Seeing as how I’ve not mumped in awhile, bet ya’ll are a little surprised that I started this week’s MMP!!
So what are some of the nicest surprises you’ve been a part of, either giving or receiving?
(I’ll post mine later)
Have a GREAT week!
We’re really cheap, and have been watching a small, old CRT rabbit-ears TV for ages. Wife assumed we’d be doing that for another decade.
Well, my daughter and I waited until everyone FINALLY went to bed on Christmas eve, then silently assembled a new, big, flat-screen TV and set it up. Hardest part was moving the old 60 lb. set and finding a place to stow it.
Christmas morning: wife walked right by it as we were getting coffee and pastries ready, before waking kids up to open presents. Best part: daughter felt like a seasoned spy.
Surprised Swampy & I aren’t having a steel-caged match over starting this weeks MMP. 
Thanks, Pearl!
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffienatin’. YAWN 'Tis 61 Amurrkin out with a predicted high of 71 and rain. It already has been rainy with tstorms. Big ones! Woke me up last night even. Thus it shall be over the next three days. Rah.
Howdy Pearl! Thanks for startin’ us off. I can’t think of any big surprises off hand but maybe I will. Or not. I’m all willy-nilly like that.
That’s ok Spidey. You can start us off next week. 
Now I need more caffiene and rumbly tummy wants to be fed. Then, alas, purtification for irk on a rainy Monday must commence.
Happy Monday Y’all!
Sorry I didn’t make it back to the last MMP, but I wanted to tell Taters that I was sorry about her friend’s son. And also hugs to Midget. I hope you’re feeling better today.
I don’t know about a big surprise, but I was pleasantly surprised that I lost 4 pounds (78 total :)) this week after taking my mom to The Melting Pot on Saturday. I did refrain from licking either the cheese or chocolate bowl, though, so I guess that probably helped.
At my age, I’m surprised when I wake up every morning…
Actually, one of the very very few times I’ve been surprised in my life was for my birthday - one of the ones in my mid-to-late 30s. The company my husband worked for had a condo at Jacksonville Beach, and if it wasn’t claimed for clients or someone else, the drones were allowed to use it for something silly like $30 per night. Did I mention it was 7th floor right on the ocean? If you opened the bathroom door, you could sit on the toilet and look at the ocean!
Anyway, my sweetie arranged for us to have it on my b-day. We went out with another couple with our kid and theirs, then they were going to keep our daughter overnight for us. After dinner, the guys (who worked together) got a phone call saying they needed to get to the plant right away. Sadly, that wasn’t all that unusual, so there I was on my birthday in the beach condo with 4 kids and the coworker’s wife. Nice lady, but kinda dull…
Not too much later, the guys were back with a bunch of people in tow. My sweetie had planned it as a surprise party. It turned out to be a very nice evening, and he’d successfully kept it a secret. Usually, I figure out stuff like that…
I gave him a surprise party he’ll never forget. His birthday was on a Sunday and I thought it would be fun (and our warped friends agreed) to have a surprise birthday breakfast. I’d left the side garage door open so everyone could gather in the garage, then come singing down the hallway enroute to our bedroom and surprise him, then we’d have an early party. Oh yeah, and everyone wore jammies!
What I hadn’t considered was that my spousal unit had experienced some things when he was stationed in Cuba in the early 80s, and when startled out of sleep, he sometimes really over-reacted. So here’s how it went down:
[ul]
[li]We’re asleep (OK, I was awake, listening for our friends.) Did I mention we sleep nekkid?[/li][li]Suddenly, there’s a gawd-awful cacophony outside our bedroom - someone thought playing kazoos was a good idea.[/li][li]**FCD **sits bolt upright and starts screaming.[/li][li]The door opens in the mostly-dark room and these shadowy figures come marching in.[/li][li]**FCD **launches himself out of bed at the first of the figures.[/li][li]I get up and simultaneously grab a robe, push everyone else out, and turn on a light.[/li][li]There against the chest of drawers, which had been moved about 4" by the impact, was my nekkid husband pinning our friend Mike against the chest. Mike is a little guy - maybe 5’6", slight build, and he was in his jammies with curlers in his beard, just for giggles.[/li][li]My poor sweetie was really confused, but Mike kept repeating “It’s me. It’s Mike!”[/li][/ul]
Then Mike when out and joined the rest of the party and I said “Surprise!” then helped poor FCD get some clothes on. Meanwhile, our daughter came into the room crying - she’d wanted to yell surprise, too…
I think it took a couple of hours for my poor spousal unit to get his heart rate back to normal. The one thing I am thankful for - the friend who was going to video tape the event was late (as usual) so there’s no record of the flight of the nekkid protector.
I never again threw him a surprise party.
Happy Monday!
Giving a surprise:
Told this one before. I suckered my sister into hosting her own surprise birthday party. Recruited family and friends, and I was lucky enough to live 3 hours away, so she would not be suspicious.
I recruited a couple of aunts to show up maybe a half hour before the main event, on the pretext of celebrating her birthday. This forced my sister to clean her house, because she would have been mondo pissed if anyone saw it ‘dirty’.
Just as she was grumping to the aunties that she was disappointed that I had not done anything for her big 4-0, I walked in the door with a crockpot of sloppy joes. I was followed by the rest of the invitees, all of whom brought food, picnicware, and/or utensils. We took over, set up a buffet in her kitchen, and put up party decorations while she watched. When it was over, we cleaned everything up, and her house was as clean as she left it. <snerk>
Receiving:
The VunderLair receives on a regular basis class action lawsuit solicitations of various kinds. Some are trashed because they are ludicrous, while some others are joined, often as a lark. VWife was invited to join a lawsuit related to one of the many pharmaceuticals she takes. This suit was not laughed off, she opted in, and collected her supporting data to send in. Nothing happened.
