Ooh! Ooh! When I wrote yesterday’s post about the Brigadoon-related events of last Saturday, I left out the REALLY interesting stuff about what I did that morning! Involving brake dust, horrific odor, maggots, and extreme back pain! It was happy fun times at Hearndom II, I tell you.
(Note: this is a long post, with many intricate plotlines. Go to the bathroom now, I don’t want you getting up during my story.)
I may have mentioned (probably not) that I was temporarily storing a refrigerator for my good buddy Craig, who just bought a new house near us with his fiancée. Last Sunday (the 18th, I think? My ability to keep track of dates at this point is totally shot) we helped him move, and got the refrigerator out of the garage.
I also should probably mention at this point that we bought a freezer not long after we bought our house; a nice used one, about 5 feet tall, from a girl in Glasgow. 80 bucks, a great deal. Then I got it home and realized we don’t actually have any wall outlets in the garage. The garage door opener is powered via a little grommet that screws into a light socket in the ceiling, giving you 3 un-grounded electrical outlets, 9 feet in the air. So I fetched one of those little “cheat your way around the fact that you need to ground something” connectors, ran an outdoor extension cord up to the ceiling, and plugged it in. Got a very satisfying whirr, and a day later it was nice and chilled, so I threw the turkey and some other meats in there.
Well, at some point during the migration of Craig’s refrigerator last weekend, the extension cord came out. This, as you might imagine, results in a lack of electricity to the freezer, which then results in turkeys melting and dripping juice down into the bottom of the freezer, out past the door seal, and all over the floor.
We discovered this 5 days later, on Friday evening, when Sarah commented that the house smelled even worse than it normally does (we have four cats; our house, sadly, smells faintly of dirty cat litter in every room). I went out to the garage, which smelled like Jame Gumm’s basement.
So, back to Saturday morning. I rolled out of bed, having gotten about 6 hours of sleep, at 7:45am, and began the day by driving to Pep Boys. Crap, I need to backtrack again.
For the last few weeks, Sarah’s right-front disc brakes have been making rather horrific grinding noises. I figured it was just something caught in the caliper; she took the car to the dealership last December and those incompetents said she still had 5mm or more of brake pad on each side. Friday afternoon, I finally got tired of the noise and took the right wheel off, to discover that there was significantly less than 5mm of pad. As in, zero. She was basically trying to stop by using the rather rough surface of the metal brackets to which the pads are attached.
We took the truck to rehearsal that night, and gas mileage be damned.
The next morning, I headed over to Pep Boys for new pads, and possibly new rotors, purchased all of the above (although the rotors turned out to be the wrong size, and she probably doesn’t need them anyway, so I have them in the truck waiting to be returned, which I intend to do as soon as I have half an hour of free time, currently slated for 2007). Drove back home, set the parts on the ground, opened the garage door, and was greeted with a smell not unlike that of roadkill on a July afternoon. Of course, that’s basically what was sitting in my freezer at that point.
I had hoped Sarah would be up to help me at that point, but unfortunately she was still asleep (she needs her beauty rest; she’s been awfully funny looking recently), so I set to dragging all of the junk in our garage out of the way so I could move the refrigerator. Most notable was the massive entertainment center, which is made of oak, and designed to fit into a corner; it’s extremely heavy, horribly unbalanced, and largely devoid of handholds in the back. I basically dragged it along the ground while listening to the disks in my back rupture one by one. (It kinda sounded like when you play with bubble wrap; pop pop pop pop pop!)
I then soaked up, with paper towel, some of the wetter spots of rotting meat juice. Next, I got a trash bag, poured some kind of carpet deodorizer in it, and filled it with highly bacterial meat.
Then I spent a few minutes retching onto the compost pile behind the shed.
After brushing my teeth for a while, I dragged the freezer out into the driveway and started rinsing and scrubbing juices and chunks out while continually gagging and burping up enough acid to cause my molars to dissolve. You really can’t imagine the smell of something like this. Remember the time you pooped your pants in the 3rd grade, and didn’t tell anybody, and by the end of the day the school had been evacuated and you ran home in tears, threw your Underoos and jeans into the neighbors’ hedge, snuck into the house, and spent 90 minutes in the bathtub trying to wash the smell of failure from yourself with a foot pumice stone?
Yeah, that, um, never happened to me either.
Anyway, that’s what it smelled like, except worse, and the juices and chunks were covered with writhing maggots. GOOOOOOOOOOOOD TIMES!!!! Finally, I got the freezer pretty well rinsed out, and Sarah finally appeared and started scrubbing the garage floor while I took her brakes apart and replaced the pads.
(There are probably those of you who would be concerned about my wife driving around with a very important automotive component that I had repaired, but you can trust me. Just because I can’t get my motorcycle to reliably run (or, in fact, start at all) doesn’t mean I’m not extremely competent with my hands. (I was an All-State tuba player, for heaven’s sake, and you don’t get to do that unless you have superb hand-eye coordination, or at least massive lips.) You just have to give me enough time to do it right, and curse a lot, and probably cut the hell out of my fingers. Also, make sure I drive the car first; that’s just good practice.)
(Nested parentheses are just elements of good style, dammit.)
While I was repairing Sarah’s brakes (just about the time I was trying to get the piston to properly recompress, which involved me yelling many, many words that are extremely not appropriate for children, which was unfortunate since there were many of them bicycling up and down my street at the time), Sarah began mowing the lawn. I was mildly concerned about this, because our mower was constructed in about 1972, and weighs as much as a PT Cruiser. She was actually able to maneuver it pretty well, though, despite not knowing how to remove and empty the bag, which resulted in mammoth mounds of mow muffins all over my front yard.
Anyway, I managed to get inside, shower the worst of the brake dust and maggot stank off of me, and made it to rehearsal by 1pm, which is about where I picked up yesterday’s post. (BTW: It didn’t rain last night, except for a tiny bit at the worst possible time, but we still managed to get all the way through the show. I need more prayers about tonight, though, ’cause things are looking ugly: there’s a storm the size of Jim Belushi floating over Maryland right now. Oh well, we have a rain date for tomorrow.)
I must be off, to try and wash the last of the brake dust out of my cuticles.
