Somebody Crashed... Again!

BEWARE:

This blog is NOT for the weak-hearted!!


You have been fore-warned.

Proceed with Caution.



Someone decided to go mountain biking tonight in this 100+ degree heat and managed to crash on his way out of the woods. He came home requesting the services of Nurse Kelly again... I am seriously going to have to stock up the medicine cabinet soon if this behavior continues... What AM I going to do with my crazy husband??



Imagine what this feels like when the shower water hit it!

Senior Weinie Roast Anyone?

So yesterday afternoon I received one of those phones calls that nobody ever wants to receive...my grandmother calls me around 4pm to tell me that the assisted living facility caught on fire. Of course, I am instantly panicked... after she bumbles the story to me for about 10 minutes I finally summarize the event into this: fire alarms goes off, they funnel all of the residents outside until alarm stops thinking it was just a drill... they get every resident back inside and then the alarms sounds again... repeat exercise... except this time they know something is burning... I kept asking her what burned up...she would just say, "oh those people on the "other" side dropped a cigarette or something" ... All of her story was questionable after hearing her tall tale from earlier yesterday morning about "all of these spiders here biting me all over my chest"... Her whacky stories seem to be happening more and more these days for some reason. So I called the Director of the facility this afternoon and she confirmed the fire story except that it was not a cigarette (considering they ARE a smoke-free community) but, instead a "memory" resident on the other side of facility had found some matches and decided to light up an artificial tree in her room. I am thinking to myself, "Did she think it was a big marijuana plant or something??" Maybe she is having flashbacks to the "good ol' " days when her father or grandmother used to grow that stuff on the farm? Anyway, all of the elderly ruckus from yesterday complete with fire trucks roaring in, etc. was the result of a small blazing plastic tree set on fire by a memory-impaired Senior who was just passing her time playing with matches like a child would... You know they say that as you get older, that elderly folks revert back to the childhood behaviors... I believe it is true myself... I see so much of my grandmother's inner child almost every day in our conversations...
Anyhoo, at the end of the day they only set off one sprinkler and managed to put the fire out with a fire extinguisher... man, what a day for the Seniors... they get all the excitement!

Back-to-school blues

Today was Day # 2 of the back-to-school saga here in the Atlanta tri-county area. Again this morning, I made myself get up shortly after 5:00am to get ready for work and on the road by 6:00-6:15am...in order to miss the school traffic. Yes, this is my punishment for living in a "high" social class area of Cobb County where the suburban mothers think they have to get up each morning and drive little "Ashton" and little "Carson" to school because they are too good to ride the school bus. And when all those mothers in their massive Excursions and Suburbans pile up on the road, the ride into work for the rest of us all-year-long-worker-bees is plain chaos. Add to the humongous SUV a few screaming spoiled rotten brats, a mother who either talking on the cell phone and/or reading her text messages and emails and juggling her coffee while yelling at the kids to behave... well then you have a vehicle of pure craziness multiplied by all the other similar-situationed yuppy parents trying to haul their kids in to school too! How do I fit into all of this? Well I don't. I am just trying to program myself to get my unwilling butt out of bed an hour earlier each morning so I can drive to work in peace and flowing traffic (and stopping in for a grande cup of frothy goodness too)... this really does helps seem to keep my stress level down. It is just not healthy to show up for work already raging angry about some lady that cut me off on the ramp to Spaghetti Junction while only moving 45 mph to my 65 mph or the white van of painters with the 29 ladders stacked on top (threatening to fall off the top at any second!) who is blocking the merging lane or the fast lane with no signs of ever moving out of the way. Of course, even though I had no problem with my ride to work this morning, the basketball goal and backboard taking up the entire emergency lane and half the fast lane on I-285 did somewhat rattle my nerves this morning... who hauls and then loses one of those on an interstate for pete's sake?? Yes, all I can do is pray for patience... patience to survive the traffic in this city and not choke someone at the same time... Amen.

"Extreme"-ly relaxed vacation is more like it...

We made it back from our extreme vacation yesterday evening... no broken bones, no crashes, no road rash.... pretty uneventful to be honest. We left early Friday morning and took a long, leisurely trip up to Asheville for lunch and then we hopped on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a couple of hours towards the Boone area... absolutely breathtaking views on BOTH sides of the very winding roadway!




We arrived and checked into our cabin... great view of the mountains from the wrap-around deck but the cabin needed updating and there was NO A/C!!!!

