. She just wanted to keep from itching. So she and Sparky started touring the Washington Mall while Dorkus was covered up in bandaids. Dorkus looked like a mummy.

By the end of their first day in Washington, DC, Dorkus’s welts had gotten bigger and were beginning to blister and they itched like MAD. Dorkus was very uncomfortable. Dorkus and Sparky’s parents arrived in DC soon after (they had been going slower and stopped to look at the Indianapolis Speedway Museum), and they all sat down around Dorkus’s laptop which was attached to the Gallaudet University wireless network and started researching. Dorkus Dingbat’s Mom said that Dorkus had been eaten alive by bed bugs. Dorkus said, “No. That’s silly. And what’s a bed bug? Are those really real?”

So to humor her mother, Dorkus Dingbat googled bed bugs.

And surprise surprise surprise . . . the funky little brown beetle was a bed bug.

Dorkus Dingbat had been defeated (translated attacked) by bed bugs in Greenfield, Indiana. And not only did she have a bad reaction to them, she looked like a freakin’ leper.

So they bought more cortisone cream that didn’t help much (they tried Benedryl but that made Dorkus cranky). So the only option was to walk until Dorkus’s feet hurt so badly she didn’t notice how much her arms itched!

All-in-all, it was a great trip! Dorkus had a wonderful time with Sparky, her brother, and her Mom and Dad. But the bed bugs, she could have lived without.

(The story has a very happy ending too because the Super 8 fumagated the room Dorkus slept in AND refunded the $$ she and Sparky paid.)

Dorkus versus the Wasps

Dorkus Dingbat doesn’t have a very good track record with wasps. They like her a lot. They mostly like her hair. She’s gotten them stuck in her hair before (and she doesn’t like that), but this year it’s been worse than normal. Wasps dive bomb her and crawl around in her hair if it’s down, so Dorkus has taken to wearing her hair up all the time. But even that bit of strategery didn’t help her in this instance.

Because the talking in the lunch room was so loud, Dorkus decided to go eat her lunch in her car on Monday. It was a beautiful day, and it was just right for relaxing in the car and reading her book with the windows down.

So Dorkus ate her lunch (yummy chicken) and read her book–a scary book by Steven King. That scary book probably contributed to her reaction when a scary wasp flew into her car and wouldn’t leave.

I’m pretty sure the whole WSU parking lot was wondering what was wrong with the strange woman in the Chevy Malibu opening all her doors and running circles around the car flapping her arms and hands inside and out. The wasp was small, so they couldn’t see it. So Dorkus just looked crazy.

Dorkus realized too that she had worn her hair down. She figures that’s the key. So she’ll likely wear her hair up every day from now on until the first freeze comes and kills all the wasps.

Defeated by a Telephone

Dorkus Dingbat answered the phone at her library this morning and was talking pleasantly to the patron on the other side, and for some reason her hand stopped working.  The phone slid out of her grasp, bounced off the edge of the counter, hit the floor, and bounced off the side of the circulation desk.  Meanwhile, Dorkus was flailing wildly trying to get a hold of the phone again and utterly failing.  Finally, she got the phone again and got it back to her ear and apologized profusely for being so clumsy.

Very fortunately, the poor lady on the line only laughed.

Dorkus is ashamed.  Defeated by a telephone.  You can’t get much worse than that.

Dorkus versus the Razor

Dorkus Dingbat doesn’t have much luck with razors.  She never has.  When she shaves, she always cuts herself to pieces. 

Well, this weekend, Dorkus had a new kind of exciting experience with a razor. 

She had spent the night at her parents’ house because she had been out late, and Sunday morning she was getting ready to leave.  It was early, and she was still half asleep.  But she was in a hurry because she needed to go pick up some peeps.  She bent over to slide her cosmetic bin back on its shelf, and she felt a strange dull pressure against her left index fingertip.  She didn’t think much of it though because it didn’t actually hurt.  It just felt odd.

When she stood up, though, her finger still felt strange.  So she looked at it and was surprised to see blood welling up in the hunk of her fingertip that was missing and running down her finger. 

So Dorkus grabbed a bunch of tissues and asked her grandma for a bandaid.  Dorkus’s grandma gave her some bandaids and she wrapped herself up sufficiently and went to the bedroom to finish changing. 

