To protect and serve...

It's been over three weeks since my last post. I don't know how this happened. I guess I've just been waiting for a good, solid, shenanigan-filled day to come along... but so far, nothing too special. But at the moment I'm trying really hard to brain storm for my writing project that's due in two and a half weeks, so it's only natural that I would end up here instead. Really though, this is a very discouraging project to try to come up with. Do you know how hard it is to think of a story that contains a captivating plot, deep themes, symbolism, complex characters, and unsuspected plot twists? Not very hard at all. The hard part is thinking of one that contains all that AND hasn't already been done. Grrrrrrr. I have a couple pieces of ideas, but nothing that really jumps out at me. See, I have this thing where if what I'm about to do isn't going to be the absolute best thing possible, I don't even try. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you manage to fail 11 credits in one semester. I often live by the phrase, "If you don't try, you can't fail." Unfortunately, that phrase is not true when it comes to school. Mehh.

While we're on the subject of school and failure... I registered for community college classes while I was in Colorado this past week. I was also mauled by a saber-tooth tiger, pushed out of a plane, and skinned alive by a group of wild cannibals. And those last three things are a lot less terrifying/painful to me than the prospect of school. Sigh.

Besides blogging, my other avenue of procrastination lately is apparently exhausting every single link on the FBI's homepage. I even tested myself in the push-up and sit-up areas of the required Physical Fitness Test that they make you take if you happen to pass phase 1 testing that you get to do if you happen to get selected from the online application that you can submit after being 23 with a degree and three years of professional, full-time work experience. And good news! If I ever were to manage to get past all that other stuff, as of now, I would be able to do enough push-ups and sit-ups in one minute to become an FBI Special Agent.

As much as I hate the sound of three years of professional work experience, I suppose it wouldn't be all that horrendous if it consisted of kicking in doors, shooting guns, and arresting punks. Though I will admit that I think my interest in law enforcement is partially do to the comedic element of picturing myself, Bri Herter, as a cop. However, irony is something that has made itself a pretty large part of my life so far, so I might not be surprised if it did actually happen someday.

I will now talk about all my previous "run-ins" with the cops.
(These bullet points are for you, Michael.)

• One time I was spending the night at a friend's house, and one of my best guy friend's - who we'll call John - was spending the night at one of his guy friend's house. Well, we decided that we were both in the mood for an adventure, so we decided that after all of our friends at our own sleepovers fell asleep, we would sneak away and find some source of excitement that so often comes with the cover of night. While trying to fall asleep, Brooke and I heard some weird noises and the phone rang and someone left a garbled message (this was around 1am). It was slightly eerie. But that part's not important until later. So anyway, eventually the noises stopped and everyone fell asleep, and at about 3am I slipped out the basement window (which was where we were sleeping and also the only window in the house that wasn't on an alarm system). John and I had some fun adventures including: exploring the quarry which is located behind Consumer's Energy, trying to hunt down a radio tower to climb (don't worry, we never found an accessible one), and eating pie on the church roof. Here's where the cop part comes into play. The next morning, Brooke and I were making small talk with her parents and told them about the creepy noises we'd heard outside the basement during the night. Slightly concerned, her dad went outside to check around. Imagine the sinking feeling in my gut when he came upstairs and exclaimed, "There's footprints outside the basement window!" He was under the impression that some freak had been creepin' around down there in the night, watching us through the window. So, he called the cops. I hid my shoes. Not eager to tell Brooke's parents, who had only recently begun to let me hang out with her again (you know those kids that parents don't let their kids hang out with because they're "trouble" and "a bad influence"? Yeah, I was one of those), that I had sneaked out of their house in the night to meet up with a boy (who really was just a friend - nothing happened), I constructed a clever lie. Brooke helped me, as she had known of my plans to sneak out and that the footprints were mine, and also didn't want to be banned from our friendship again. So, I sat her parents down and told them that I couldn't sleep in the night and wanted to call John to talk, but I didn't get service in their house (which is true), and I knew the rest of their house was on an alarm system, so the only way to get outside to make a call was through the window. Now, you might think this is about to turn into one of those stories about a ridiculous lie gone wrong... but surprisingly, it's not. They bought it. And let me be clear here: lying is very, very, very wrong (Mr. and Mrs. King, if you guys ever end up reading this - I'm really, really sorry... but hey, it's in the past, right?..). So were a lot of other things I did that year. However, the emphasis of this story is not on how stupid I was, but on cops. So let's get back to that, shall we. So, even though Brooke's parents now knew the footprints belonged to me, the cop was already on his way. He showed up and I gave him my story, too. Yes, I lied to a cop. I know, I'm the worst. He did that whole belittling thing where he was like, "So, you were hearing creepy noises outside, then received a middle-of-the-night garbled voice mail, and then thought it was a good idea to crawl through a window and talk outside in the very location that the noises had been coming from, after everyone was asleep so no one would have known if you'd been kidnapped?" To which I replied, "Yes, I thought it was a great idea." I don't really think he liked me, but the feeling was mutual. Anyway, that was incident number one with the law.

