No souvenir, no gift.

Daltonboy left for Norway on Monday. He was supposed to be gone until Friday. He came back last night. He called Monday night to say that the plane had an oil leak somewhere over Canada, so they turned around and flew back to Detroit, where they put him up in a hotel room with a jacuzzi and mirrors on the ceiling, and told him to go back to the airport the next afternoon. The trip leader decided it wasn't worth it to go, so they came home. I guess the most exciting part of the trip was when the full fire engine brigade met them out on the tarmac.

I didn't tell the kids. I just drove up to the airport, picked him up, and when they came home he was there. It took daltonman a while to figure out that something was wrong. After all, he was texting a friend, so he couldn't be expected to pay attention to something like his father sitting there in front of him, when Dad was supposed to be in some Scandinavian country halfway around the world. After standing in directly front of daltonboy for about five minutes he said,

"Oh. You're back already? Short trip."

So that was anticlimactic. Then Lola came home from Young Women.

"DAD!!!! What are YOU doing here? I'm SO conFUsed!" And then she proceeded to feel sad about not getting a Norwegian souvenir this week.

That was slightly better than the first response, but I guess I didn't think the whole prank through as thoroughly as I should have. I told daltonboy that we should be making out when the kids came home, and make them think I had some other guy in there, but he wouldn't do it. I guess it hit a little too close to home.

So I am not one who plays brilliant pranks. I'd like to be, though.

My best prank was probably the time my friend told all the little kids in her neighborhood that I was deaf, and she sat there and "interpreted" everything they said in "sign language," and I talked back to them through her with my own signs. They thought she was pretty cool, and they were very nice to me--until they found out it was a trick.

Then there was the time I sent a prank email to one of my employees, telling him he was about to be fired, and saying all kinds of other horrible stuff, which the employee would have thought was really funny, if he had received it. Only I accidentally sent it to my boss, who happened to have the same last name as the employee. That didn't go over so well either.

One of my more successful pranks was when I broke into a coworker's computer and sent incriminating emails to another coworker, prompting this whole email exchange between the two that had the first coworker really confused. That was really funny, except that I got an ulcer from worrying about whether or not I was going to get caught and fired.

So yeah. It's just not one of my gifts. Cicada, my hat's off to you!