Butts and Wooden Nickels

I had the nursing staff in hysterics this afternoon after coming back to the day hospital. When I'm up on the ward, there isn't that much room between each bed. Normally when I'm talking to a patient, I'll just sit on their bed to be on eye level with them. But this particular patient's daughter was present and already sitting on the bed. So I pulled up a stool on the other side of the patient's chair, and by doing so, was encroaching a bit beyond the curtain line into the next-door patient's area. About 10 minutes into our conversation, I felt and saw out of the corner of my eye that an older man (a guest, not a patient) had squeezed past the back of my stool and was standing in front of the next-door patient's little bedside cupboard. Next thing you know, he is bent in half and his butt is shoved up against the left side of my face...he didn't sort of brush or tap my face with his butt, it was as if I were a wall...he just bent over and kind of used my face to lean against. So I stood up, and moved my stool a few feet away, at which point he straightened up, turned around, and said "Oh sorry, love." He never asked me to move in the first place, never said "Excuse me, I need to get into that little cupboard," it was as if I didn't exist, until I moved my face from his butt, and suddenly he had nothing to lean against. I'm still laughing about it.

Totally unrelated topic-- with all the emails that have been flying around since the family reunion, I now know today what the big deal is with wooden nickels in my family. For as long as I can remember, our extended family has told each other whenever we get together "Don't take any wooden nickels" and at one of the last reunions I was present for, someone actually gave out wooden nickels. Well, they did again this time, the one I missed, and for all the youngsters, the story was: Wooden nickels used to be popular at state fairs and centennials. You weren't supposed to take any wooden nickels the last day of a fair, in case you couldn't cash them in before the end of the event, at which point they were valueless. Ok, so maybe that's only interesting to me. You'd have to know some of the characters in my family- they are larger than life- but I wanted to share the news with y'all anyway.