Dorkus had just got her shirt on when she felt something dripping on her left palm.  She looked at her hand again.  You guessed it.  She had bled through two layers of bandaids, and the blood was running again.  So she got more tissues and wrapped around the wound, and soon the tissues were soaked too and she needed more.  So she called for more bandages. 

Between her and her grandma, Dorkus finally got her finger wrapped tightly enough that the bleeding stopped.

What Dorkus couldn’t figure out was why it didn’t hurt.  It was very strange.  But the bandage held all day and it had stopped bleeding completely when Dorkus took it off that night.  She wrapped it up again in normal bandages, and it’s doing fine today. 

Except today it hurts like mad.

Oh, well.  Dorkus will likely stay away from razors from now on, unless she has no other choice.

Dorkus and the Sugar Cookies

Dorkus Dingbat is a genuinely helpful person.  Really, she is.  She likes to help people learn things and teach them things, and it makes her happy when people can take the things she tells them and use them in parts of their lives.

So she was very excited about having her friend Heavy Metal Ballerina out to her house to make cookies.  Heavy Metal Ballerina had never made cookies from scratch before so it would be a new experience for her (and Dorkus sure hadn’t ever taught anyone to make cookies before so it was uncharted territory for her too).

The first batch of cookies came out glorious!  Dipped gingersnaps.  Very yummy.  Drizzled with white chocolate.  Just right.

The second batch of cookies weren’t bad either.  Chocolate chip cookies.  With name-brand chocolate chips!

The third batch of cookies, however, is a different story.  Dorkus had a recipe for suger cookies that could be cut out and baked and frosted, and she’d made them before, but it was a long time ago.  So she showed Heavy Metal Ballerina how to mix the dough and roll it out (they had fun throwing flour at each other).

Dorkus rolled out the dough, and Heavy Metal Ballerina cut out the cookies, and they both put them in the oven, and they waited.

But when the pulled the cookies out of the oven, they had been a little bit too thin.  And they were more like crackers than cookies.  They tried again.  No luck.  And again.  No luck.  Still more like crackers.  Eventually, Dorkus gave up, and they drizzled the cookies with the last of the white chocolate from the gingersnaps and ate them that way.

But Dorkus will use a ruler next time she’s rolling out cookie dough so she can tell the difference between 1/4″ and 1/8″ next time.

Dorkus and the Alarm Clock of Doom

So Dorkus Dingbat slept really really REALLY hard last night.  She doesn’t often do that, but she must have been very tired.  And when Dorkus sleeps that hard, it’s very difficult for her to wake up in the morning (and she’s not a morning person to begin with). 

Well, this morning when Dorkus’s alarm clock went off, she reached over to turn it off.  She’d done it many times in the past, but she couldn’t get the alarm clock to shut off.  It was wailing obnoxiously, likely telling the rest of the house that it was time to get up.  She tried and tried and tried to get it to turn off, but nothing seemed to work.

Dorkus quickly realized the reason why.  Both her hands were numb.  She had fallen asleep on top of them and couldn’t feel her fingers (well, she could feel them, but it was that uncomfortable prickly sensation that reminds you that your digits are still attached but is absolutely useless in helping you grasp objects–or in this case, effectively turn off your alarm clock). 

Eventually, Dorkus resorted to pounding on the alarm clock with her useless stubs until it switched off.  The alarm clock hushed, and Dorkus sat in bed waiting for the feeling to come back to her hands.

Dorkus really hates alarm clocks.

Dorkus Dingbat and the Lost Wig

Dorkus Dingbat was working at the library, and the telephone rang (it often does that in her library).  It was a woman on the other end of the line, and she asked quite pleasantly to be transferred to Lost and Found.

First off, Dorkus was very glad that the lady sounded pleasant, since earlier in the day she had been confronted by a very grouchy patron who cussed her out something fierce for something that wasn’t even poor Dorkus Dingbat’s fault!  Secondly, Dorkus was also glad because she knew how to answer lost and found questions and wouldn’t have to transfer the patron to another department (since that often makes them grouchy).

So Dorkus Dingbat said, “This is where we have the lost and found.  What did you lose?”

The lady asked, “Has anyone turned in a wig?”

Dorkus had to wait for a moment.

“A wig?” she asked, not certain if she’d heard correctly (her coworkers Dude and Mumble stopped doing what they were doing and listened too).

“Yeah.  A wig.  A black wig,” said the lady on the phone.

“Curly or straight?” Dorkus asked before she thought about it.

“Straight.”

