I never even considered paintball grapeshot. . . . now there's a thought.
Schmit, by the way, swears that starter fluid (ether) is far superior even to Aqua-Net.
The very first time I brought my future wife home to meet my parents, she was a little worried. My father is a somewhat rough and gruff-looking man with an Al Borland beard. He doesn't say much of anything to anyone unless you can get him on a topic that really works him up, like fishing lures or 16-guage shotguns. Missy comes from a very, very
loud household. Her mother and stepfather have very loud opinions on everything and they express them all--loudly. They really love commercials, for instance, and if you watch a Lowes commercial with them they'll grill you until you guess who the voice in the background is (it's Gene Hackman, by the way, in case you ever find yourself watching TV with my in-laws.)
Anyway, Missy was ill-prepared for a parent who just sat in his chair and didn't say anything. She began to fear that she had offended him terribly, and, she says, she was a little bit scared of him.
Mom and dad run a small antique booth in their spare time, so there are always little odds and ends around the house. Missy picked up a Pound Puppy (tm) and commented that she hadn't seen one in years. If you don't recall the Pound Puppies, they were one of those toys in the 1980s that were sold with the innovative method of creating a Saturday-morning cartoon about them. They're small stuffed plush toy puppy dogs about eight inches long with floppy legs and ears.
At this, my father's ears perked up, and without warning, he launched into the following story. It may still be the longest continuous speech he has ever made in Missy's presence after five years.
Oh, you like Pound Puppies? That reminds me. Cheryl, I forgot to tell you about this when I got home. You know it was raining today and we couldn't do that concrete job by the park, so we were puttering around fixing up the trucks and stuff in the shop, and when there just wasn't much else to do I remembered I had the potato gun in the truck. So over lunch I went to IGA and got a big sack of potatos and some hair spray, and we did some experimenting.
At this point, mom is imploring dad not to tell this story; she's afraid something terribly sinister happened at the City garage that day and he's going to scare Melissa out of ever coming back. She likes Melissa.
So anyway, we were shooting potatos across at the lumber yard, and those guys couldn't figure out what was going on. You could hear the potato go SPLAT! on the steel roof, and it must have sounded like a bomb going off inside because they'd all come running out, but we just dropped the potato gun in the bed of the truck every time and they couldn't figure it out. Then we started shooting over the whole lumber yard--those things really go.
Well, about the time we ran out of potatos, we were going to give it up, but then Ronnie says "Wait right here!" Ronnie's an idiot--he's my boss, too, but he's still an idiot--so we weren't sure what he was going to get. But he ran back to my truck and grabbed the other Pound Puppy. So we wrapped its ears around its head sorta spiral like, and did the same with the legs, and mashed it down into the gun. Boy, it was tight, too. So we put a really big charge in, put it at the angle to come down on the roof at the lumber yard, and let it go.
That little puppy came flying out the end of the barrel almost too fast to see, but as it got higher the ears unwrapped. It was spinning and flying head first with its ears flapping in the wind like wings, and it really looked like a flying dog was flapping its way across the street and over the building. I think we fired it too low,but the ears and legs slowed it down some and it did land on the roof. Probably be there for years.
Some of the lumber yard guys saw it flying and wanted to know what it was. They knew it came from us, but they couldn't figure out how we did it. I think some of them thought it was a real puppy. We just laughed and played dumb.
And with that, he lapsed back into silence. But she'd at least seen him smile, and that helped (dad smiles a lot, but you can't see it unless you know what to look for.)
