MARCH IS MAPLE SYRUP MONTH IN MICHIGAN

By Tim Colin
Last week I decided to go into the maple syrup business. Tourists are willing to pay a fortune for just a small bottle of Michigan Maple syrup. I figured that if I could sell a thousand bottles of maple syrup at $10.00 per bottle then I could clear $10,000.

Now a person who lives in Northern Michigan that has $10,000 would be looked up to like Donald Trump. Then, I could get a girlfriend who wasn’t so shallow that she cares only about my personality. Instead, I could get a deep thinking girlfriend who is impressed with my bank account.

Of course in order to clear $10,000 I realized that I would have to keep my expenses low. I also realized that I would need some help to do all the work. I was able to recruit an employee of this blog named Gerrard. He’s a big guy and not too bright. I decided to pay him by letting him have any leftover syrup. I told him he could lick the pots clean. This would in turn save on having to use soap and water.

Next I realized that I needed a kitchen to cook up the syrup. I was able to buy a small trailer at a police auction for only $10.00. It was a great trailer with a really nice kitchen in it. Apparently, the crooks that owned the trailer must have liked to cook stuff. The only problem with the trailer was that it made Gerrard and me really dizzy every time we were in it. Of course opening the windows and letting fresh air in helped a lot.

Getting free bottles to use was really easy. I just sent Gerrard down to the local landfill and he picked up about ten garbage sacks of catsup bottles. I even saved money on washing and sanitizing the bottles b using some old pesticides called DDT that my parents had in their shed. The only thing left to do was gather up the maple sap and cook it down into maple syrup. I had Gerrard do that work meanwhile; I produced a bunch of labels on the Humor News Nuts printer that the owner just bought so he could download income tax forms. I figured since I’m the editor of several of his blogs using his stuff for my own business was just like one of those Wall Street executive bonuses. It is kind of like “Don’t ask don’t tell”. As long as the boss don’t ask me if I’m using his stuff I am certainly not going to tell him.

Well, after I made up the labels to put on the syrup bottles I went over to the trailer to see how things were cooking. I knew that Gerrard had gone out and gotten a bunch of sap and he was supposed to be cooking it down into delicious Michigan Maple syrup. The trailer was parked out on 40 acres that used to belong to an uncle but he lost it in a game called Russian roulette. Of course the guy my uncle lost to actually lives in Russia so I suppose he wouldn’t care if I squatted my trailer on his property for a while. Besides, the neat thing about Michigan backwoods law is that if you squat on someone’s place for seven years you get to claim it for your own.

Unfortunately, when I arrived at the trailer I found the trailer and the forty acres to be blazing in fire. I asked Gerrard what had happened. Well, it seems that all the maples on the forty were in the back and Gerrard was too lazy to walk that far so instead of tapping the maple trees in the back he tapped the white pine trees that were up near the trailer. Of course the tar from the trees is highly flammable hence; Gerrard caused one of the biggest fires that Northern Michigan has ever seen.  That is is anyone was around to see it.  You see we were so back in the backwoods that nobody noticed and most likely nobody cared.