A wise man (Hi Dad!) once told me that experience was learning from your own mistakes, whilst wisdom was learning from someone else's.
I present, so that others may become wise, things I have learned by experience:
1. Never nurse an infant immediately after applying Oragel to her gums.
2. Read packaging carefully, as the pretty purple marker may be air-erasable rather than water-soluble like the blue one. And that detailed shadow embroidery piece WILL take more than the 24 hours required by the marker to disappear.
3. Always check large piles of leaves for fire hydrants before leaping into them.
4. Apparently "Do not feed the baby any cereal whatsoever" means, in manspeak "A little bit will be Oh-TAY! Several days in a row."
5. It is, in fact, possible after sewing something on backwards twice, to sew it on backwards a third time if you're too tired to be bothering with it anyway. Sleep deprivation will change your motto from "measure twice, cut once," into "measure twice, cut three times, then blame the ruler."
6. Gravity is immutable. Even on the Shaw Parking ramp at MSU.
7. Trying to make something idiot-proof interferes with the entropy of the Universe, causing it to spit out a better idiot. Please stop, as the current variety of idiot is quite enough, thank you.
8. Prairie dogs do not make good pets. And they lead to these sorts of conversations:
"I've never had to neuter a Prairie dog. What do I do?"
"Just like a rabbit, and remember to close the inguinal ring. They're precocious, and they get nasty as they get older, so neuter them before they're 4 months old."
"Does that make them less nasty?"
"Nope."
"Then why worry about it?"
"It'll be easier for YOU if you handle the damn thing before it's four months old. Nastiness afterwards is the owner's problem."
9. What I regard as perfectly clear apparently isn't. I've been chewed out by clients for giving their 2 year old dog a 3 year Rabies vaccine.
10. My little trucklet apparently runs in stealth mode, invisible to other motorists. Hence, the high rate of people who pull out in front of it and make me test out the stopping distance.
I'll stop there for now. I wouldn't want to make anybody's head explode.
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