one man's trash is another man's treasure... sometimes...

every year the toad's mom's family has a christmas party. we all bring a "guessing game" (a jar full of candy, you tell us how many are in there) and a prize ($1 or less/person) for bingo. then we play bingo and everyone gets several prizes depending on if you win. so this year i picked up some cute wire trees and the toad's idea for the guessing game was to put a jar of something inside another jar that is surrounded by something else, so we tricked everyone on that, it was fun. then we were rushing to get out of the house and the toad said "we have to wrap the prizes" all i had was some tissue paper and bags. i had been saving both parts of the wrapping for a moment like this, so i grabbed them, shoved them in bags w/tissue paper and away we went. traffic was pretty bad as it usually is about six southbound interstate besides that it had snowed earlier so some people were driving ridiculously slowly being "careful" making others who couldn't care less that there was snow who were driving ridiculously fast, brake a lot. i was a wreck as the toad drove. when we got there we had to remember to bring in our two dozen cookies, our two bags and our guessing jar. the toad grabbed everything and i started talking to his sister who drove up and parked right before we did. we went inside and he put everything down, we grabbed a plate of food and started eating and playing bingo. we got a few prizes and his mom wanted to see what we brought so she went and got our bags. she brought one over and unwrapped it and thought it was so cute she sent one of his sisters over for the other one. they grabbed the other bag and she started ruffling through it and said, "is this your bag you brought?" i looked over and saw that it was not one of the gifts we had brought but just a brown paper bag, and said, "oh no, that's not it, it would be in a green sparkly bag" she said, "it looks like a bag of garbage" indeed it did. she told the girls they brought her a bag of garbage and she sent them back over to the prize table, but alas, it wasn't there. we all wondered who had got the green bag with the red tree. when the party was over we hurried back to her house and looked at the pretty green wire tree and talked about how its too bad they didn't get both. it got late and the toad and i drove home finally arriving around midnight. as the toad cleaned out our backseat he found the green sparkly bag! oh no! i suddenly realized that the brown paper bag she had found as a "prize" was indeed my "garbage can" for my car. just a nice large sturdy brown paper bag that i threw recyclable bottles and paper in, that i would dump out and reuse. i double checked in the backseat where i kept it and sure enough. gone. i guess what is our garbage is someone else's prize. in this case, my mother-in-law's!
well at least it made the toad and i laugh for quite a while :)