One of my life-long best friends is my cousin, Jessie. Ever since we were small, we have managed to inadvertently involve ourselves in shenanigans.  Most recently, I realized that this has never changed through all these years!  Our daily lives are busy, so we don’t see each other as often as when we were young, but when we DO get together, things just…happen!  Some things I’ve learned from my cousin over the years, in NO particular order:

1. When driving around a sharp curve in a three-wheeled golf cart, don’t speed.
2. If you partially tip a golf cart so that your passenger and the tin of cookies they’re carrying fly to the ground, gather the spilled cookies back into the tin and tell no one.
3. People can’t tell the difference in taste when cookies have been spilled in the dirt if you pick out all the rocks and leaves. In other words, family members enjoy dirt cookies just as much as regular shortbread cookies.
4. If you have a pillow fight, don’t use a down-filled pillow. The quill portion of some of the small feathers WILL scratch the fuck out of your face.
5. Nail-polish doesn’t stay on turtles’ shells forever.
6. If it is your first time ever getting drunk, stay away from the Goldschlager, no matter how pretty you think those flakes of gold look when drinking directly from the bottle.
7. Do NOT try to use the turntables at a party when drunk on Goldschlager. It WILL sound like a train wreck. This is not arguable.
8. Fad diets that include bacon don’t actually work.
9. When driving several hours to pick up a recently purchased puppy, be aware that you are entering banjo territory. There are several places a body can be buried.
10. If you get pulled over for speeding, but have a puppy in the car, you will not get a ticket.
11. Osceola Cheese employees will be pissed off if you arrive to taste their cheeses 5 minutes before they close.
12. Speed limits don’t actually exist. Not even when driving a Uhaul.
13. When moving heavy objects in a garage, avoid trash cans that contain gigantic shards of glass, aka ass shanks.
14. Pulling your pants down to reveal a glass-shard ass-shanking will elicit NO pity.
15. If someone accidentally locks the Uhaul keys inside the vehicle while parked in a shady neighborhood, the Locksmith who comes to “rescue” you will probably rip you off.
16. Uhaul doesn’t keep spare keys.
17. There are questionable characters wandering around storage spaces–ones who recently lost money and will yell about it at random while wanting to punch things.
18. Veterinary offices in banjo-land ONLY accept checks or cash. They also ironically have dead animals on the wall.
19. One cannot fit three truckloads of stuff into a 5’ by 10’ space.
20. It’s okay to spend three hours at a restaurant, while laughing 85% of the time.