In order to get from Lucia’s apartment to the street one must navigate a narrow passage between a fence on one side and the house on the other. When I was packing up my car to leave last Tuesday, the cable guy had a ladder leaning against the house, working on a junction box of some kind. I had no choice but to walk under it. About six times. Now I don’t consider myself a superstitious person, but I have to admit this gave me a very uneasy feeling, particularly since I was about to set off on a journey that would require me to navigate through the hell called Chicago traffic and then run the speed trap gauntlet of Wisconsin.
The trip was uneventful, so I thought I was off the hook. Flash forward to the weekend.
On Sunday Beck and I decided to get some yard work done. It started innocently enough, tearing out some of that nasty plastic edging that the earth rejects every spring, and pushing the rocks back so they won’t spill onto the neighbor’s lawn for awhile. We’ve been talking about taking the rotting timbers off the three raised beds in the backyard, expanding the garden to incorporate the two larger beds bringing in loads of dirt and grading the beds out to the new dirt level, a big project.
Step one was to take the timbers off. At first we were going to just remove them from the little bed, just to see how it would go, but since that bed won’t be part of the eventual expanded garden we decided to leave it and pull up the timbers from one of the larger gardens.
Step one was to take out the low wire fence that we put around them to keep the rabbits out (no longer need thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Fox). So I started ripping it out with a pry bar, one of those that has sharp claws on either side. The staples that held the fence to the timbers were popping out easily and I was working quickly when I took a good hard pull on the bar and it released a little too easily, sending the pry bar right into my knee. Bad luck.
The timbers came out fairly easily, our neighbor let us borrow his chain saw to cut them up into small chunks and we decided to avoid double handling and put them right into the car and head for the dump. We put down the back seats and threw a tarp down and filled the Mazda up. That’s when we found out that there was no dump open on Sundays and that the municipal dump wasn’t open on Tuesdays either. So now we had a car full of dirty, ant infested, smelly old rotting lumber. Bad luck.
We determined that there was a commercial dump site open on Monday so we closed up the car cleaned up, drove the log truck to dinner and exhausted, packed it in for the night.
We got up in the morning ready to head for the junk drop off. We jumped in the car and turned the key. Nothing. It turns out that we must have bumped the overhead light switch when we were loading the crap in the car, the battery was as dead as my neighbors in the cemetery. Bad luck.
Moral of the story: don’t tempt fate, don’t walk under ladders.
