So,
after an unbelievable battle with my customer and then with my own company over
end of quarter business…(and then having it spill over into the weekend), I get
to our PA lake house on a Friday night around 11PM. I’m Toast.
The
follow day I’m still in a complete fog, but we have company coming up, so I
need to strap on my happy face and be a delightful host. Being that I’m a curmudgeon by nature,
this saps just about all the remaining energy I have.
We
haven’t been up for weeks so I need to clean the yard. (outside of being lit on fire, there’s
not much else I really wanted to do more than clean the yard…Ah but patience,
that’ll come later). Also the
battery in the boat was dead, so my wife took it out prior to me coming up and
attached it to an overnight charger.
This
is how the rest of the weekend went:
1) While doing heavy lifting in
the backyard cleanup project, I threw my back out…just wonderful. (now you take the curmudgeon factor
& the bad back, and my happy needle is hovering just above empty)
2) Still in a funk, I wasn’t
paying attention and put the battery back into the boat… backwards. I attached the Negative to the Positive
and… (I had a clue something was wrong when I couldn’t turn the engine
off. But what really gave it away
was when smoke started coming out of the ignition key slot… as well as the
battery compartment) So I fried the boat…disappointing a waiting crew,
clad in swimwear and tubing gear.
I also missed the only two-hour time slot that it didn’t rain that weekend.
Question you may be asking
yourself is, well if you melted the ignition and the boat was running…how did
you turn it off? Simple, I
electrocuted myself a number of times as I disconnected the sizzling
battery. (Now I can recharge my
Blackberry in about 30 seconds by just holding in the palm of my hand.)
3) Next, time for Chef-Boy-R-D
to spring into action. I go to
start the dinner charcoal briquettes in my Weber Kettle…taking a stick match
and flicking it on the box. As I
strike the box, the matchstick breaks in half, flying in different
directions. The head of the match lands on the underbelly of the last
digit of my left thumb. I look down (and again in my crispy mind this is
happening in slow motion) I see the head of the match begin to ignite on my
skin…kind of like when a sparkler goes off. (Think Homer Simpson)
4) Sunday morning, still in a
daze, I go out to buy bagels and fruit for breakfast. Not paying attention but yet again, I find when I get back
home that half of the bagels I bought are as hard as rocks and more than half
of the fruit is rotten. (People are loving me)
5) Sunday night, being that my
back is still spasming, I had my 17-year-old son drive me home. Of course that won’t be stressful.
This is the first time he’ll be making this 2-hour drive that includes a nasty
patch on route 80. I won’t provide
details for fear that the Good Hands people will take my auto insurance policy
and with those good hands…viscously rip it into a thousand pieces. The only thing I will say is that a
couple of months ago I was asking my insurance carrier how I might lower my
rates since we’re adding my son to our policy. They suggested that they insert
a blue box in the car he uses that monitors his driving. We’re going to pass on that option…
P.S.
Last
weekend I had too many friends and family over. I had to breakdown and use the small propane gas grill to
augment my Weber Kettle capacity.
The push button starter on the communist gas grill wouldn’t work, so I
walked across the deck and got my trusty box of stick matches…the same ones
that attacked me three weeks before.
I throw a match into the grill…remembering way too late that I had “not”
turned the gas off. This is not
good at all. I will say, “I got
the grill lit.” It happened
literally in a flash – as the bursting cloud of flames were at a “Holy Sh*t”
level. One good outcome is I no
longer have to worry about the hair thinning on the top of my head.
The
last thing I remember was my Godson screaming to my wife, “Hey Aunt Joanie,
have you ever seen Uncle Steve without eye brows?”
