Brokeback Weekend

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

What’s that law by that one guy?

Oh yeah, Murphy (the bastard). If something can go wrong it will. This weekend was my weekend for things to go wrong.

I’m not really sure when it turned, but somewhere between the 7:30am and 8:30am on Saturday, things took at turn for the worse.

My story actually begins sometime on Wednesday afternoon. In an effort to be more fit and trim (heck, just to get fit and trim rather), I’ve started doing some exercises when I get home from work. Well apparently I pushed my self a little too hard on the sit-ups (yeah, best place for a fat guy to start, sit-ups). Any who, I didn’t think anything of it.

That night we had game night and I was crushed by a little girl playing TurfMaster (just aside note I did tie for 2nd, but how a 9 year old girl beats 7 other adults amazes me) but I did manage to redeem myself during our game of Pickomino’s (I think I am undefeated to date!). When I woke up the next day my lower back was a little sore, but nothing big, sometimes that happens when I drink a lot of caffeine like I do during game nights.

The same minor soreness was present on Friday morning (though it was gone by the time I got to work) and when I work up on Saturday, but I thought nothing of it.

Saturday morning rolls around and I’ve decided to be productive. I headed off to the Post Office to send off a board game that I was trading and returned home and then decided 10 minutes later to head off to Lowes to finally replace the dreaded double move door knob. Well by the time I hit the Pilot after exiting Lowes I was having a hard time getting in as the muscles in my back really started to tighten up.

By the time I get home, I was in a good amount of pain. So much so that I sat in a chair while I replaced the door knob (granted part of that was because I had to chisel out part of the door for the new lock).

While in the middle of working the knob, I heard a pop and Michelle let out a startled cry. Her power supply in her Shuttle X had gone up in a puff of smoke. I wasn’t sure if something shorted out or what was going on, so I headed into the den (a little too quickly) to unplug everything (only to further aggravate my lower back). So I left the smoldering computer on the kitchen table and finished the door (which for all of our guests now works FABOUSLY… no special moves required).

My amazing wife was very understanding about me not feeling up to fixing the computer and since she has a laptop, it wasn’t a huge inconvenience. I spent much of the afternoon immobilized on sitting upright on the couch. After lunch, my patient wife asked if there would be a reason why she would be getting a signal from the wireless router and would be able to see other computers on our network, but not be able to connect to the internet. I thought that perhaps I just needed to reset the router and we would be good. No such luck.

Turns out one of my other fears had come to pass. We’re several hundred feet away from the Verizon drop for FiOS. Instead of jumping poll to poll and then running across our yard, they decided that they were just going to drop it on the ground and bury when they got the chance. Problem with that is part of that distance is through the woods and over a bike trail that runs along the river. The kind of bike trail that folks with dirt bikes and ATVs like to use. Apparently someone caught it and ripped the connect out of the socket and almost pulled the box off the side of the house (at least the casing was pretty damaged). They broke it good.

I managed to get a hold of Verizon (which if I may say has one of the worst automated voice services in the world) and they wouldn’t be able to get over until Monday to take a look at it and weren’t sure when they would get a chance to bury the wire when they did get it fixed.

So that was my weekend. Propped up on the couch, broken back, broken computer, and broken internet connection. Ah well, such are the days of our lives.

On a completely unrelated plus note, Andrew Peterson’s Appendix A finally showed up on Monday and I was very happy to see that. So I guess all is not lost.