My oldest daughter’s birthday falls between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. So for her first Christmas, she was almost a year old. She was old enough that she would be able to appreciate getting toys. She would also be able to enjoy looking at Christmas decorations. My wife always decorated our whole house for Christmas …
Author Archives: elvisgumby
Fast Food Service and Work Uniforms
Today, I was eating lunch at a fast food restaurant. This is one of the restaurants where they take your name when they take your order instead of assigning you a number. When your order is ready, they announce your name. The young lady waiting on me asked my name and I told her. She …
Waffle House From Hell
My wife’s grandmother lived in Nashville right before she died. A few weeks after she passed away, my wife, my mother-in-law and I went to Nashville to help clean out her apartment. We traveled in two vehicles. My wife and I were in my small pickup truck. We were going to transport bedroom furniture. My …
Sorry, Wrong Number
Several years ago, I was driving my son to school on a Friday morning. My cell phone rang. I looked at the screen and it wasn’t a number that I had programmed in my phone so just the number showed. I saw that the call was from a phone with a Memphis area code. I …
Halloween Hijinks
Halloween was a big thing for the teenagers in the town where I grew up. Sales of toilet paper and soap increased exponentially at all of the grocery stores. These sales went to teens who had never been to the grocery store without their mom and mothers restocking their shelves at home that had been …
What Scares Don Knotts Scares Me
When the movie “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” made it to theaters around where I lived in 1966, I was 4 and 1/2 years old. I don’t have that many memories of this time in my life but I do remember specifically wanting to see this movie. I remember seeing the ads on TV. I’m …
Scary Happenings While Watching Evil Dead
I saw Evil Dead when it first came out in 1981. I was in college at the time and there was a group of us called the Bad Cinema Club that went to see nearly every horror that was released at that time. This is not to say that all horror movies are bad. But there are …
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Seeing Friday the 13th Part II on Bargain Night is Scary
I was a freshman in college when Friday the 13th Part II was released. By the time this one came out, I was more familiar with the jump scare techniques they used in the first Friday the 13th film. During my first semester of college, I had helped form a group called the Bad Cinema …
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How Friday the 13th Scared Me and My Friends
I didn’t jump on the modern horror movie bandwagon until the release of Friday the 13th. When it was released May 9, 1980, it had been about a year and half since Halloween had made its debut. I had completely missed Halloween and never really paid much attention to it until Halloween II came out …
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Feeling Refreshed in Vietnam
We spent most of the last day of my recent trip to Vietnam sightseeing. We were in Ho Chi Minh City which was formerly Saigon. We were going to spend time in the downtown area checking out museums and looking at historic areas. Before we left our hotel, one of our hosts told us what …