An Uneven Start to a Rocky Relationship [Where the Hell Was I?]

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August 1, 2003

An Uneven Start to a Rocky Relationship

Some people call this a sling blog. But I calls it a Kaiser blog. Mmm-hmm.

This is going to be my most painful blog post ever.

(Well, at least for me. I can't promise that it will hurt you more than some of the groaners that I've laid on you in the past. You'll have to be the judge of that.)

Anyway, I'm eating a quick lunch now, but I just got finished raking three and a half tons of gravel over our parking area. And no, for once, I'm not exaggerating. Three and a half tons. Hence my pain, and current drippy sweatiness.

Now, I don't know whether any of you have worked with gravel before. If not, I can tell you this:

Three and a half tons sounds like a hell of a lot of gravel.

When the truck dumps it out, it doesn't look like that much. Gravel's pretty heavy, after all.

As soon as you start raking, or shoveling, or scooping it with your hands, you realize that three and a half tons really is the enormous fucking truckful that it advertised itself to be.

So, with a garden rake and a three-foot shovel, I did the best I could. I spread it around our parking 'bunker' (basically an uncovered garage, about twenty feet square), and tried to even it out where possible. In the end, I'm afraid it's a bit lumpy and uneven. On the other hand, so's my friggin' back, so I'd say that's pretty fair. I don't think I'll be doing any rowing, or situps, or bending over -- or standing up straight, for that matter -- for quite a while. Which is rather unfortunate, really, since I have a job interview in about two hours.

So, I'm gonna wrap up this post, finish my lunch, take a shower and try to put myself back together again. I want to put my 'best foot forward', of course, but I'm afraid at the moment, it'll be coming forward sideways and limpy, dragging my less-best other foot behind it. 'Hi, thanks for seeing me today! My name's Charlie, but my friends call me Quasi.' I'm not sure I like my chances.

Still, if they don't have a need for a crippled software engineer, I can still get a job ringing those enormous church bells. Hell, it can't be any harder than sloughing that gravel around. And they'll probably feed me, too, which is good. Given my current hunchy condition, I was limited to what I could easily reach for lunch today. So I'm having an artichoke heart and salsa sandwich on pita bread, with dill pickle chips and lemon juice to drink. I smothered the sandwich in brown mustard, hoping that would mask the ickiness, but it's not really working. Now that I think about it, I don't recall the bottle saying 'brown' anywhere on it. Or 'mustard', for that matter. I think the stuff may have been salad dressing in a former life.

Oh, well, it probably won't kill me, at least.

(Which is what I said about the gravel a couple of hours ago.)

So I'll gobble it down and go get ready for my interview. I just hope I can get a tie on, now that my neck's all crooked. Maybe a bolo would be easier. Anyone out there got a string tie an old hunchback can borrow?

Hey, three quick notes before I leave:

1. Don't forget to read this week's Carnival of the Vanities. It features me -- little old me! -- plus a bunch of people cooler than me, and a bunch of their posts, too. Definitely worth checking out.

B. Also, I'm still working on 100 Things About Me. The things are all there, but because I'm a masochistic freakin' idiot, I've decided to turn each one into its own blog post. I'm up to fifteen or so entries, and chugging along. Soon, you'll even be able to post comments over there! Won't that just complete your whole life?

III. Hey, does anybody know what's happening with Bob the Corgi? She was nice enough to leave me a cool comment on my birthday post, but as far as I can tell, her site's been down ever since. Coincidence? Eh, probably. Still, Shelley at Cynical, A Life, if you're reading this, you might want to watch out. You left a comment, too. You could be next! *gulp*