STOP because I say so.

I own some rather interesting things and this is one of them.

Yes, people of Bloglandria, it is a stop sign. Only...it is wood. I am not really sure if wood stop signs were ever in use, but this one is rather old (the first red and white stop sign was made in 1954...but out of what I do not know. Were they always metal?) but even if someone made it as some sort of joke, I still enjoy it. And the long story that goes with it

My Hungarian grandfather, when he was alive, was a "garbage picker" (as I would say); my mom, her sister and her brother carry the same family mantle. I am doomed.

Garbage pickers do things like take tables off the side of the road when left out for bulk garbage day (they also specifically drive around with big cars on weeks that they know people will put out big things). Garbage pickers like to salvage items which they find for little or no cost.

Garbage pickers also like dumps...

I don't think "stealing" things from dumps is legal, but not like anyone else was gunna use the stuff. Let's not focus on the small details.

This top sign was a dump find. No, not found by me. By...well we will let him remain nameless for the sake of legal protection.

Anyway, when I was a little kid he gave me this wooden stop sign. At my old house I hung it outside my "tree fort" to warn trespassers of...I don't know what... all that was in there was stinky mushrooms, faux-bonfires and hemlock trees

Once a police officer, whom we personally knew, stopped outside our house and asked why we had a stop sign (not exactly a thing you should legally possess) hanging in our trees. We persuaded him that it was old and wooden and that we didn't steal it off some road somewhere in our wee little town.

It hung out there for a long time, but then we moved and I was older and tree-fortless.

In our new house the stop sign sat outside in our barn, over my busted up drum set (I had great aspirations to be a self-taught drummer, but dreams those never really took off.) next to a plastic figure of the Muppet drummer from Electric Mayhem Animal. As time passed my drummer dreams faded and the stop sign got tucked into a corner and left alone for sometime.

But the story just keeps getting more interesting.

At some point my youth group decided that old road signs would make cool decorations for our stage during worship and I was like "Hey, I have a stop sign you guys can use if you don't hurt it!"

Now, take a look at that picture above again; that stop sign used to actually look like a stop sign until...a severe miscommunication

When I handed over my sign I sharpie-d my name on a piece of duct tape and stuck it on the back. I carefully instructed them NOT TO PAINT IT.

A couple months passsed and somehow the tape with my name on got taken off and well...that was the doom of my sign. For unknown reasons they flung some brown paint on it and I think ran it over with a tire or something. Still I am not sure why this occurred, but we will just let the past stay past and keep going with this story...

Then they decided that sticking a stop sign on a stage in the middle of worship was kind of a discouragement to the worshipful atmosphere and it was stuck in the closet at the back of our sanctuary where all of our out of use props and decorations go. The poor thing stayed there for years.

More recently that closet has been gone through and people have begun to throw out stuff in order to make room for the new and I decided it was time to reclaim my stop sign before its final destruction came upon it. Plus, who wouldn't want a stop sign in their possession.

The beast is pretty heavy but I have decided that I am going to somehow hang it on my wall and perhaps I will require full 3 second stops before people can enter my dwelling place...

Now you know something about me and one of the things that I love that you didn't know ten minutes ago, so I guess this post accomplished something?

And once again I have left you jealous

...now stop that, it is unbiblical