About two years passed, and it was 2010. I knew I was losing the position I had because the contract was not being renewed for reasons way over my head. My company found me a position at the divisional HQ, necessitating a 220 mile move. Our finances ran on fumes regularly, and I was severely freaked out because even when the company picks up the tab for the move, it is still an expensive proposition, and I had $$$ to cover $$$$ expenses. I tried hitting my 401K for a loan, but that was denied for reason of an outstanding balance.
My contract was up New Year’s Eve, and I was beginning to really sweat. The new job started at the end of January, and there was so much to do. One day, just before Christmas, an odd looking envelope showed up in the mail, and it was thick. I opened it, and at the bottom was a settlement check for $5k from that lawsuit. That was the closest I came to pooping my pants in the middle of the road.
I went inside and showed it to VWife, and I very pointedly asked if this was what I thought it was, and I’m not dreaming. Her jaw dropped and said yes, it was.
I did a bit of research, and wound up calling the principal law firm in the class action suit. They verified it was legit. We had a windfall.
It took me about 30 seconds to come up with a strategery. The amount was enough to pay off the 401K loan in full, so we sent it in. As soon as it cleared and the 401k account showed the deposit, I took out enough money to replace the check amount and cover moving expenses. We paid off A LOT of medical bills, had our lease payment, and VWife had some mad money to boot.
We moved to Maryland with less heartburn than expected.
East Coast snowbunnies, please check in. Will you be mushing today?
Up, caffeinated, off to irk. I had a dual surprise party for my 40th.
I am irked at irk, it’s snowing and I has a blurf. I don’t do surprises.
Biggest one I’ve been involved in:
When my mother was coming up to 50, she decided to finally admit her age, and throw a really big party. She was such a little kid about it, she actually started inviting people over a year beforehand. However, I was having a year’s working holiday in New Zealand, and I was due to be there over the big day. So I came back 2 months early to suprise her.
It got quite elaborate- my Dad came and picked me up from Heathrow airport (while pretending to be camping in Wales), took me to my Great Uncle’s house, where I had to hide out from the rest of my extended family for a week (I couldn’t get a closer flight), because there’s no way my aunt or Grandpa would have been able to keep that secret, and they both lived very close, and saw him all the time. I sent a happy birthday email the night before, after phoning at some weird hour the previous week in Malaysia, where I’d had 10 days stopover, pretending to have just got back from work in NZ (keeping the time zones right to allay suspiscion), then showed up at the party. Her reaction was quite funny.
Hmmm…
Power outage at the orifice overnight. Check.
Phones (all cordless) dead. Check.
Leak in roof over reception area. Check.
Monday mornin’. Check.
'Tis a lovely start to the irkweek here in swampland.
OYKW surprised me with an outdoor cooker for Christmas a few years back. See, we don’t do presents and such for Christmas, birthday or any other celebratory thing cause we’re both cheap and tend to get what we want for ourselves anyway. I had wanted a new outdoor cooker but it was not a priority. He knew one I had my eye on so he bought it and set it up on deck while I was not at da cave. He knew I would be grillin’ later and would see it. I walked right by it, not even noticin’. Poor thing had to point it out to me.
Some friends gave me a bday party on my 25th bday. The cake had black frostin’, had “Happy Bar Mitzvah Irving” written on it and featured 25 ballerina candles. I still have the candles. I know weird people.
I know. mwah
I got a surprise subscription to Mental Floss. I suspect it’s a Christmas/Birthday present from Older Sister but I have not confirmed. I have enjoyed, though.
And from last week’s MMP (I know, I need to stop living in the past):
NASA ground transportation is indeed cool! Just look at the Crawler-Transporter. I wish I could have had a chance to see that thing in action.
Here’s a late birthday video for doggio: “As God is my witness, I thought condors could skate” (to quote Dave Barry).
WARNING: Horrendous version of the US national anthem at the beginning.
it’s raining - turning my yet unplowed street into a skating rink. I chose to stay home today.
I have yet to be the recipient of a surprise party. I’m too suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. I have, however, been on the planning end of several surprise parties, only one of which was a bust because the honoree took ill that morning and couldn’t “meet for drinks” after work.
There was a big surprise on the news last night. They did a story on a domestic dispute in which someone was shot (no surprise there), and hit in the arm, leg and public area. Do they mean he was shot in a place where people gather? Or in a public part of the body like his face? Whatever it was I personally hope I never get hit in the public area. That sounds like no fun at’all.
**FCD **didn’t work on anything nearly that cool. Most of what he arranged to transport were payloads that were transported via truck or military airlift. But he had to ensure everything was properly shock-mounted and often sealed in very strictly controlled environments - temperature, humidity, purity of air, etc. Certain things going into space need to be protected from earthly contaminents, lest it affect the mission in space.
A couple of times, he and a team had to follow the truck cross-country to monitor the transport and make adjustments or repairs to the environmental units as necessary. So the contractor rented a bus-sized RV with a team of drivers. One of the RVs they rented had been a Girls Gone Wild bus! :eek: No girls were left behind, tho… 
Or things coming from space…:dubious:
Friends gave me a surprise party for my 25th birthday. Unfortunately friend who was supposed to get me there thought the party was on a different date, so I missed my own surprise party. Since then I have hated surprises. I always read the last pages of a mystery story first.
We finished working on the rental yesterday. My weekends will be all mine again!