Here's a story. Of a lovely lady. (Me)
OK, stop laughing.
ANYWAY, this happened to me last week. As you may or may not know, I've been studying martial arts for the last 5 or so years. Recently I came to the very difficult decision to take a sabbatical from tae kwon do in order to spend more time at the gym. My knees have been really hurting lately and it would take a few days to recover from TKD class which would happen just in time for another TKD class. In between I would be too sore to do any other exercise. This did not amount to enough activity so I was getting steadily less...visibly fit...which only exacerbated the knee issues even more. So, I decided to take a break and go to the gym at least 4 times a week (one day with a personal trainer, even). I saw someone I knew from TKD last week and was asked why I'm not in class anymore. I gave the quick knees-recovery-sabbatical explanation and was given the following advice:
"You should lose weight, then."
I'll give you a moment to process that.
...
...
...
I know, right? Who says that? Several responses flitted across my brain before I answered. They were:
"Huh. That never occurred to me! Wow! Thanks for the advice! Before I go, will you help me tie my shoe? I forgot how. Also, please explain to me how to open this door. Do I push the knob thingy? Turn it? Do speak a password into it? Dang, things are so confusing!"
or
"You know you said that out loud, right?"
or
"Considering I almost certainly outweigh you and I have a black belt in tae kwon do, would you like to amend this conversation in any way?"
But I went with:
"Uh, yeah, that's the plan."
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
I'm Baaaaack!
So, yeah. I'm sorry that it's been quite a while since I've posted. I've been teaching an over-overload this semester and it's been insane in the membrane. In the grand scheme of things, I can't really complain since no matter how crazy my schedule is it only ever lasts for three months before I get a minimum of a month off. Here's a hodge podge of stuff for you:
1. I am now down to one pair of pants that fit me. Stress and the fact that I like to do most of my grading in restaurants have really taken a toll on the old waistline (and buttline, and pretty much all my lines). Why am I sharing this with you? I had originally vowed to not purchase more pants seeing as how I have many, many pairs of pants that are only 10 pounds away but after a marathon session of grading at Panera (see?) I decided to go see what I could find at Target. I headed over to the women's clothes and wandered around trying to find something that seemed to be made of natural fibers and didn't have some dipshitty sparkly butterfly pattern glued to the pockets. Right before I decided to abandon hope and go throw myself at a pizza, I found a pair of khaki pants that looked workable. Not low-rise? Check. Made from cotton? Check. Waistband that won't dig in when I sit down? Check. Inexpensive? Check. Thank goodness! I grabbed them off the rack and started to head to the checkout lanes. Right before I got there something on the tag caught my eye. I looked closer, turned around and put them back where I found them, and speed walked out of the store.
They were maternity pants. As the kids say, FML.
2. Remember when I told you I got my feet tangled up in my pants, fell down, and messed up my toe? It's still messed up! A toe is not a complicated body part. What the hell could still be wrong with it? Frankly, if this keeps up I might have to let it go. Times are tough and if it's not going to hold up its end of the bargain I'll find another toe.
3. Thank goodness for iPods at the gym. I've been doing a lot of interval stuff on the elliptical lately and I suspect that I probably sound like an obscene phone caller at times.
4. Last Tuesday I had the house to myself for the evening. This is what I did:
3:00 I arrived home from work
3:15 I headed to the grocery store
5:00 I made tacos for dinner (the totally inauthetic orange powder in the beef kind)
5:30 - 7:00 I watched some TV
7:15 I went to bed
I'm so wild and crazy that I go beyond wild and crazy and end up wrapping around into completely boring.
Thanks for reading, all. Have a good night.
1. I am now down to one pair of pants that fit me. Stress and the fact that I like to do most of my grading in restaurants have really taken a toll on the old waistline (and buttline, and pretty much all my lines). Why am I sharing this with you? I had originally vowed to not purchase more pants seeing as how I have many, many pairs of pants that are only 10 pounds away but after a marathon session of grading at Panera (see?) I decided to go see what I could find at Target. I headed over to the women's clothes and wandered around trying to find something that seemed to be made of natural fibers and didn't have some dipshitty sparkly butterfly pattern glued to the pockets. Right before I decided to abandon hope and go throw myself at a pizza, I found a pair of khaki pants that looked workable. Not low-rise? Check. Made from cotton? Check. Waistband that won't dig in when I sit down? Check. Inexpensive? Check. Thank goodness! I grabbed them off the rack and started to head to the checkout lanes. Right before I got there something on the tag caught my eye. I looked closer, turned around and put them back where I found them, and speed walked out of the store.