The view from our cabin porch:



On Saturday we made our way to Sugar Mountain for a day of downhill mountain biking... I got a little worried when we arrived because the first group of bikers we encountered was about 4-5 teenagers all decked out in FULL crash pads- I am talking fully enclosed motorcross helmets, chest guards, full arm and full leg guards, the whole nine yards! I thought to myself- "Omigosh- what have we gotten ourselves into???" We bought our lift tickets and they put us and our bikes on the lifts for the slow crawl up the mtn.

See Mike's bike riding up the lift:



The 30-40 minute lift ride got really old after the first time we rode up. But, the views are beautiful... We get to the mountain top and gear up for the ride down. After seeing the "mountain biking trail" winding over the river and thru the woods along the mountain side.. we decided to stick to the ski slopes and not kill ourselves... that trail had vertical drops any where from 8 feet to 20+ ft in some places! I have never seen such huge rocks before and bikers were actually riding up and down them! We heard one of the younger bikers crashed on the trail somewhere and broke his tooth and then we witnessed a lady fly over her handlebars into a full body contact crash sliding down the mountain side on her chest no less! All I could do is grit my teeth and shake my head for that poor girl! Mike kept saying how glad he was that she was not me! We tried to get some pics but they just do not do justice as to how high or steep this ride really is...

Me flying by Mike:



Mike looking studly:



All in all, we had a nice relaxing "extreme" vacation... I am just so happy that I am not nursing wounds today...

Eve of Extreme

It is the Eve of our extreme vacation and I am tired and happy at the same time... it was so nice to make the drive home after a long and HOT day out on the job site in Conyers. Did I mention that it was HOT? It had to be 105 degrees with no breeze around to push the stagnant, foul wastewater vapors that always engulf me when I am standing on site baking in the sun and inhaling the stench of a treatment plant. Yes, but it does smell like my paycheck...
We are off to the NC mountains at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning for a 3-day weekend extreme vacation. Downhill mountain biking on the ski slopes of Sugar Mountain... two nights in a mountain cabin in the 57-60 degree mountain air... relaxing and having fun with my husband...Until then...

SK8 or Die!!

Trying to catch up on topics from last week that never made it online...

Did any one watch the X-Games last week? Thursday night they held the "Big Air" skateboarding competition for the X-Games series and I just happened to be watching... I was sitting in the den half working on a Sudoku puzzle and half watching this contest on the TV. Now keep in mind that I used to skateboard when I was a teenager all those years before GA Law Enforcement allowed me to burn up the roads in my uncool high school car. Yes folks I was a skater and I lived and breathed the idea that I was that good.... Not. I tried to do all the tricks they showed in the skater magazines but, having only a Wal-mart brand board and a lack of cool ramps or rail slides like the professionals sort of held me back. Those were the days of Powell Peralta boards, Vision Street Wear clothes, long skater bangs, double Swatch watches, Tony Hawk and Christian Hosoi were gods, and all I wanted to do was Skate or Die! (SK8 or Die) I religiously purchased Thrasher and Transworld skateboarding magazines and would just drool over all the pics and how much air the pros would catch on those halfpipes and empty concrete pools. Anyway, now the you know my history, back to the X-Games...

First, a little history on the "big air" contest... The contestant basically drops into a halfpipe ramp from 30 or so feet above the bottom and then up the other side and then flys off the ramp 70 feet into the air over onto another halfpipe and then down and up the other side (about 30 ft high of vert ramp) and then that throws him up into the air another some 15 to 20 feet and then drops him back down into the ramp about 40-50 feet of vertical distance... the trick is to land all of the tricks perfectly while still ON the board and not fall off (even after the 70 ft gap jump from ramp to ramp) Yes, it is an absolutely insane contest and these guys are literally acrobats when doing it... You seriously have to watch this contest in order to appreciate the full magnitude of just how dangerous this contest is!

