Why is your nick name Moose?

Well first of all my first name is really Torry and I've always hated it. It's Irish and it means "mischievous dwarf". Go figure. It's only partly correct because I do enjoy my mischief but as for the dwarf? Hardly. What the heck were my parents thinking? My middle name is De…which again I hate. In fact when I was in high school is when the movie "Grease" first came out. The kids in school changed the words to the "Look at Me, I'm Sanda Dee" song that Stockard Channing sang in the movie and rewrote it to apply to me and make fun of my weight.
The original lyrics were: Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity. Won't go to bed till I'm legally wed, I can't, I'm Sandra Dee.
The lyrics they changed for me were: Look at me, I'm Torry De. Stretch marked from obesity. Won't go to bed until I'm fully fed, I can't, I'm Torry De.
I hated high school.
It was sheer misery for me. My ADD and obsessive compulsive disorder didn't help matters either.
My dad wanted my initials to be T.D. because he wanted me to be a football player. He called me "Touchdown" or "T.D." for the first eight years of my life. Then he realized that I wasn't any good at sports and had no interest in them whatsoever. What a disappointment. BUT…he loved me anyway cause that's how Dad's are. Or rather how they should be. I was just lucky I guess. When my father discovered that I had a sense of humor though it all made up for it. He especially liked it when I couldn't figure things out or would get confused or distracted when I was working on something. Or I'd forget what I was talking about in the middle of a sentence. He'd just laugh and shake his head while saying "Watching you is like watching my favorite cartoon."
Okay…so…um…what was I talking about? Oh! Moose! Why my nick name is Moose. That's it.
Well when I was living in Alaska I was worked a few years as a camp host for Alaska State Parks and as I'd be walking the campgrounds and checking in campers and gathering camping fee's etc I'd always notice the moose droppings on the ground. If they were fresh I knew that I needed to be careful while I was walking around because I might run into one. You don't ever want to be caught off guard by standing between a momma moose and her baby let me tell ya. Mother moose are very violent and have trampled people to death for such an offense. It usually happened several times a year and you could read it in the newspaper because the stories were always covered to serve as a warning. Anyway, I had been at a gift shop in Anchorage one day and I saw that they carried moose dropping jewelry that someone had made. I also saw that the tourists were buying the jewelry like crazy to take back with them as humorous souvenirs for the friends and family back home. That got my mind to thinking that "Hey! Maybe I could do this! I see tons of moose dropping every day in the campground. Heck! I'm practically rich and I don't even know it. I've got the equivalent to gold nuggets in moose dropping all over where I live!" I then started picking up moose droppings every day and asking campers to keep an eye out for the fresh stuff and to come get me if they saw some. I'd tell them my name was Torry but no one could remember it. They'd call me Troy, Cory, Terry, Rory and every name but mine. One day I introduced myself to a camper and asked him to keep an eye out for moose droppings for me. He was like this new age hippie type of guy, pretty cool too, and he said, "What kind of a name is Torry? That name doesn't fit you, man. You belong in the woods so I'm naming you Moose. The mighty beast!" I was like "Really? Cool!" Then the camper guy said "Yeah, way cool and stuff. Plus Moose are known for having really small brains and not being too smart so it kind of fits ya." I just looked at him when he said that part though, as I wasn't sure if I should feel insulted or if he was teasing. Then he said "Your shirts on backwards,' and walked away. And sure enough, my shirt was on backwards but it was a sweatshirt so it's hard to tell when you're the one wearing it and not the one looking at it so you know…whatever. It doesn't mean I have a small brain. Anyway, I started introducing myself as Moose and the name stuck. Then I started making business cards and product cards to attach my jewelry too and they all stated "Jewelry by Moose" on them. Which was kind of funny too because the jewelry was indeed made by a moose.
Just for fun now I'm going to tell you how to make a moose-dropping necklace.

