What's Mis-Happening? (A Nevillian Adventure)

Plans for a bike ride to a nearby botanic garden, followed by a picnic, were crushed Friday evening when a rush to first base left Washington with a severely skinned knee and bruised palm.






We spent our Saturday cleaning our respective abodes, playing with our respective cats, and doing nothing much, in hopes that the knee would be mended enough by Sunday. And while it had certainly improved by that point, it hurt for me to even look at it.

So we did what any normal people would do: we planned a day trip, using an online city guide to locate a random place to eat in a small-town (total population: 1,500). It was about 100 miles away, and we took back roads to drive there.

Given our mutual proclivity for photography, we stopped a bit along the way.



Unfortunately, my camera battery died fairly early in the day and I missed a few great shots, including a picture of my grease-stained lips after dinner.

Suffice it to say, the restaurant we drove to made Long John Silver's look like a health nut's paradise. The food was great — I'll give it that — but I think if the conversation inside the restaurant had been a few decibels lower, I could've heard the distinct sound of my arteries clogging.

But any calories we consumed may have very well be burned off by simply being out in the heat (it was 35F here one day last week... but 101F this weekend), or the wonderful day we spent installing air conditioners on Monday.

It was during that little "adventure" that I learned three very valuable lessons:

1. Don't talk to boys when they're doing "man" work
2. If you have concerns, simply resolve them later on your own (i.e. go to Home Depot and get the weather-stripping without asking about the "gap" between the A/C unit and window sill)
3. Never leave a rotting window open & unattended

You see, after Washington installed two A/C units at my place, we went over to his abode for the same routine. He quickly installed one unit in his bedroom, but we faced some difficulty in the living room:

His property management company failed to install storm windows, and the weather here hasn't been too kind on the wood. The area around the handle was rotting, and the window itself was hard to open (it took both of us to make it budge). We opened it and walked away to get something else, only hear a faint rumble and then a loud crash.

The next sound I heard was — as you might expect — an expletive.

That initial shock faded fairly quickly, and I attempted to locate the apartment maintenance guy while Washington taped up the pieces that remained. One shard had cleanly separated and fallen inside his apartment, but the rest of the window was severely cracked, with two shards pointing outside. Not at all a safe situation for passersby a few stories below.

By the day's end, Washington went full-redneck, with plywood in lieu of a window — still further proof that my bad luck is rubbing off onto him.

This all contributed to a delay that prevented us from catching a matinee showing of X-Men III, and then relaxing separately for the rest of the day. Instead, we spent the entire day dealing with four air conditioners, a broken window, and a cat (Washington's, not mine) who kept jumping up on the window sill. At one point his cat made the jump when there wasn't a closed window to stop him; he would've gone right over the ledge if I hadn't caught him mid-air.

The close of our day was somewhat more relaxing; with the sweat & frustration behind us, we ate Thai and rented X-Men 1.5 so I could catch up on what I've missed. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the film, as I'd had no interest in the series until a recent preview for III caught my attention.

Quote of the Weekend: "There's the easy way. And there's the right way... And we're not going to do either."