•  One time, I was playing board games on the church roof with a group a friends when a car pulled up (on a day when no one was at the church besides us). I crawled to the edge of the roof and saw that the man who emerged from the car was in a Sheriff's uniform, and with him was a German Shepherd. To make matters worse, one of my friend's younger brothers just so happened to have a backpack full of spray paint with him. I'm honestly not sure why it was with him, but if a Sheriff were to catch a group of teenagers on a roof with a backpack of spray paint, he's most likely not going to believe that we weren't planning on using it for some form of vandalism. Anyway, we hid up there for a long while until eventually we got gutsy and jumped down when the cop was on the other side of the building and ran to our cars for a speedy getaway. Disaster averted.

•  Another incident also took place at the church. See, I had figured out how to pick the lock on one of the doors, so my friend's and I would often sneak in there after hours when we had nowhere else to hangout. One time I was painting pictures there with one of my friends (notice that none of our activities were actually destructive in any way: board games, picture painting...), when the same freaking cop showed up with his German shepherd. He was coming towards the door and we managed to get around the corner right before he would have seen us through the window. We thought we heard him come inside, but will never know for sure as we were hiding under the youth room stage for an hour until we were positive that the coast was clear.

• Another time I went TPing and our targets saw us and reported it to the cops and gave them all our names and numbers. The Sheriff called and said not to do it again. Yes, sir.

• One time a four year old said he was going to draw a picture of me. It turned out as a face with a lot of lines over it. I asked, "What are those lines, Noah?" to which he replied, "This is you in jail." This bullet point isn't a story about me and cops directly, but I thought it was funny anyway. 

 Yes, I think I just might pursue a career in law enforcement... if nothing else, it will be the best joke ever.

The Troublesome Trio strikes again.

FINALLY. I have been waiting for a shenanigan-filled day worthy enough to post a shenanigan blog post about it. I should have known all I had to do was plan a Troublesome Trio day.

First, I should give you a little background on "The Troublesome Trio."
Rewind to July 28th, 2009. I'm on a bus heading to the Upper Peninsula to bike 200 miles and serve the less fortunate and camp on the property of a rad elderly couple. I was sitting next to my buddy, John, because so far he was my only friend going on the trip. When we got to the property where we were going to be staying, we immediately set up camp. I'm not exactly sure how it happened... actually I'm pretty sure everyone else on the bus had already pegged who they were going to tent with, and so I was one of the three "leftovers" that got thrown into The Ugly Dumpling together ("The Ugly Dumpling" was the name we gave our tent... it was truly the only fitting name. However, it literally blew away four days later in a storm since no one told us to stake it down... we still have plans to write a book titled, "Camping Failure 101"). The other two rejects name's were Brooke and Reina.
We were all a part of separate cliques back at Church and had hardly ever interacted. They thought I was mean, I thought Brooke was just a dumb blond, and Reina was just plain weird. Well, those things are all still true, but we have learned to appreciate each other for them now.
Anyway, that first night we stayed up until 4am sharing our life stories and dark secrets. Since that's what you usually do on the first night of being trapped in a tent with two complete strangers, you know.
For the remainder of the trip, starting that next morning, the three of us were constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Seriously, I could write the longest post ever about that trip and all the "incidents" that we were involved in together, but those are not the stories I'm trying to tell right now. The point is, we were labeled as "The Troublesome Trio" about halfway into the trip, and that name has stuck and is still relevant two years later.


About a month ago, Reina and I were suffering from some massive food babies and feeling a liiiittle insecure. We started joking about working out together, and Reina said that her mom actually has two passes for a free month of working out at this little gym in Plainwell called "Repz." But we were both busy last month and didn't want to start our free month when we couldn't get the maximum amount of use for them, of course. So we were like, "Let's start on April 1st because then it will be April fools day and it will be hilarious because the idea of the two of us working out is just a joke anyway."

