April Fooling Around

I do not like being pranked, so April Fool’s Day does not amuse me. Unfortunately, this does not deter my intrepid husband. The April Fool situation has deteriorated since he retired. Back when he worked, he would play tricks on his co-workers and spare me from his creative pranking. Now that he has retired, however, he has no co-workers, and I have lost my buffer. His entire arsenal of April Fooling ingenuity focuses on me. This year, I had a reprieve since he was distracted (in SoCal visiting our kids).

Once he substituted my toothpaste with a decoy tube filled with cake decoration paste. He knew this prank would make me particularly crazy because I have a vendetta against sugar, which I think is responsible for every disease known to humans as well as the economic meltdown of 2007, the extinction of the Javan tiger, slavery, Jon Stewart’s decision to leave the Daily Show, and the failure of last year’s cherry crop. While he laughed into his pillow in the adjoining room, I made noises of pure disgust while complaining aloud that my toothpaste tasted awful and I wondered if toothpaste could go bad. Come to find out that I had brushed my teeth with pure, toxic, crap-sugar. Ha ha, very funny.

But the toothpaste prank was nothing compared to the April Fool he played on me by resetting the language on my laptop. This is the disastrous consequence of being married to a technology geek. He actually set his alarm clock and got up before dawn on April Fool’s Day so that he could sneak into my study and reprogram my computer so that it would think that its default language was Greek. When I attempted to type anything on it (in MSWord, Facebook, whatever), the computer automatically produced Greek characters and words. When I asked my hilarious husband if he could figure out why I could no longer write in English on my computer, he spent several minutes rolling around on the floor laughing before he admitted to what he had done. (Needless to say, I refused to help him up off the floor. Let the pleading begin.) Then he spent twenty minutes typing on my computer and guffawing at the result before he ostensibly restored the computer to its original language setting. He’s a sucker for cheap entertainment.

I said ostensibly restored because my computer has never been the same. The Greek language fiasco occurred several years ago, before he retired, when April Fool’s Day fell on a weekend and he didn’t go into the office. Otherwise, all his co-workers would have been typing Greek on their computers instead of me. To this day, every time I attempt to spellcheck a document, I still receive a message stating that the spellchecker “can’t find the proofing tools in Greek.” I then tell the computer that’s OK, let’s use English, and it sighs with relief and proceeds to spellcheck in English. Clearly, my computer and I are still recovering from Mediterranean linguistic trauma foisted on us by my husband. (Why didn’t he just take me to Greece instead?)

I fared better with this sorry excuse for a holiday back when my children still lived at home. One year we decided to beat my husband at his own game. He is one of those people who takes a while to get moving in the morning. His brain functions in power saver mode for a while when he first gets up, and the gears don’t fully engage until after he has his coffee. So the boys and I woke him out of a dead sleep at dawn on April Fool’s Day and told him a skunk had gotten inside his car. (This was when we lived at the Ranch.) “How could that possibly happen?” he asked. We said we didn’t know but it had. He incredulously put on his bathrobe and grabbed a broom. (Seriously? A broom?) We followed him outside, where he circled his car, peering cautiously through the windows. When the boys fell down laughing, he looked puzzled at first. Then it dawned on him what the date was. His expression when he came out of the house with the broom was priceless. But it did not make up for convincing my computer that my native language is Greek.

While I have thought of numerous excellent pranks, I have not had the heart (or the straight face) to execute them, thus my husband has been spared. My April Fool’s observance has deteriorated into seeing how long I can keep from laughing while trying to convince my husband of outlandish falsehoods, such as that the Patriots traded Tom Brady to the Miami Dolphins in exchange for one of Cam Newton’s touchdown footballs and a tank of sardines. Meanwhile he is sneaking around at night reprogramming my blender to think it’s a lawnmower and dressing my cats up in dinosaur costumes. I really can’t compete. I hope none of you readers did irreparable damage on April First. If so, you can assume you are now written out of my will.

I googled "images of skunks in cars" and this is what I got. Kinda cute. 

The cat looks like my ginger cat Golda. Fortunately, I have never had a cat get skunked.