Captain's Log, Day Two: Brothers

          I don’t mind rain, but when you’re getting soaked while trying to carry a desk through a door and your brother, who’s inside and DRY, drops said desk on your foot, it’s hard not to hate the water trickling down the back of your neck. Or your brother.

          As I’m hopping around on one foot wishing I knew another language (so I could swear and no one would know), Nemesis decides the best thing to do is complain about the weather, which made me quit thinking about my foot and look around for something to throw at him. Did I mention he’s currently inside? Bugger.

          Seriously, though, you gotta love brothers. Who else will help you build a cannon and set it off in the barn? Who else would volunteer to be a moving target for the rocket launcher in our treehouse? And who else would enjoy building paper boats, attaching fireworks to them, and launching them in the pond? OK, yeah, my sisters would too, but they’d want the parental unit out there as well to “supervise” or some such nonsense. Unfortunately, my parents do not have a very good sense of what is “awesome,” per se…my mom caught us when we were about to test the aforementioned cannon. I still maintain that it would have worked.

          Nemesis can also come up with some of the most awesome and evil ideas ever. In his words, “Gee, how evil can we get?...let’s find out!” (Actually, this might be his MOTTO, but I’ve never asked.) This has led to near-death on several occasions when he rigged my room with various traps. His death, by the way, not mine. This also led to the infamous Christmas Day Present Duel, when—mere hours after I had realized I was missing several boxes of fireworks—he placed my present under the tree and told me to listen to it. It was TICKING. Not to be outdone, I build a mechanical troll and tucked it in my present to him. It shook the box and roared every time he touched it. I’m sure we were the only people in the world who brought blast shields and toolkits to the tree Christmas morning.

          Seriously, though, I have a great brother. He’s still going to find a frog in his bed tonight…