Pick up FRESH moose droppings. About 23-25 pieces will do nicely.
Thread them together IMMEDIATELY while they are still fresh and soft so they are easy to thread with metallic wire. If you wait until they dry out they will crumble when you try to thread them and you'll be wasting good droppings.
After they are threaded together place them on a cookie sheet and bake them in an oven for exactly 30 minutes at 400 degrees. Keep your kitchen window open though because it gets a little stinky when they're cooking.
After they are dry you can paint or stain them any color you'd like and then varnish them to make them shiny or just varnish them as they are. They still look pretty.

I also made tie-tacs, cuff links, earrings and nose rings out of my moose droppings. (The nose rings never really took off though and now that I think about it I guess the reason was apparent. Funny how you don't think of things until later huh?) The tie-tacs, nose rings, earring and cufflinks were all basically the same thing though- just single moose droppings with a small jewelry rod attachment thingy glue gunned on the back. I'd package them differently though and in sets or singles. The package was the real eye catcher because it was illustrated and showed a moose dropping his doo-doo out of his rear while looking over his shoulder and winking. He also had a daisy in his mouth. It was funny.

Oh- I might as well tell you something else about the moose dropping while I'm here too. Okay, one of my other moneymaking schemes was to package my own trail mix and sell it to campers. I could never make enough of it though, as it was a great seller. Then I started making oatmeal raisin cookies and chocolate chip cookies too because the smell of the baking cookies would drift through the campground and people would start following the smell and then come buy my cookies. (I would put a sign up at my campfire that said "Fresh Cookies!" whenever they were ready. I was sort of the Krispy Kreme of the wilderness.) Well the head ranger dropped by to visit me one day and bring me some fresh moose dropping from the upper campground that he had picked up and so I offered him a fresh cookie. I had just started using my spatula to remove the cookies from the cookie sheet when he had arrived so there were only a few cookies left on the tray. I offered them to him for free as a thank you for the moose droppings and he stood there and ate four of them quickly while chatting with me. Then when I saw the cookie sheet was empty I dumped out the bag of fresh moose droppings on it that he had brought me. I immediately started threading them together while they were fresh so I could bake them in the over. He stood there with his last half eaten cookie in his hand and then looked at me and asked "Do you always use the same cookie sheet for your cookies as you do for the moose droppings?" I said "Uh-huh," and he fired me.

He said I could have gotten everyone in the campground that had bought my cookies sick by baking them on the same cookie sheet that I dried out the moose droppings on and that I was a lawsuit waiting to happen. He was being way melodramatic if ya ask me. I never got sick once. Sissy whiner.
Anyhoo that's how I ended up working at the fish factory in Anchorage next and making caviar for the Japanese. (I'll NEVER eat caviar again though but the reason why is a long story and I don't want to get off on that tangent now so ask me later and I'll tell you.) Making caviar is what then led to my hosting the kids show for the Fox network affiliate in Anchorage next.

Hosting that kids show was four of the longest months of my life because I didn't find out until too late that I didn't like kids. Can't stand them. Kids are dirty, loud, annoying, and easily distracted little creatures. In short, we are simply too similar to get along.

What was I talking about? I don't know…anyway, that's why my nickname is Moose.

Oh, one more thing. Be careful if you keep a bowl of Whoppers candy on the same table in your house where you are going to sit and thread the bowl of moose droppings. It's easy to confuse the two bowls. I only made that mistake ONCE.

I guess you can see by my random ramblings that I don't know how to edit myself. That's exactly how I am in person too. I just say whatever I'm thinking as I'm thinking it so the thoughts stay fresh. I think it makes it easier for people to string my thoughts together that way.

Besides my job isn't to be an editor. That's someone else's gifting in life. My gifting is to chase dreams, speaking of which…my current dream is to appear in at least a one sentence speaking role on ABC's "Men in Tree's."

How crazy is that for someone who doesn't have an agent and spends his time between Tennessee and Alaska?