No one's perfect

When I am older and look back at my life, I will realize that I have done a lot of wonderful things. I loved my children, read lots of good books and discussed them with people who I thought would benefit, and I made a lot of jokes. But I also have done a lot of bad things. Here are a few things that I did before I was 18:

• I abused the return policy at ShopKo to take items that I had not bought and return them for cash. After a few times I turned myself in to the store manager and had to plead no-contest to fraud in court. ShopKo told me never to enter their store again. Mom brought me back a few weeks later to get an eyeglasses adjustment and do some shopping.
  
• I cheated on some tests, noteably the one where my history teacher (Mrs. Strebe at Lannoye School) wanted us to memorize all the presidents, in order, with the dates they were in office. No one should have to know that stuff and an assignment and test of that sort defines a bad teacher. It would have been better to require us to know some thing that each president actually did. What an idiot, and a waste of my time.
• My friend Scott Meek and I used to drive around Green Bay looking for interesting things to do. One night we went to a place where railroad cars were parked outside a factory. We took off the brake on one and actually managed to push it. It rolled away from us (must have been on a slight hill?) and crashed though a fence and then some men started shouting. We got in his car and drove away.
• Shortly after she started giving us driving lessons, when my Mom left the house my brother Erik and I would drive the car. The first time we did this we pulled it out of the garage and then spent the next half hour trying to repark in the exact same spot we had pulled it out from because we thought she would notice. We would drive around the neighborood and pass our friends houses. I have since told her about the parking portion of this and she thought it was very funny.

So there you have it, an honest look at some of the bad things I have done. I am sure that my mother will read this and be disappointed at me and wonder why I would type this, but the truth of the matter is that kids do a lot of bad things and looking back, I really wasn't that bad. I didn't live a Puritanical existence by any means, but I'm an OK guy.