So, it's been our plan for the last month to "work out" on April fools day. Last night we were talking about it and decided we should bring a video camera and document our "working out," since it would surely be so pathetic that we would want to be able to look back and laugh about it years down the road. We also definitely needed a tripod to set the camera on while we were "running."

Click HERE (if you're my facebook friend, which you probably are) to see Reina and I pumping ourselves up for the big day.

A wrench was thrown into our plan when we found out her mom had the camera over at Western, where she works. Being the flexible people that we are, we decided to go there and get the camera from her and then just use the rec center at WMU instead of Repz... even though the whole point from the beginning was using our free passes at Repz... but oh well.
The next thing we needed was a tripod. We knew there was one kept in our youth room's storage room at church, and we had to go that direction to pick up Brooke anyway.

We arrived at our church (another place at which I could go on and on about all the adventures we've experienced) and trotted gleefully to The Venue. But imagine our dismay when we found the storage room locked. However, we were not so dismayed that we saw this as an obstacle. We searched the rest of the church for another tripod, yet came up empty handed. We asked the few workers that were present (one) if they had a key, and she did not. We NEEDED a tripod. A month of planning hinged on us having a tripod. And yet there we were, staring at the locked door that separated us from the only tripod in the whole church with no feasible way inside. You'd think this might thwart our plan.
You'd think wrong.
Nothing stands between The Devious Duo (another story that would require its own post) and their goal. Nothing.

A memory suddenly popped into my head inside of a glowing light bulb that radiated hope. Last summer, some middle school primate boy had somehow managed to break the key off in the lock of this storage room, thus making the entry via door impossible. One of the custodial guys cut a small hole in the front of the stage (the storage room is behind the stage) and somehow army crawled his way through a maze of dust and death to get underneath the storage room, cut a square in the floor, and then pop through and unlock the storage room door from the inside. It had taken him at least an hour and a lot of voices to help him know where he was under the stage in relevance to the storage room.

Here is a map of the general layout:

Realizing that this was the only way to reach our tripod and thus move on with our day, we got to work moving the portable stage pieces so as to reach the rabbit-hole-sized entrance.
Once we could see our entry, I squeezed in first with the flashlight. Once under, we realized this would be slightly more difficult than we'd anticipated. It was basically a mine shaft. For one thing, we could hardly manage an army crawl on our elbows without hitting our head. For another, once inside, we already faced another wall. There were a couple gaps leading to the next stretch of space, but the question was, which gap to take? I remember them saying back in the summer that getting to the trap door all the way at the back required taking a very precise, indirect pathway. It was a complete maze. Also, every time I inhaled, I'm pretty sure my lungs filled with a lot more dust than oxygen.

Here's a map of the general layout beneath the stage/backstage/storage room:

As you can see, this little endeavor proved to be quite challenging. After about twenty minutes of crawling around in dirt and wires, I turned a corner and laid eyes on a colorful mass at the end of an exceptionally narrow tunnel. We pushed our way to the end where a jungle of bright wires rested, attached to some sort of motherboard system. And directly above it was the trap door - our goal. At first we tried to dodge the wires, but it proved impossible. We ended up laying on our backs, our heads at the massive outlet system, pushing up on the trap door which was inconveniently covered in those tiny but abnormally sharp nails.

And then finally... after shedding blood, sweat, and tears, we burst through the floor of the storage room in a frenzy of glorious victory. I felt like one of the 33 miners in Chile feeling fresh air for the first time in months. I can't remember the last time I was that filled with joy.
(We didn't really shed tears.)

Unfortunately, we both got these weird rashes on our legs from scraping along the concrete floor or something. But it was all worth it when we laid eyes on that tripod.

We left the church, prize in hand, and headed to go pick up Brooke for the remainder of our adventurous day.

I could tell you all about the rest of the day in lots of colorful adjectives and exciting verbs, but this is already getting sort of long, so I will just let you watch it for yourselves.

(Seriously, watch it... this post is nothing if you don't watch it to the end.)


The only thing left out of the video is the part where Reina ran a red light after leaving WMU with a cop passing right in front of us. He turned around after her and we pulled into the first parking lot to hide. Coincidentally, the parking lot ended up being under construction and was full of "Do Not Enter" signs. You'd think that hiding from a cop in an illegal area after just breaking the law would back fire, but fortunately the construction tools concealed us perfectly and we made it away ticket-less.

Oh, and we never did end up using the tripod.