Apr
13
Get Your Hands off My Ladder
April 13, 2008 |
I’m kind of digging this strange feeling of waking up in the morning and not immediately finding myself reviewing the yard-long checklist of things I need to get done on a house somewhere. I still need to give House #2 a good cleaning and shift some stuff out of the garage there into storage, but that sucker is mostly done. The buyer’s are having their inspection done next week, so who knows what will suddenly jump back on the to-do list, but for now I’m in rest and relaxtion mode (or as close as I ever get to that).
Kind of a funny scene yesterday as I was driving to Austin to buy a new laptop and drop off my extension ladder with a friend doing some painting on his house, and I just threw the aluminum extension ladder in the back of my truck and took off, like I’ve done a thousand times. My wife always nags me about not strapping down anything in the back of my truck, but, bless her heart, it’s more from a lack of grasping the physics involved, as she’s convinced that anything in the bed of the truck that weighs less than 300 lbs is subject to constant gale-force winds and in imminent danger of blowing out.
So I’m driving along merrily at about 70 mph yesterday and remark to myself, “Self, gee, it’s damn windy today”, as we were getting 20-30 mph gusts of wind, enough to blow my wee little truck around on the highway, when suddenly a huge gust of wind just blew the ladder right out of my truck. I mean, just cleanly whisked it out and sent it spinning (thankfully) about twenty feet over onto the side of the road, well away from traffic when it finally touched down.
The funny part is that by the time I slowed down, turned around, and got back to it (which took about 90 seconds), some dude had already stopped and was loading it into his truck. I got out of my truck came running up and he’s looking at me like we’re about to have a Mortal Kombat style deathmatch there on the side of the road over a $50 ladder, but he caved in fairly quickly and laughed when I explained what happened, as I was like “Dude, look at all the paint cans and drop cloths and other sundry crap in the back of my truck. Seriously, that’s my ladder.” (Well, okay, I didn’t actually use the word “sundry”.)
Manage to safely deliver the ladder (after, umm, strapping it down securely) and bought a new laptop in preparation for another poker reporting gig for PokerRoom.com in Las Vegas from April 15th-27th. I’m not 100% thrilled to be gone that long, especially when trying to close on House #2, but it’s good money and hard to turn down staying at the Bellagio with meals and other perks provided. And yeah, I likes the Vegas, so I can’t really complain, I just wish my wife was there and that the trip was about 5 days shorter, as a week is usually enough time for me to get pretty sick of being away from home.
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By the way… had you really said sundry, I don’t think you would’ve gotten your ladder back.