They were maternity pants. As the kids say, FML.
2. Remember when I told you I got my feet tangled up in my pants, fell down, and messed up my toe? It's still messed up! A toe is not a complicated body part. What the hell could still be wrong with it? Frankly, if this keeps up I might have to let it go. Times are tough and if it's not going to hold up its end of the bargain I'll find another toe.
3. Thank goodness for iPods at the gym. I've been doing a lot of interval stuff on the elliptical lately and I suspect that I probably sound like an obscene phone caller at times.
4. Last Tuesday I had the house to myself for the evening. This is what I did:
3:00 I arrived home from work
3:15 I headed to the grocery store
5:00 I made tacos for dinner (the totally inauthetic orange powder in the beef kind)
5:30 - 7:00 I watched some TV
7:15 I went to bed
I'm so wild and crazy that I go beyond wild and crazy and end up wrapping around into completely boring.
Thanks for reading, all. Have a good night.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Can't You Smell That Smell?
Since I've blogged in the past about how I find some people stinky and wish they would not be so ick-worthy it's only fair that I share this story. I don't want to but...well, you'll see.
So my morning routine is to get up, shower, brush teeth, get dressed, pack breakfast and lunch and then let the cats out of the basement. Before you think I'm cruel, the basement is a nice place for them: they have beds, cat towers, 4 litter pans (for 3 cats), and sometimes a toasty wood stove. The cats have to go downstairs at night or one of them (Ibsen) will spend the night walking around my room pushing things off my dressers onto the floor and molesting the blinds. It's not restful for me. If I decide to take a nap during tthe day this same cat will join the others sleeping peacefully next to me but there's something about the hours from 11p.m. to 3 a.m. that are ripe for noisemaking to my friend Ibsen.
OK, so they come running upstairs each morning and I head downstairs to make sure they have food. This morning I was greeted by a terrible smell that needed immediate investigation. One of the other cats (Dennis) was a stray for a few years in our neighborhood in Lowell before we took him in and so he's a little odd. One of his peculiarities is that he doesn't really understand about using litter to cover up his poop. He knows he supposed to do something but he's just not sure what so he dutifully scrapes at the wall and the floor outside the pan. For a really long time. This, of course, does absolutely nothing to cover the poop in question but eventually he figures he's put in enough time and he walks away. If I'm home and I hear him tirelessly scraping at the walls I go downstairs and shoo him away and cover it myself (with a scooper, don't get any weird ideas) before the stinkiness can spread.
So back to this morning. I open the door, it's smelly, I go downstairs and cover up Dennis' latest triumph. All fairly routine. I had a moment before I left the house where I wondered if I'd stepped in something but after a frantic moment of shoe checking I saw that I hadn't. I chalked it up to my nose having flashbacks and left for work.
I drive about a mile and a half to the train station and then ride the train for 45 minutes before hopping a bus or walking the rest of the way to campus. It's a pretty stress-free way to commute as I can nap or read for the whole train portion of the trip. The downside is that I am beholden to the train schedules. There is no turning around and heading home because I forgot something.
Today, as I settled myself onto the train I smelled something icky again. I checked my shoes again thinking I'd find something in the more-well-lit-than-my-living-room train car. Already I was steeling myself for the phone call I'd have to make to Huppy to tell her that I may or may not have stepped in the poop or stinky barf and tracked it who knows where before leaving. This would be a bad phone call at any time but I thought it would be particularly unwelcome at 6:30 a.m. I had a moment of relief when I saw that my shoes were as poop-free as I'd originally suspected. That vanished when I realized that somehow, someway in my brief interaction with my cats I had gotten a dime-sized amount of poop on my shirt. MY SHIRT! And I'm on a train that will be traveling in only one freaking direction for the 45 minutes getting steadily more crowded. Oh, and I have poop on me. Fortunately I was wearing a button-up shirt with a t-shirt on underneath so I unbuttoned it and rolled the offending portion of the shirt up like a coke-head's dollar, jammed the roll under my armpit, and zipped up my coat. This put many layers between the crap and the rest of the world.
