Friday evening, I came home to 4 messages on the machine. Jeff mentioned that several were from my mom, but didn’t fill me in on any details. Message #2 was the typical Mom message:

“Hi, it’s me calling from South Carolina. [She always identifies herself as either “Georgene,” “from South Carolina,” or both.] I don’t really have anything important to discuss, just thought you might be home to chat. You don’t have to call me back.”

Message #3 was also from Mom – and it was a bit more unusual. She started off by telling me that Katie would probably not be camping by herself anymore. My sister is a big camper, so I rightly suspected that some story of camping woe would follow.

Apparently, Katie was out camping alone, and woke up in the morning with a snake bite. (At this point I gasped aloud and yelled to Jeff that my sister had been bitten by a snake – he didn’t seem particularly surprised or moved, but of course, he’d already heard the message.)

Since Katie had seen rattlesnakes in the area, she was understandably worried, and drove herself to the nearest clinic. They kept her overnight to see if there were any signs of invenomation (I wasn’t surprised that Mom was familiar with snakebite terminology, because in the past few months she’s become an enormous fan of “Venom ER” on Animal Planet.) Mom’s voice was shaking a little; I figured she must have been pretty upset that Katie had such a close brush with the wild!

She tried to lighten the mood by joking that it was just too bad Katie hadn’t wound up at Alta Loma (the hospital featured on Animal Planet), because then Mom would have “had” to fly out and visit those cute doctors.

I should have been suspecious at this point, but still bought it all until she continued: “but of course, I didn’t have to fly out because this is all just an April Fool’s joke!”

She gets me every year! Almost always with a story about Katie, which I suppose just proves that I’m willing to believe anything about my sister, no matter how ridulous… Of course, the “shaking” voice was just Mom trying not to laugh!

The story that she got Katie with this year was that I’d spent a night in jail after being caught driving medicinal marijuana to an ill friend of the family – Katie likewise fell for it hook, line and sinker, and apparently complained that Mom always gets her with stories about me!.