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davidnWhat a couple of days. I think that I only ever managed to get through my life because nothing ever really happened in it, and I can't really cope with... events. My self-declared holiday had been going perfectly quietly until I stepped out into the world, but once you do that, the world starts giving you things to think about.
Whitney's parents are here for a while, and on the day they arrived, a huge van drew up outside our house and started gouging huge chunks out of the road. Their preferred digging technique seemed to be hitting the asphalt with the back of a JCB shovel as a makeshift hammer, but otherwise things had gone smoothly enough and they had cleared off by the time it came for them to park outside. The next morning, though, I saw the workmen outside staring glumly at the hole cover they'd left, which my father-in-law had parked his colossal hire car on.
So I decided I'd better move it away, and went out with their keys - the roadworks men were friendly and relieved to see someone who could move the car, and one of them asked me what I thought of this new Ford Explorer. I had to say that my car was actually the one in the driveway (which would have fit comfortably into the back seat of this goliath) because I am not eight feet tall and am comfortable with the size of my penis in all three measurable dimensions. Operating it felt rather like driving one of the Transformers - feeling like I was ten feet up from the road, I had to perch on the front of the seat and just crawl it along, hoping the road was wide enough to actually get through the vehicles parked on either side, and then left it in front of somebody else's house as soon as I saw a parking space wide enough to accommodate it, which it fit into with all the finesse of an elephant trying to squeeze into a pair of size M tights.
On the walk back, I was performing my new-found habit of looking at other people's makes and models of cars, and suddenly realized that every single one of them had a rectangular sticker in the window that I didn't have. This is the Massachusetts inspection sticker, which the dealership had never given me through some oversight. And after visiting Whitney's work just after lunch, where I managed to get hold of our salesman and arrange to pick it up, I returned to the car to find that someefficient public servant diligently doing their job fascist bastard had put a ticket on the windscreen for not having the inspection sticker in the five-minute space between my phoning to arrange getting it and returning to the vehicle. But once we got to the dealer, they took the ticket in and paid it without question, for their omission - I think we chose our place well, they're great people.
And to wind down from that and taking the car out to a neighbouring town on the freeway and back in the evening, we somehow decided that the best home activity for today was to screw a massive plate into the wall to hold up our television. We had actually had the wall mount since moving in, but hadn't ever put it up because it had instructions like "Get your knees to unbuckle enough to hold the entire thing in place on the wall while you mark the positions of the mounting points with one of your other twelve arms". With Whitney's father's help (and two separate trips to the local B&Q equivalent to retrieve missing parts and tools), though, it's finally up where we'd meant it to be last June, firmly bolted to the walls studs and unlikely to come down even during a major earthquake.
It's strange being able to tug such a huge piece of electronics about to re-align it, remembering that its mount is made of something stronger than steel and it's impossible to accidentally knock it off. Actually, now what I'm afraid of most is that we'll come downstairs tomorrow morning and it will indeed still be firmly fixed to the studs, which it's ripped clean out along with most of the wall on its journey face down on the floor.
Whitney's parents are here for a while, and on the day they arrived, a huge van drew up outside our house and started gouging huge chunks out of the road. Their preferred digging technique seemed to be hitting the asphalt with the back of a JCB shovel as a makeshift hammer, but otherwise things had gone smoothly enough and they had cleared off by the time it came for them to park outside. The next morning, though, I saw the workmen outside staring glumly at the hole cover they'd left, which my father-in-law had parked his colossal hire car on.
So I decided I'd better move it away, and went out with their keys - the roadworks men were friendly and relieved to see someone who could move the car, and one of them asked me what I thought of this new Ford Explorer. I had to say that my car was actually the one in the driveway (which would have fit comfortably into the back seat of this goliath) because I am not eight feet tall and am comfortable with the size of my penis in all three measurable dimensions. Operating it felt rather like driving one of the Transformers - feeling like I was ten feet up from the road, I had to perch on the front of the seat and just crawl it along, hoping the road was wide enough to actually get through the vehicles parked on either side, and then left it in front of somebody else's house as soon as I saw a parking space wide enough to accommodate it, which it fit into with all the finesse of an elephant trying to squeeze into a pair of size M tights.
On the walk back, I was performing my new-found habit of looking at other people's makes and models of cars, and suddenly realized that every single one of them had a rectangular sticker in the window that I didn't have. This is the Massachusetts inspection sticker, which the dealership had never given me through some oversight. And after visiting Whitney's work just after lunch, where I managed to get hold of our salesman and arrange to pick it up, I returned to the car to find that some
And to wind down from that and taking the car out to a neighbouring town on the freeway and back in the evening, we somehow decided that the best home activity for today was to screw a massive plate into the wall to hold up our television. We had actually had the wall mount since moving in, but hadn't ever put it up because it had instructions like "Get your knees to unbuckle enough to hold the entire thing in place on the wall while you mark the positions of the mounting points with one of your other twelve arms". With Whitney's father's help (and two separate trips to the local B&Q equivalent to retrieve missing parts and tools), though, it's finally up where we'd meant it to be last June, firmly bolted to the walls studs and unlikely to come down even during a major earthquake.
It's strange being able to tug such a huge piece of electronics about to re-align it, remembering that its mount is made of something stronger than steel and it's impossible to accidentally knock it off. Actually, now what I'm afraid of most is that we'll come downstairs tomorrow morning and it will indeed still be firmly fixed to the studs, which it's ripped clean out along with most of the wall on its journey face down on the floor.