I'm happy to say that for as paranoid as I was I didn't smell it again until I made it to my office and took off the button-up shirt and unrolled it to get a better look. Cleaning it off was not an option because I had rolled the shirt up and I couldn't be 100% sure I knew where all of it was anymore. Now I know I mentioned that I was wearing a t-shirt so you may think that it shouldn't have been a problem. Not true. I bought this t-shirt too small for the express purpose of being able to wear it under other things. I thought I was going to have to cancel my 8:00 class and wait for the bookstore to open at 9:00 so I could buy another shirt but I remembered that I had a full zip sweatshirt stashed in a desk drawer. I haven't even looked at this thing in a about a year and a half so I was relieved to find it still there.
My new problem: my t-shirt was a kelly green ringer and the sweatshirt was olive green. Also, it appeared to have food on the sleeve. Trust me - the kelly green/olive green thing was a real problem (the food ont he sleeve wasn't optimal either). Not a poop level problem but a problem nevertheless. I freely admit that my main consideration in buying clothes is comfort, not fashion. However, no matter how ill-fitting or unattractive my clothes may be they never, ever, ever clash. Ever. To me, seeing such a thing is as grating as hearing a note sung off-key. So for three uncomfortable hours I felt like fire ants were crawling on my body because I had on this terrible color scheme. Finally, when I got a break between classes I went to the bookstore and bought a grey sweatshirt. Ahhhh. I was able to focus much better after that.
My last class of the day ran late so I never made it back to my office for leaving to catch the train home. This means the poop shirt is still rolled up in a tight ball on my desk so I have that to look forward to on Monday.
As for how the poop got there, I only have theories. It definitely came out of a cat and I haven't found any outside of the approved litter boxes so I am guessing it occured when I was covering up Dennis' tribute to digestion.
So, aside from that, it was a pretty good day!
OK, so they come running upstairs each morning and I head downstairs to make sure they have food. This morning I was greeted by a terrible smell that needed immediate investigation. One of the other cats (Dennis) was a stray for a few years in our neighborhood in Lowell before we took him in and so he's a little odd. One of his peculiarities is that he doesn't really understand about using litter to cover up his poop. He knows he supposed to do something but he's just not sure what so he dutifully scrapes at the wall and the floor outside the pan. For a really long time. This, of course, does absolutely nothing to cover the poop in question but eventually he figures he's put in enough time and he walks away. If I'm home and I hear him tirelessly scraping at the walls I go downstairs and shoo him away and cover it myself (with a scooper, don't get any weird ideas) before the stinkiness can spread.
So back to this morning. I open the door, it's smelly, I go downstairs and cover up Dennis' latest triumph. All fairly routine. I had a moment before I left the house where I wondered if I'd stepped in something but after a frantic moment of shoe checking I saw that I hadn't. I chalked it up to my nose having flashbacks and left for work.
I drive about a mile and a half to the train station and then ride the train for 45 minutes before hopping a bus or walking the rest of the way to campus. It's a pretty stress-free way to commute as I can nap or read for the whole train portion of the trip. The downside is that I am beholden to the train schedules. There is no turning around and heading home because I forgot something.
Today, as I settled myself onto the train I smelled something icky again. I checked my shoes again thinking I'd find something in the more-well-lit-than-my-living-room train car. Already I was steeling myself for the phone call I'd have to make to Huppy to tell her that I may or may not have stepped in the poop or stinky barf and tracked it who knows where before leaving. This would be a bad phone call at any time but I thought it would be particularly unwelcome at 6:30 a.m. I had a moment of relief when I saw that my shoes were as poop-free as I'd originally suspected. That vanished when I realized that somehow, someway in my brief interaction with my cats I had gotten a dime-sized amount of poop on my shirt. MY SHIRT! And I'm on a train that will be traveling in only one freaking direction for the 45 minutes getting steadily more crowded. Oh, and I have poop on me. Fortunately I was wearing a button-up shirt with a t-shirt on underneath so I unbuttoned it and rolled the offending portion of the shirt up like a coke-head's dollar, jammed the roll under my armpit, and zipped up my coat. This put many layers between the crap and the rest of the world.
