Spouse and I were late going to work this morning, as planned – Spouse had a date with a masked man intent on drilling holes in her teeth;\u00a0 meanwhile, I was waiting at home for delivery of some exercise equipment we ordered.<\/p>\n
It was an odd start to the day, because the delivery truck driver was more than a little hesitant to bring his truck up the drive outside the house.\u00a0 Now, don’t take what follows as any suggestion that I would be able to do any better, but I had to immediately begin wondering about this guy’s level of skill.\u00a0 It seems to me that “maneuvering a very large vehicle around\u00a0in unfamiliar\u00a0surroundings and around obstacles” is pretty much the key member of the desired skill set for a delivery truck driver.\u00a0 Like I said, it’s not so much that I think I could do better than this guy – I don’t – but I have seen other truck drivers get their<\/em> trucks up and down the drive without a hint of a problem, while navigating around more obstacles too.\u00a0 The fact that this guy apparently had like no confidence in his ability to avoid crushing the Probe – tucked away in its usual spot on the “gulch” side of the driveway – caused me no end of concern about this guy’s abilities.\u00a0 He gave off the aura less of a “driver” and more of a “bemused passenger.”\u00a0\u00a0 The other thing that was weird about this guy was that he had this extremely thick Russian accent.\u00a0 Anyway, at 8:00 this morning, as it turned out, I was out front of the house in my pajamas helping this guy unload a giant box from the back of a truck that was parked part <\/em>of the way up my driveway.\u00a0 All of these things –\u00a0his furtive uncertainty, his thick accent, and the two of us struggling with a heavy load – left me feeling like a character from The Sopranos, struggling to conceal a body after a Monday morning whacking.<\/p>\n Once\u00a0the delivery was safely in the house, our troubled teamster departed, and Spouse\u00a0returned from the dentist, we were making some lunch when we heard a thump on one of the front windows.\u00a0 This particular thump, unfortunately, is all too recognizable to us after living almost a year in this house; it was the sound of a bird hurtling into one of the windows.\u00a0\u00a0 Thankfully, most of the window strikes we get don’t seem to be fatal.\u00a0 I don’t think the birds generally get up enough speed to really hurt themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 Anyway, we hear this type of thump rather frequently;\u00a0 we don’t, however, usually hear it coming from the front windows.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A quick look through the window to the snow below revealed the wayward avian lying in the snow.\u00a0 He didn’t appear to be breathing, and was kind of planted face first in the snow, with one of his wings still extended awkwardly.\u00a0 Spouse opined that the bird, if still living, might be suffocating in the snow.\u00a0 I hurriedly put on my boots and headed outside, clambered through the garden (no mean feat with all the snow we’ve got) and scooped up the little creature in my hand.\u00a0 He perked right up but was obviously stunned;\u00a0 he turned his head to face me and managed to fold his wings back up, but was in no condition to fly.\u00a0 I had to pluck a feather that was sticking crazily out of one of his eye sockets.\u00a0 Spouse arrived in the nick of time with a shoebox lined with tissue paper.\u00a0 We put the little bird in the makeshift nest with a handful of black sunflower seeds (hey, who doesn’t want a snack after making an ass out of himself?) and left him alone on a table on the front porch.\u00a0 A few minutes later, Spouse saw the little bird fly\u00a0somewhat erratically\u00a0away and land in a tree.<\/p>\n When we were driving down Main Street on our way in to work, I spotted a guy leaning up against a lamp post.\u00a0 He had one arm extended up the side of the post\u00a0high over his head and he was half bent at the waist.\u00a0\u00a0 With his other arm, he was placing one finger to the right side of his nose.\u00a0 Too late, I recognized the gesture from a thousand hockey rinks across this great land, and just as we passed by his location, our eyes locked as he closed his mouth and exhaled abruptly,\u00a0blowing the most massive piece of snot out of his left nostril that a person is ever likely to see.\u00a0\u00a0 I am so glad I was there to chronicle the moment.<\/p>\n It was only a little after noon and I felt like I was living inside a David Lynch movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spouse and I were late going to work this morning, as planned – Spouse had a date with a masked man intent on drilling holes in her teeth; meanwhile, I was waiting at home for delivery of some exercise equipment we ordered.<\/p>\n It was an odd start to the day, because the delivery truck driver […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":520,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions\/520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}