So am watching this contest last Thursday and the first place skater is Jake Brown. Several skaters including him are doing their 4th and 5th attempts at trying to plunge down the huge halfpipe and miraculously land on the board each time they fly down the wooden vertical walls and drop on these monster ramps. Many just keep flying off these boards in mid-air and falling during their run but always a quick crash into the flow of the ramp wood on their knees/knee pads or butts... Well this guy, Jake Brown gets up to do his final run to improve upon his already first place scoring... he takes off and attempts a 720 in the 70 ft gap between ramps and lands it! Now I am out of the chair just watching in amazement! No one has ever pulled that off and on national TV! Now I am all excited and watching this guy... he rides up the next high vertical of the other ramp and somehow seems to lose his balance as soon as he is flying up the high side... his limbs are waving and the board is long gone... and then instead of dropping back down into the flow of the ramp wood his body flies somewhat back into the middle direction of the ramp and he drops flat into the bottom of the ramp from 45+ ft... My mouth is gaping in shock as I watch his lifeless-looking body just laying there in the middle of the ramp bottom. The medics finally run up and the crowd is silent. I am thinking he HAS to be dead... free-fall from 45+ ft above and splat flat on the bottom? There is NO way he will make it... I am now yelling and trying to tell Mike what happened... they go to commercial of course! When they finally come back from commercial, he is still laying there in the same spot... they show the run and fall in slow-motion for the viewers and it is so amazing to see him... for those few seconds that he is free-falling he looks like he is trying to decide what part of this body he wants to sacrifice to that fall... and then when he does... his shoes just blew OFF his feet!! Like 2 rockets for crying out loud! Then, they flash back to his body on the ramp and all of sudden this guy stands up and walks off the ramp with help... Now I am a believer in miracles...

In the end, news reports say that all he hurt in that fall was a bruised lung, a bruised liver and a small fracture to one bone in one of his hands... Wowsers! All I can say is that guy must have a horse shoe embedded in his butt ....

In tribute of this incident and the fact that I watched it when it happened, I am attaching photos of my old board... a Powell Peralta Tony Hawk deck, Gullwing trucks and Vision Shredder wheels... those were the glory days...and never forget that skateboarding is not a crime...





And yes, I still have this board and will never part with it.

Tick Tock

We ventured to my hometown this weekend for a visit... mostly to take my Grandmother to a family reunion today. Needless to say it has been sweltering all darn weekend... the humidity just sucks the life of me. Of course, it could be because I live in the AC at work and home? Anyway, I actually have a funny episode to write about...

Saturday after our BBQ lunch at my favorite BBQ place in town, we went on a nature hike around some property we are interested in just outside of town. We took precaution in our clothing wearing jeans and shoes (instead of sandals/flip flops) since we would be trekking around in the wilderness for who knows how long... camera/bottle of water in hand and we take off. Even in the woods it is blazing hot... we trekked for about an hour or so and once my 20 oz of precious water was long gone I pleaded mercy to leave... so we then went to my grandmother's house to do some overdue cleaning... a couple of hours later with the cleaning done we got into the truck to go visit my Mom. I happened to look in the mirror above the driver's seat and noticed a chunk of dirt caught in my eyelashes... using my index finger and thumb I tried to pull it off my eyelashes and it would not budge (for the ladies- imagine pullling a glob of mascara off your lashes). I am thinking to myself- how odd it was that first of all, it was there and secondly, why it would not pull off! I kept trying and for the life of me it would not budge! Mike is probably wondering what I am doing and why do I keep pulling on my lashes... I finally give up and figure I will just borrow some tweezers when we get to my Mom's.

We arrive at Mom's and few minutes later she has me sitting in front of her make-up mirror, tweezers in hand and me on a mission to remove the dirt... (now keep in mind looking back on this now that I am not really sure what possessed me to keep trying but I am glad I did!) I tugged numerous times and it would seem to move a little but never completely off my eyelid... all of sudden I got a little closer to the mirror and watched this time while pulling the "dirt" and trying not to pull the skin again and the dirt had LEGS!!! Omigosh! It was a tick for crying out loud!! I panicked and started yelling and dancing around her bedroom.. she and Mike thought I had lost my mind! All I had going through my mind was that the tick was going to crawl into my eyeball and latch on and I would have to go to the hospital to have it removed surgically! I was freaking out!! I was scared to death! My Mom is screaming for me to lay on the bed so she can get it...one attempt and I thought she was going to poke my eyeball out! I grabbed the tweezers and got back in the chair... I figured I could inflict a lot more pain upon myself than either of them ever could...After three or so attempts I thought to hell with the lashes I am digging in! I grabbed eyelid, lashes and pulled like never before... it hurt like hell... but I got him! I mean that little sucker was clamped to the rim of my eyelid like no tomorrow! Afterwards, I don't think I have felt relief like that in a LONG time... I was literally crying at all of the bad thoughts going through my head...Needless to say, they were just happy that I stopped yelling and carrying on. What a fiasco to say the least...