I'm happy to say that for as paranoid as I was I didn't smell it again until I made it to my office and took off the button-up shirt and unrolled it to get a better look. Cleaning it off was not an option because I had rolled the shirt up and I couldn't be 100% sure I knew where all of it was anymore. Now I know I mentioned that I was wearing a t-shirt so you may think that it shouldn't have been a problem. Not true. I bought this t-shirt too small for the express purpose of being able to wear it under other things. I thought I was going to have to cancel my 8:00 class and wait for the bookstore to open at 9:00 so I could buy another shirt but I remembered that I had a full zip sweatshirt stashed in a desk drawer. I haven't even looked at this thing in a about a year and a half so I was relieved to find it still there.
My new problem: my t-shirt was a kelly green ringer and the sweatshirt was olive green. Also, it appeared to have food on the sleeve. Trust me - the kelly green/olive green thing was a real problem (the food ont he sleeve wasn't optimal either). Not a poop level problem but a problem nevertheless. I freely admit that my main consideration in buying clothes is comfort, not fashion. However, no matter how ill-fitting or unattractive my clothes may be they never, ever, ever clash. Ever. To me, seeing such a thing is as grating as hearing a note sung off-key. So for three uncomfortable hours I felt like fire ants were crawling on my body because I had on this terrible color scheme. Finally, when I got a break between classes I went to the bookstore and bought a grey sweatshirt. Ahhhh. I was able to focus much better after that.
My last class of the day ran late so I never made it back to my office for leaving to catch the train home. This means the poop shirt is still rolled up in a tight ball on my desk so I have that to look forward to on Monday.
As for how the poop got there, I only have theories. It definitely came out of a cat and I haven't found any outside of the approved litter boxes so I am guessing it occured when I was covering up Dennis' tribute to digestion.
So, aside from that, it was a pretty good day!
Monday, February 1, 2010
It burns! It burns!
SERIOUSLY?!?!? Suddenly my TV is riddled with commercials for this place. Schools don't just start overnight. It's not like a hot dog cart, it requires a lot of planning, hiring, leasing of space, you name it. So how it is that all that happened and no one said, "You know, maybe we would have more credibility if we had different initials."
I wonder if they sell t-shirts. I might need one.
I wonder if they sell t-shirts. I might need one.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
All You Need Is Love (And an Emesis Basin)
This blog post is will begin with a shoutout to Joe who said I needed to hurry up and post something before he leaves on his trip tomorrow. Holla!
I love books. LOVE books. I read while watching TV, sitting at stop lights (shhh), riding the train, before movies start - have book will read. You get the point. I read for pleasure almost exclusively. The types of books I read tend to be mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, or fantasy. I do not read romance and I do not read books that are about horrible lingering deaths. I’ve mentioned before my aversion to sad movies. This rule holds for books too. When I was much younger I read Sophie’s Choice and thought I’d never recover. Also, I don’t read teenage angst vampire porn. I might have to, though, just so I can say definitively that I don’t like it. I grew my hair out once for that very same reason. (shudder)
OK, back on topic. Here’s what drives me around the bend. When I’m choosing my next book and I read the cover and there’s an appropriate amount of people missing/bodies found/zombies reanimating I am happy. I feel utterly betrayed when I get into the story only to realize that I am being tricked TRICKED into reading a g**damned romance. Suddenly all the spooky events and plot twists are just a device to pressure two people together so that they can take comfort in each other’s arms. Barforama.
Now you’re probably wondering, Maia why do you hate love so much? I don’t. I swear. I have what I believe are perfectly valid reasons to hate this sub-genre (the romance in disguise). I will enumerate them here and you can decide for yourself if I am just an old grump.
