"The Shugas"

When David and I first met, we took a trip to Tennessee to visit some friends.  A key part of our vacation was travelling to the Jack Daniel's Distillery.  As part of our visit, we were able to sign up for a free tour. 

We learned the history of Jack Daniel, including a little personal information shared by our tour guide...

Meet Bubba.  Apparently, Jack Daniel met a painful and untimely death.  Bubba explained that Jacky Boy "didn't know what the shugas was."  He developed some sort of infection in his feet, gangrene set it, and it was off to the great distillery in the sky.  After doing a little more research, I later found out that he had actually kicked a safe and and tried to treat the injury by dipping his toe in whiskey.  Regardless, word is that the man had undiagnosed diabetes...hence, "the shugas."

Fast forward eight years.  One of the very friends we went to see on that trip lovingly sent Morgan her first Polly Pocket.  Very quickly, my life came full circle.

You see, Polly was about to meet her own painful and untimely death.  At first, I didn't notice anything was wrong.  Morgan would regularly ask me to help her change Polly's clothes and shoes. 

Then one night, I noticed that Polly's sandals weren't fitting quite right.  All of a sudden, her toes were missing, like some crazy gangrene had eaten away at her little plastic feet.  Was Polly a long-lost decedent of Jack himself?

After I quickly ruled that out, my next thought was the dog was the culprit, but then I realized that there would have been a whole lot less of Polly if that were the case.  I then briefly wondered if maybe Polly had been that way the whole time, but I would have noticed if she looked like that when we took her out of the box.

I then remembered my daughter, who had recently been sent home from school with the note, "Morgan needs to please stop biting all of the tails off the dinosaurs in the classroom."  Looks like it wasn't "the shugas" after all.