Rumrunner

My mother, in a selfishly blatant attempt to spend all of my inheritance on herself and her own amusement, has been involved in a near-international incident. The woman has an illness of some sort or other on almost every major organ in the human body, so she is on heart medication and oxygen. This does not deter her from picking up and hauling her pharmaceutically-endowed self all over the Seven Seas and going on a cruise right before Christmas. However, she chose to pack all her medical supplies, antibiotics, heart medications, and a mini-bar-sized bottle of rum all into one suitcase.

There are 2 points to consider here: 1) She claims she needed the rum since she was not sure if they would have any "good" rum in Hawaii for her to make homemade pina coladas in her ship cabin using fresh pineapple and coconut from the islands. 2)APPARENTLY it is against the law to smuggle a bottle of rum in your suitcase onto a cruise ship because the security of the cruise ship line and the ATF (Alcohol/Tobacco/Firearms) confiscated her bag o' drugs and liquor. I have visions of some poor drug dog somewhere going totally apeshi+ and practically having a seizure when it came across her bag. It probably needed her heart meds and oxygen by the time it got through sniffing that bag.

She found out because she got onto the ship and one of her bags was missing. THE bag. With all her meds and the replacement battery for her oxygen tank. She figured she would eventually truly NEED these things to stay ALIVE on her journey, so she called the cruise ship people to report the missing bag. They asked her to go down to the security office but would not tell her why. She naively assumed that they were going to fill out a report that it was stolen or something. Instead, she arrives and sees her bag laid open like the wrappings off of a Red Rider BB Gun on Christmas morning. She starts to approach the bag and examine the contents (knowing full-a$$ well that there was a bottle of rum in it), but the security guys wave her off. After seeing her oxygen tank and noticing the other medications in the bag, they just shook their heads, shook my step-dad's hand and let them have the dayum bag.

And y'all wonder why I'm the way I am...