I love books. LOVE books. I read while watching TV, sitting at stop lights (shhh), riding the train, before movies start - have book will read. You get the point. I read for pleasure almost exclusively. The types of books I read tend to be mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, or fantasy. I do not read romance and I do not read books that are about horrible lingering deaths. I’ve mentioned before my aversion to sad movies. This rule holds for books too. When I was much younger I read Sophie’s Choice and thought I’d never recover. Also, I don’t read teenage angst vampire porn. I might have to, though, just so I can say definitively that I don’t like it. I grew my hair out once for that very same reason. (shudder)
OK, back on topic. Here’s what drives me around the bend. When I’m choosing my next book and I read the cover and there’s an appropriate amount of people missing/bodies found/zombies reanimating I am happy. I feel utterly betrayed when I get into the story only to realize that I am being tricked TRICKED into reading a g**damned romance. Suddenly all the spooky events and plot twists are just a device to pressure two people together so that they can take comfort in each other’s arms. Barforama.
Now you’re probably wondering, Maia why do you hate love so much? I don’t. I swear. I have what I believe are perfectly valid reasons to hate this sub-genre (the romance in disguise). I will enumerate them here and you can decide for yourself if I am just an old grump.
- Did I mention how they’re tricky? The fact that they don’t openly fly the romance flag on the dust jacket summary tells me that they know this is some bullshit too.
- They follow the same couple of scripts every time:
- Script 1: Woman is imperiled, man protects her, they fall in love. This kind typically has a lot of description of her trim, athletic body and his kind eyes. What it boils down to is that she is weak and can’t handle shit and he is turned on by her obvious need for a big strong daddy. Ugh. I hate them both.
- Script 2: Woman and man are both strong (usually law enforcement ) types, they meet, she gets kidnapped and almost killed, he finds her and saves her life. The way the bad guy captures her is by some lame-ass ploy like sending a text message claiming to be from the good guy setting up a meet at an abandoned warehouse. Never mind the fact that our protagonists have never communicated by text prior to this point in the book. These books spend so much time describing the burgeoning love between the two of them that they can only support the most moronic of characters
- Script 3: My favorite. The bad guy is doing bad guy things. Stalking, killing, whatever. He’s soooo bad. This version has a woman and at least two men involved. They’re all trying to solve the crimes. Teamwork! Sexual tension! One guy is really nice and pines from afar and the other one is dynamic and charming. Naturally, this is the guy our lady fair picks. (Moment of silence for that pioneer John Hughes, everyone). The book is nearing its end and terror still reigns but our romance is hot and heavy. Suddenly it all goes wrong. In a surprise twist we find out the Mr. Right is actually Mr. PsychoKillerQu'est-ceQueC'est . And by surprise twist I mean something that has been painfully obvious for at least 100 pages. And from this, ladies and gentlemen, we learn that you should always choose the quiet creepy dude who loves you from afar over the fun exciting dude who secretly wants to make you into a sofa cover. Rookie mistake.
- I guess most of my beefs can be distilled down to the fact that having a romantic plot line seems to give the author permission to completely phone in the rest of the story. They say that love makes people stupid and apparently so does writing about love. Which makes me stupid right now. Whoa.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The One About Bowling
I just got home from bowling. It's been several years since I've gone bowling and several years again since the time before that. I had a lot of fun and hopefully won't wait another several years before I go again. Here are a few observations:
1. I have clearly not seen a single music video in a very, very long time because although I recognized most of the songs that they played the only familiar video was for....wait for it....Born in the USA by The Boss Himself. Vintage!
2. This bowling alley color coded the balls by weight so you could see from a distance if another lane had a ball with potential or not. This is absolute genius and also such a painfully obvious thing to do that I can't believe this is the first place I've seen that does it (I'm looking at you, Plaza Lanes in Washington, IL). Not having to slink around the drunks in the other lanes furtively spinning around each ball until you could see the weight and stick you fingers into the holes to check the fit was such a boon.
3. Speaking of hands and fingers....I really do not think I'm a germaphobe. I know I'm not. Something is definitely happening to me as I get older, though. Perhaps it's just an enhanced awareness of my own mortality. Regardless, about an hour and a half into the three hours of bowling one part of my brain seceded from the union in order to dedicate itself to fixating on the horror show of pestilence that I must have on my hands.
4. On a related note, on the drive home there was a lull in conversation that I chose to fill with, "So, how bad do you want to touch your face right now?" and got the response "Oh my God, it's killing me." I know we could have washed our hands before we left but, honestly, hands washed in a public restroom are only half-washed. I kept myself distracted with fantasies of owning a home autoclave.
