T.P. makes me P.O'd in the a.m.

Waking up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning is a terrible thing. The weekend is the time to sleep in, not to rise before the birds and the sun. But my sons were going fishing with their uncle bright and early, I woke up as they were leaving to wish them well. My plan was to fall back into bed, fall back to sleep and waste a good part of the morning getting some shut-eye. Then my wife noticed through the blurred vision of recent sleep that our front yard was all white, like it had just snowed. This was August and this was Hollister, so it was not snow. This was August and this was Hollister, so this was a toilet paper prank perpetrated by someone who knows one of my sons. There were rolls of paper in six different trees in our yard; paper on the bushes; paper on my roof; paper in the shape of a heart on the lawn (it was a message to one of our sons, we assumed, but we didn't love it.) At 4:15 a.m., my wife and I went to work cleaning up the mess, hoping not to wake the neighbors while cursing our fate. Toilet paper on a wet lawn becomes a lumpy mess that is difficult to pick up. But it was easier than the rolls that were thrown over the 15-foot tree in our front yard, because those rolls rolled up onto the roof, making them unreachable until I brought out a ladder. Climbing on a ladder at 4 a.m. when you are half asleep is not the smartest thing a guy can do. Climbing from a ladder onto a dewy roof when you are half asleep is even dumber. But I did it because I wasn't going to be able to sleep knowing that the toilet paper strands were dissolving into my landscaping and onto my roof. Forty-five minutes later, about an hour before sunrise, my wife and I had filled a trash bag with every last toilet paper remnant that we could find. We eventually put the ladder away, jumped back in bed and hoped to wipe this toilet paper incident from our memories.