Two steps forward, two steps back

  I wasted most of a day waiting for the vaults to be delivered - the ones that were supposed to be here between 8 a.m. and noon.

The truck showed up about 3 p.m., which is when I had told the tool rental guys I would be by to pick up a pressure washer. I realized I was going to be late and called them at 2:30 to say I'd be in sometime before the closed at 5:30 p.m.

So then I drove up the street to my in-laws' house to borrow their pickup truck. But some morons delivering the two halves of a modular - read trailer trash with a foundation - home had the street blocked. So I had to take about an eight-mile detour to reach their house from the north and, naturally, I found myself behind a loaded grain truck as I approached the modular home clusterfuck from the north. Somehow the truck and I got by the house-half blocking the street and I got into their driveway, got into their pickup truck and headed off.

I got the pressure washer without incident. Two guys had loaded it into the bed of the truck by the time I finished the rental paperwork. The older guy opined I would need help unloading and loading it. But I'm working alone in this venture, so when I got home I manhandled the beast out of the back of the truck and endeavored to lower it to the ground without wrenching every muscle in my back. I think I got it done, although my back is a little sore now, some five hours later.

Then it was off to Lafayette and the Home Depot for a hand truck. The one I wanted was in the garden section which, of course, was cordoned off, while some rookie forklift operator very nearly dropped a pallet of eight gas grills from a height of about 20 feet. I got the one I wanted, threw it into the back of the pickup truck and took it home, then returned the truck.

Later this evening, I decided to do something useful, so I dragged the hand truck to the attic and loaded it with boxes of books that had never been unpacked from my move to this house in 2001. It was then that I discovered there was no air in the pneumatic tires and the tires were threatening to come off of the rims under the heavy load.

By now it was 10 p.m., I was drenched in sweat from the heat sink of an attic, and I was in no mood to go out to the storage barn and screw around with the air compressor in the mosquito-infested dark.

So, to quote Pete Townshend in the Who's performance of My Generation and Cry if You Want during their 2007 tour, "Fuck it!"

I've kenneled the dogs for the night and will now sit down to watch TV with a very large rum and Coke Zero.

Yeah. Fuck it.