5. I did better than I expected at bowling and I credit it this to the fact that I wore a bowling shirt. You gotta dress the part. Plus, in true Big Lebowski fashion, I consumed White Russians. Also, I find that the more of an ass I make of myself the better I do. Most of my strikes came when I ended up in a weird sort of airplane/crane hybrid stance.
6. I must be so much more out of shape then I think I am because an hour into it I was sweating like it was my job and already starting to feel a blister form on my right big toe. Pathetic!
7. There was absolutely no security with the bowling shoes. Granted, they were half neon yellow and half neon orange. But seriously, in my more morally ambiguous and less germaphobic youth I totally would have ended up with a pair of bowling shoes at the end of the night. Do people not do that anymore or do they have tracker chips in them? Can you imagine the embarrassment of being tracked down the my Bowling Shoes Retrieval Task Force?
8. That rug really tied the room together.
1. I have clearly not seen a single music video in a very, very long time because although I recognized most of the songs that they played the only familiar video was for....wait for it....Born in the USA by The Boss Himself. Vintage!
2. This bowling alley color coded the balls by weight so you could see from a distance if another lane had a ball with potential or not. This is absolute genius and also such a painfully obvious thing to do that I can't believe this is the first place I've seen that does it (I'm looking at you, Plaza Lanes in Washington, IL). Not having to slink around the drunks in the other lanes furtively spinning around each ball until you could see the weight and stick you fingers into the holes to check the fit was such a boon.
3. Speaking of hands and fingers....I really do not think I'm a germaphobe. I know I'm not. Something is definitely happening to me as I get older, though. Perhaps it's just an enhanced awareness of my own mortality. Regardless, about an hour and a half into the three hours of bowling one part of my brain seceded from the union in order to dedicate itself to fixating on the horror show of pestilence that I must have on my hands.
4. On a related note, on the drive home there was a lull in conversation that I chose to fill with, "So, how bad do you want to touch your face right now?" and got the response "Oh my God, it's killing me." I know we could have washed our hands before we left but, honestly, hands washed in a public restroom are only half-washed. I kept myself distracted with fantasies of owning a home autoclave.
5. I did better than I expected at bowling and I credit it this to the fact that I wore a bowling shirt. You gotta dress the part. Plus, in true Big Lebowski fashion, I consumed White Russians. Also, I find that the more of an ass I make of myself the better I do. Most of my strikes came when I ended up in a weird sort of airplane/crane hybrid stance.
6. I must be so much more out of shape then I think I am because an hour into it I was sweating like it was my job and already starting to feel a blister form on my right big toe. Pathetic!
7. There was absolutely no security with the bowling shoes. Granted, they were half neon yellow and half neon orange. But seriously, in my more morally ambiguous and less germaphobic youth I totally would have ended up with a pair of bowling shoes at the end of the night. Do people not do that anymore or do they have tracker chips in them? Can you imagine the embarrassment of being tracked down the my Bowling Shoes Retrieval Task Force?
8. That rug really tied the room together.
Monday, January 18, 2010
A Case of Cerebral Flatulence
There is a water filter in my basement that filters the water for the whole house. Once in a blue moon it needs to be changed. It's not a very difficult thing to do. This is the story about how two reasonably intelligent people managed to turn it into a circus.