Dorkus put the lady on hold and hung her head, trying not to laugh as Dude and Mumble chuckled behind her.

Mumble told her that all lost and found had was a Tartan scarf.  No wigs.

Dorkus told the lady, “No.  We haven’t had any wigs turned in.”

So the lady said thank you and hung up, and Dorkus let herself laugh finally as Dude commented that she couldn’t possibly go outside today without her wig to keep her head warm.

Ah, the strange and funny things that end up (or not) in the library’s lost and found . . . .

Dorkus Dingbat and the Ninja Attack

Dorkus Dingbat was at work the other day, minding her own business, when Little-Little-Little-Sis came to the desk and waved at her.  Dorkus never gets to see Little-Little-Little-Sis enough, so she happily jumped up and ran to hug her.  They were standing out away from the library desk when out of the corner of her eye, Dorkus Dingbat saw three strange guys slinking toward them with scarves pulled up over their faces (she would later discover that they were ninjas, but she didn’t immediately think, “Ninja!” when she saw them). 

Dorkus realized as they crept closer that the one in the middle was Hippie, one of the students who was formerly in her drama team.   She pointed at him and nearly cried, “Hippie!” because it had been a long time since she had seen him.

And that’s when everything went crazy.

Hippie and his two weird friends ran at Dorkus Dingbat, and from somewhere behind him Spitfire and Klepto (two more of Dorkus’s strange former drama students) jumped out and started attacking!  They were making a lot of noise.

So Dorkus did what was natural.

She shushed them (looking back, now, she feels really bad about it).  And she shooed them out into the foyer where she joined them in very jolly laughter and asked them, “What on earth is going on?”

Come to find out, Klepto was going to have to study with someone that she thought was boring, but instead of doing what a normal person would do and just telling them that she didn’t want to study with him, Klepto, Spitfire, and Little-Little-Little-Sis came up with an elaborate plan.

Klepto and Spitfire would dress up like superheroes (complete with tear-away pants), and while Klepto was studying with the boring guy, Spitfire would run in and cry, “The ninjas are attacking!”  Klepto would answer, “I’m on my way!” and tear off her pants, and they’d run away together to fight the ninjas (they were so excited that they recruited people to be their ninjas). 

But, alas, boring guy didn’t show up.

Little-Little-Little-Sis, Klepto, Spitfire, and Hippie and his weird friends were all very sad.  They didn’t want all their hard, elaborate planning to go to waste.  So they decided that if they couldn’t freak out a boring college student, they needed to surprise Dorkus Dingbat.

Dorkus felt very embarassed afterward; she hadn’t thought she was librarian-ish enough to actually shush someone.  But she did.  She was also impressed with her friends, since not many people have the guts to dress up like ninjas and superheroes and invade a library (Spitfire and Klepto were wearing shorts over their tights too . . . . Spitfire called her shorts her “blasphemous booty shorts”).  So the ninjas and the superheroes made Dorkus Dingbat’s day, and they went their own way after all the laughing was done (and after all the patrons coming into the library had stared at Spitfire’s blasphemous booty shorts.)

And that’s how Dorkus Dingbat was attacked by ninjas in the library–and was rescued by superheroes.

The Very Friendly Librarian

Dorkus Dingbat has done many embarrassing things over her life, but this one was a doozy.  See–Dorkus Dingbat works in a library (have I mentioned that before), and you would think that libraries are very quiet places.  Well, they’re supposed to be, but Dorkus has never really been sure where that sterotype came from since all the libraries she has worked in have been very loud places (whether from children’s programs, construction, or guided tours). 

The library Dorkus works at now is an academic library, and the school it’s part of gives tours often.  Well, today, Dorkus forgot that handy little fact.

Dorkus was in her cubicle working when she saw her friend, Beautiful Leprechaun Girl, walk into the library.  Dorkus was happy because Beautiful Leprechaun Girl and Dorkus are very good friends (and she’s known her a very long time), so it was very natural for Dorkus to walk up and hug Beautiful Leprechaun Girl like there was no one else there.  Just as Dorkus hugged her friend, she heard a voice say:

“And the library has a very friendly staff obviously.”

Dorkus looked up and the tour guide was grinning at her, as well as the other people in the tour group.

Needless to say, Dorkus turned very red and managed to run away to her cubicle as fast as she could.

So from now on, Dorkus will make sure that all her friends are not part of a tour group before she bursts in and hugs them.