“Tell us about a time you thought you saw one thing, but it turned out to be something else.” Okay. Okay, it's food too for me. Okay, so I was at my Uncle's funeral. And at the church, like under- underneath it -- no, it wasn't underneath the church, must have been next to the church. So, there was the banquet hall basically like, where all the food was set up. And there was this bread that it -- I was like, "Holy s***! Chocolate bread? They make chocolate bread? I have never even dreamed about this before, like, this is amazing! Chocolate bread!" And so I got a few pieces, you know, and I sat down and I started eating this chocolate bread. I thought it was chocolate bread. I had never heard of anything called pumpernickel bread. It was so disgusting. I hated it. I was so angry. It was nothing like chocolate bread. I was just very upset. And ever since then, up until I, I was like in my 20s basically, I refused to eat pumpernickel bread because of it. Turns out, pumpernickel bread's pretty good, but because of that experience I was like, "I don't want it. Bad...feelings," you know what I mean?

You ask about if we'd ever been married. Yeah, I've been married for 47 years. And about our wedding day, that's always been a very interesting thing. My husband was in the military and Vietnam had just ended when we got married. And in order for me to go and visit him or be with him at all, I had to be -- we had to get married so I could be on to the military post and everything else. He had graduated from Michigan State's ROTC program. He was a newly minted second lieutenant. So he had like, no money and no power. But anyway. We were getting married and I was gonna teach junior high in southern Georgia, which I did do for three years while he was in the military. Our wedding was a lovely wedding in Northville, where I grew up, and, um, it was the hottest day of the summer, it was July 24th. And it was the hottest day of the summer and absolutely, positively miserable. The humidity was -- it was 93 degrees. And so was the humidity. It was so hot that our pastor told us later, many years later, that it was the shortest wedding he had ever performed. It took less than 20 minutes. He said to me that the entire sermon fit on a typed double-spaced page. Two -- or, page and a half of print. And he later, many years later, gave me a copy of the, of the sermon that he preached that day. But he said, "It's really not a sermon. It's more of a 'Here's what I have to say and let's get out of here ‘cause it's hot.'" He had fans running and the doors were all open because the church was not air-conditioned, but it was still a lovely wedding and it was, it was good.

One of my students was celebrating their birthday, which is technically tomorrow, but they brought cookies in today. So they passed cookies out to, you know, everyone in the class and then right when she was done passing out the treats she got called to go home. I think her mom was picking her up to, you know, celebrate her birthday early. So she took her extra cookies and she kind of bolted down the hallway. And one of my kids noticed that I didn't get a cookie. So she broke off a piece of hers before she ate it and she gave it to me, but I refused to take it ‘cause I was like, "That's your cookie. I can't take it." So I kind of hugged my hands so she couldn't put it in my hand, and she set it on the desk next to me anyway, but like five minutes later the birthday girl came back to the classroom. She was supposed to be gone. She kind of like used her head to knock on the door because she was holding the tray of cookies with two hands and I opened the door and she was like, "I almost forgot my favorite teacher!" And she gave me a cookie and when I took it -- it sounds like I'm making the story up, but when I took it, the, the class broke out into a round of applause. I swear they don't do it all the time. It sounds like they do it like every five minutes but yeah, they just were pumped because they saw that one student tried to give me a cookie and I refused, so. I often don't eat the birthday treats, but today obviously there's no way I couldn't and that was a delicious chocolate chip cookie. So it's a win.

I had a, a basset hound named Julie when my kids were little, and she was constantly chewing something. We couldn't leave our shoes down. We couldn't leave our socks down. My poor [Name’s] Barbie doll set was cremated by this dog. And it was a Friday afternoon when I came home and I put my purse down on the floor, where I never kept it. I always put it on the table, but this day I put it on the floor for whatever reason. And it wasn't zipped. And Julie got in it, unknowingly to me. And she ate my envelope that I had just cashed my paycheck in. She didn't just chew it, she ate it. She was pooping out $20 bills. It was awful. I was beside myself. But I washed off those bills that she pooped out. I followed her for days pulling money out of her poop. And I washed them all and I took them to the, to the bank and so long as they, they could read the serial number, they would exchange the money for me. And I got most of my paycheck back that way, but oh my gosh. It was a crazy couple of weeks.

…And I was like, “Oh, I love sycamores,” you know. ‘Cause I saw a sycamore when I was a kid. My dad would take us when he was first divorced. He actually did like stuff with us, you know, and after time went on he then he just couldn't care less about our visits. But I feel -- anyway, but those initial times were pretty great and So we went to the Morton Arboretum near Chicago. So there was -- in -- so we would take the smallest Circle route. My dad -- even then he wasn't very fit back then, so we would do this small circle. And it was called the Morton Circle and in the Morton Circle there was a sycamore tree that was like my favorite and it would have this kind of peeling bark on it. I thought it was just such a pretty, pretty tree. It was one of my fond memories of the Morton Arboretum.  Anyway, so now fast forward to today. I am selecting a tree. So I finally look online to a bunch of places. Look at the catalogs, see that there is a, like a sycamore tree, and they only have one available at this nursery. So I'm researching that kind and I read it's a London Plane Tree. Once it was delivered and arrived at my house -- I kid you not, this is what -- I think I'll end on this note, this story, because this is wild. So I didn't see the tags at the time that I was at the nursery. But I pull off like the tag and it says Exclamation! London -- like Exclamation! London Plane. And I go on the internet and I Google like what we had – What about this tree? Like what attributes like does it not like how tall does this one get? is going to be this massive unruly tree? all this jazz. So apparently the actual trademarked Like official name of the Exclamation! London Plane Tree is called like the, the -- it's like, the Latin name and then it says X Morton Circle. So apparently this exact type of like, London Plane Tree of the Sycamore family is identical exactly trademarked to the one in the Morton Circle that I saw as a, as a little girl. So that's wild, like, I don't even think I…