Today I have a special guest writer, none other than my darling chicken crazy husband. After reading today's post you will all soon feel my pain and realize what a complete weirdo that I am married to. Enjoy!!!

Colleen


Today, I wanted to write on the blog to get my point of view across for the first time. I usually am the butt of most of this blog and even though most of the time I probably deserve it, I still am one heck of a catch. Colleen sure got lucky when I agreed to marry her, I agreed after she told all her friends we were getting married. She doesn’t remember it that way but trust me, I am always right.

Today, on our trip home from Chicago, we were both hungry. We went to 10:00 mass and then left in pretty short order to make it home by 5:00 pm for Kelsey’s game, I hadn’t eaten anything all morning and I was in the mood for Taco Bell. As we started looking for a Taco Bell, I noticed all the food signs on the sides of the highways. My wife suggested, “How about some KFC”, now that is a good women, no wonder I agreed to marry her. If any one has followed this blog, you will know that I love KFC and I usually have a few misadventures whenever I try to eat some.

As I was driving, I was explaining to Colleen that people shouldn’t call it KFC because if the Colonel called it Kentucky Fried Chicken, then for the love of God, I was going to call it Kentucky Fried Chicken. KFC was just a cop out and I for one would not stand for it. She usually does not pay much attention to me so I went on explaining that she needed to watch very carefully for the Kentucky Fried Chicken signs because they do not put too many of the signs on the highways because they do not want to just make their delicious food available to anyone, but rather they prefer the traveler undergoes a quest, or a pilgrimage to find this treasure.

As she was rolling her eyes at me and telling me to be quiet, she noticed a sign for KFC, 2 miles ahead and boy was I excited. As we exited the highway, Colleen told me the sign said go left so left it was. What could be better than driving on a beautiful sunny Sunday with the girl of my dreams to go retrieve some Kentucky Fried Chicken, life just doesn’t get any better than this. Normally, these highway signs are for restaurants that are just off of the highway and I noticed that we were traveling awfully far away from the highway, practically into downtown Joliet and no sign of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Now my heart was sinking and Colleen was laughing at me. She knows it is always some type of nonsense when I attempt to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, usually it is just a closed restaurant or I get confused in the drive through but this time it was different. Could I have gotten off at the wrong exit, or did I just miss it. By now it was not funny and Colleen was ready to give up and she was yelling at me to turn around. We had driven about 15 minutes and I just knew that if we kept going, a bit further, it would appear on the horizen. Then I just began to think that she read the sign wrong and we should have turned to the right. What started out as a nice drive on a Sunday quickly turned into me wanting to pull into oncoming traffic and have some semi-truck crash into her side of the Jeep. Kentucky Fried Chicken is like my search for the Holy Grail. I feel like Indiana Jones, except instead of giant boulders and snakes, I am dealing with inaccurate road signs and a directionally challenged wife. At this point I would take the snakes.

Disgusted and hopeless, I turned around, resigned to the fact that I would be Kentucky Fried Chickenless once again. From my side of the Jeep there were no sounds except for a faint sniffling but Colleen’s side was a different matter. Her laughing and joking was almost too much for a man to handle. My mind was spinning through all of my options, I was hoping that there was another Kentucky Fried Chicken somewhere on the way home but I knew I was just kidding myself. As I neared the highway, off to my left, hidden behind a giant Rick’s RV’s sign, I saw the Colonel looking out over the sign like the old “Kilroy Was Here” signs. Man, I was back in business. Life was good again and Colleen would live to see her children once again. As we were waiting to make a left, it occurred to me that the Kentucky Fried Chicken was on her side originally and she should have noticed it. It was about 100 yards from the highway and she had me driving for 15 minutes into downtown Joliet. She was not paying as close of attention as I had instructed her to and I thought I should remind her of the consequences of her actions. I thought about bringing it up and reminding her once again how important it was to keep a sharp eye out for Kentucky Fried Chicken because it is not like they simply put them where just anyone can find them but I did not want to ruin the moment so I chose to leave my explanation for another day.

Colleen wanted to get it to go, she wanted to get home in time for Kelsey’s game. Get it to go!? She knew better than to suggest the drive though but she now wanted me to walk in and then get my food and eat it in a Jeep, I just stared at her in disbelief. After all I had been through and she wanted to get it to go, that was just not going to happen. Once again I had to explain to her that it is not easy to eat fried chicken while driving, greasy fingers, crumbs, just can not be done. How could a man drive and eat mashed potatoes, think about it, it is just not possible. Sometimes she just does not think everything through. As usual, she gave in to me rather than listening to any more of my explanations and we sat down to a delicious lunch.

I originally thought about writing this as an open letter to Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I decided that I should not tempt fate. Kentucky Fried Chicken is pretty powerful and even I do not fully understand all of its powers. I was able to sneak one out today but all the bad karma an open letter would cause would probably catch up to me next time so I just thought I would present just the facts and there you have it.

By the way, most of the stories you have heard on this blog have been jazzed up a little bit for artistic purposes. I am no where near as much of a bumbling fool that my little "punkin" would have you all believe. I have practically raised these 7 kids single handily and if it wasn’t for me and my organizational skills, this house would fall in upon itself. After all, I did battle with Kentucky Fried Chicken today and I lived to tell the tale.

P.S. I kid a lot but I really do love my wife. She is the best and with her permission, I may write again some day,

Dave