The Curious Case of Mr. Puff

The following is an excerpt from my Hawaii Scrapbook.  A few years back, we took our office staff to the Islands for the ADA and then a vacation afterwards.  I made a kickass scrapbook to commemorate the trip, and most of you aren't around to see it in person, and even if you were, I don't foist my vacation scrapbooks on my few and long suffering houseguests.  It's kind of too bad, because the scrapbook IS pretty kickass, more fun to look through than the standard vacation slides.  

Anyway, I'd seen them referenced before, but I didn't know that lamps made from actual puffer-fish were a real thing until I went to Hawaii, and there they were, just hanging out one night while Shane and I were having dinner.  I'd like to say that the following story is because I had way too many Mai-Tais while we were on the beach, but I didn't.  My imagination really is this warped.  So with that in mind, I present to you "The Curious Case of Mr. Puff." 

Dining by the light of a taxidermied pufferfish!

Mr. Puff once lived in Bikini Bottom with his wife Mrs. Puff, a boating school instructor.  Mr. Puff was a traffic cop.  He frequented the Krusty Krab before SpongeBob SquarePants was even out of grade school.  Then one day, mysterious hooks appeared in JellyFish Fields, a quiet suburb of Bikini Bottom, and Mr. Puff went to check them out.

Suddenly, Mr. Puff was jerked up and out of the water, away from his home and friends in Bikini Bottom.  It was hot and dry and Mr. Puff didn't like this new place at all.

Mr. Puff as part of the aesthetic team at LuLu's.

Mr. Puff can't remember what happened next, but the next thing he knew, he was suspended from a ceiling and lit from within. It took Mr. Puff a while to understand what was going on, but he realized he was now part of the aesthetic team, along with other Pufferfish Lamps, at a place called LuLu's in the Waikiki Beach neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawaii.

A pufferfish in his more wistful moments, thinking of home.

Although Lulu's isn't geographically far from Bikini Bottom, just a mile out to sea and straight down, LuLu's is a completely different world.  Mr. Puff doesn't mind life at LuLu's- everyone there is happy and when the sun goes down, Mr. Puff and his friends do give off a disturbingly pretty glow.

But every so often, when the trade winds calm ever so much, Mr. Puff turns his gaze out to sea and remembers his old life in Bikini Bottom, and for a few moments, he's plaintive.  Then the trade winds pick up once again, and it's back to work for Mr. Puff.