• goodbadi

    Basketball’s Biking Bailout

    April 14, 2009

    With the advent of our frantic get-the-house-ready just beginning to glow in my mental cheeks, riding my bicycle to school has taken a back seat.

    Today I couldn’t have ridden anyway; I had a meeting after school and M had her evening ESL teaching job. Tomorrow I maybe wouldn’t have ridden, anyway, since there are forecasted rains, but now I definitely won’t because my dear brother-in-law (remember him from here and here? And here?) is meeting me out at the house to make a pre-renovation shopping list.

    And I’m counting on such interruptions stealing my pedaling drive for the next several weeks, too.

    All is not lost on the exercise front, however: I have agreed to play in the end-of-year faculty vs. faculty basketball game.

    Now, I haven’t played basketball in, like, forever, as anyone could have discovered just watching my almost perfectly aligned but grossly short shots that first morning I drove to school early to practice there all by my lonesome.

    The janitor lady turned on the gym lights for me, and my dribbling dribbles echoed around the room, mostly accompanied by panting jumps and periods of reverent silence as the retched ball sailed towards and then uninterruptedly away from the net, rim, and backboard.

    I got better, though, and when my half hour of self-infliction ended at 7:00 am, I was quite sweaty and breathy, definitely more so than after my more even-keeled bicycle stints.

    Today I took another jab at basketball, since those meetings were keeping me off the bike, and I’m guessing that tomorrow morning I’ll do the same once again, even though I’m forever destined to be in league with the likes of Dave Barry, who is quoted as saying, “I haven’t been able to slam-dunk the basketball for the past five years. Or, for the thirty-eight years before that, either.”

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  • goodbadi

    Projects Limbo

    April 12, 2009

    N has apparently taken over my blog, judging by my last few posts.

    Soon something else will be taking over not just my blog, but probably my whole entire life. Not that it hasn’t taken over my life already. Most of my sleeping and waking minutes are consumed with mental gymnastics and rote recitation of what I want and what needs done at our new house.

    Today I again dropped in on the current residents–they’re hoping to be out by noon next Saturday–and again dreamed and plotted for my post-departure work-in. Then I sputtered over to help my brother-in-law with some of his projects around their house.

    See, pretty soon he’s going to be over at our house helping us out (like, all the time), and so my weariness of just thinking about doing, coupled with our anticipated labor debt to him, prompted me to believe–rightly–that digging fence post holes and stretching barnyard wire (that section of fence was to keep their kids off the road) would help dissipate my uneasy worry that we’ll never actually get to move in to our new house and that none of our renovation hopes will ever materialize.

    I think in extremes, I guess, but that’s just how life is, sometimes.

    Between my gasping questions about how to do such-and-such anticipated projects, J peppered the air with his own quandary: my sister was all excited about the possibility at being given–for free–30 or 40 six-week-old fryers.

    “So you think I could just switch out the boiler and put a new one in myself?”

    “I’d have to build a pen and drag it around the yard to a new spot every day.”

    “What about tearing just part of the wall out? To avoid the pipes?”

    “I’d rather just work a couple of extra hours and buy the damn birds at the grocery store.”

    “Soil and Conservation said they need to talk to the spring owner, not me. Apparently the water’s been getting cloudier more recently, although still not often.”

    “What’s she thinking? I’m going to need to by a feather plucker, the kind that spins like a dryer.”

    When I left they were still waiting for a call back from the neighbor, and I was still wondering if our new country life would ever get here.

    But at least that section of fence was almost finished.

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