To begin, it was Huppy who decided it was time to change the filter. I was in another room and I could hear her steadily growing frustration level. It seems there's a knob at the top of the filter that allows you to bypass it. This is helpful when taking the filter out so that the only water that comes out is that just sitting inside the filter itself. This knob was not submitting to her efforts to turn it to bypass so she turned the water off at the knobs on the water pipes above it instead. This is where I wandered in to see if a fresh set of hands (or, to be honest, a bit of cheerful optimism) could make some headway. As she unscrewed the filter, water started spraying out a little. This wasn't necessarily worrisome as we knew that there would be some water already in the pipes. Well, I decided (this was my decision and my decision alone, world) that the thing to do would be to just go ahead and unscrew the filter all the way. My theory was that, like a bottle of soda, once the pressure was relieved the water in there would fall into the bucket underneath the filter and we could proceed. This is not even close to what happened. Instead, the water started spraying out in all directions more agressively and then when I made that final turn it blew the filter housing off and a gush of arctic water came pouring out with absolutely no intention of stopping. Obviously I tried to put the filter back on immediately. This proved to be a challenge due to the sheer force of the water I was pushing against and the fact that it was so cold my hands were already numb and there were shooting pains going up my arms. Did I mention this frigid water was going everywhere? At this point in my story there was a lot of shouting happening. I distinctly remember actually saying the words, "Oh my God, what have I done?". Prior to this event I would have classified that statement as something that is only said in books or movies and not by actual people. I won't keep you in suspense, I did finally manage to get the damned thing back on but not until the water had soaked everything within 5 feet of the filter (including me) and a little o-ring type seal had been carried off in the deluge. The absence of the seal meant that once the filter housing was tightened again there was still a fine mist spraying out. It was a vast improvement, though, so we took a moment to regroup. Oh, hey! There's the shutoff valve! I turned it, the fine mist turned into a fine trickle, and all was right with the world. Except, of course, the shitload of water dripping off of everything.
Lest you think we are completely inept let me add a few notes.
1. The utility closet has no light in it so all activities are done by the light of a flashlight.
2. The big, monster flashlight is not where it is supposed to be so we had to resort to the small crappy one that only allows you to see about 6 square inches at a time.
3. The shutoff valves that were originally turned off were at eye level are bringht red.
4. The shutoff valve that actually worked was gross, dusty, rusty, and located at ankle level.
5. I should not try to help.
On the upside, Huppy's mood improved dramatically when the situation went from "Big strong Huppy is too weak to turn the damned knob" to "Maia made a huge mess (again)". All is as it should be.
To begin, it was Huppy who decided it was time to change the filter. I was in another room and I could hear her steadily growing frustration level. It seems there's a knob at the top of the filter that allows you to bypass it. This is helpful when taking the filter out so that the only water that comes out is that just sitting inside the filter itself. This knob was not submitting to her efforts to turn it to bypass so she turned the water off at the knobs on the water pipes above it instead. This is where I wandered in to see if a fresh set of hands (or, to be honest, a bit of cheerful optimism) could make some headway. As she unscrewed the filter, water started spraying out a little. This wasn't necessarily worrisome as we knew that there would be some water already in the pipes. Well, I decided (this was my decision and my decision alone, world) that the thing to do would be to just go ahead and unscrew the filter all the way. My theory was that, like a bottle of soda, once the pressure was relieved the water in there would fall into the bucket underneath the filter and we could proceed. This is not even close to what happened. Instead, the water started spraying out in all directions more agressively and then when I made that final turn it blew the filter housing off and a gush of arctic water came pouring out with absolutely no intention of stopping. Obviously I tried to put the filter back on immediately. This proved to be a challenge due to the sheer force of the water I was pushing against and the fact that it was so cold my hands were already numb and there were shooting pains going up my arms. Did I mention this frigid water was going everywhere? At this point in my story there was a lot of shouting happening. I distinctly remember actually saying the words, "Oh my God, what have I done?". Prior to this event I would have classified that statement as something that is only said in books or movies and not by actual people. I won't keep you in suspense, I did finally manage to get the damned thing back on but not until the water had soaked everything within 5 feet of the filter (including me) and a little o-ring type seal had been carried off in the deluge. The absence of the seal meant that once the filter housing was tightened again there was still a fine mist spraying out. It was a vast improvement, though, so we took a moment to regroup. Oh, hey! There's the shutoff valve! I turned it, the fine mist turned into a fine trickle, and all was right with the world. Except, of course, the shitload of water dripping off of everything.
1. The utility closet has no light in it so all activities are done by the light of a flashlight.
2. The big, monster flashlight is not where it is supposed to be so we had to resort to the small crappy one that only allows you to see about 6 square inches at a time.
3. The shutoff valves that were originally turned off were at eye level are bringht red.
4. The shutoff valve that actually worked was gross, dusty, rusty, and located at ankle level.
5. I should not try to help.
On the upside, Huppy's mood improved dramatically when the situation went from "Big strong Huppy is too weak to turn the damned knob" to "Maia made a huge mess (again)". All is as it should be.
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