Take me home.
I'm actually into this. Take me to the old stuff at Blogspot or Archives.
"Ripcord" - the trebuchet dude. Not all his fault. Actually, not his fault at all. You see, I must've skipped a few paragraphs--the ones marked in red--while I was trying to build this...thing. You might want to open his intricate design page as you read along, just to see what a dunce I am. It's amusing going through this again. It also means that KitKat, when her time comes, will not be seen with me in Home Depot arguing over nipples.
I really try to reduce, reuse and recycle. That's why God made gerbils and I stole the gerbils from my husband. I couldn't see wasting paper and printing it all out at once, because I wanted the freedom to mark things off, like a list. I cut/pasted the above list and a few other things into a WordPerfect document, printed it off, and away we went. We felt SO good about this project! We were prepared! We had an outline! We had a schedule! We could do this! This was going to get Tiger's Eye out of F-dom, and probably into B-dom. We were ready! Right after dinner, we decided to get to it. An hour or two each evening, more on weekends, why, we could get this thing pumped out and even have time to primp it before show day!
We ate and put things in a cleared-out area, grouping the objects together, making notes of the tools to find, and looked through the instructions one last time. Again, I didn't print them out except for the picture, so we could envision the thing. Bliss held us in her warm embrace. This was mother-son time. This was bonding that was keeping us toasty warm as the weather threw ice down on our area. And kept on throwing it.
It's like mother nature conspired to mold and compact every bit of ice in an attempt to play croquet using the Gateway Arch as a wicket. Still, the weather could not and would not sour my mood. I typed quickly. I wanted to get those colonoscopy reports back to the surgical center! I wanted the weekend to be totally free! At 3:00 a.m., I felt I gave my all for the physicians of our community, and readied myself for bed.
I sat on the toilet. I reached for the toilet paper. The searing sound of the paper brought a deafening noise, one of complete silence, and the lights went out.
By 7:00 a.m., I had my cell phone in hand, trying to figure out who had power and who didn't. Mom did. Good. The school didn't. Not so good. The temperatures kept dropping. We knew one thing...the kids could not stay here, when our only heat source not dependent on electricity was on the wall in the snake room, where Mr. Sapphire and I could make some kind of pallet to stay warm, but no room for anyone else, and we had to stay to take care of all the animals, scaled and furry. We spent a lot of time bringing the few reptiles we keep in the other parts of the house back to the breeding room, and the dog and cat seemed perfectly okay, which meant we had to move all the trebuchet parts out of the way (remember the eye screws?). Our Y2K stash (remember when everyone had those?) got used, as we found all those little packets of water and tins of canned heat. Mom came and got the kids. I hated that. I knew our plans for the trebuchet went out the window for that night, but didn't consider for how long. We waited for the next night. And the next. And the next. And the next.
You see, it wasn't just any old ice storm. It's one where you hear gunshots outside and get brave enough to look, only to find that 20-foot limb of your maple tree, you know the one that's 18 inches in diameter, just cracked and fell onto the street! Yes, the ice was that thick. I joke about all my injuries, and I re-injured my raccoon arm only managing to move it enough so it didn't harpoon the undercarriage of an unsuspecting car. While moving the limb, I heard branches drop everywhere! Spooky quiet from the heaviness of the air and smart folks staying home, but the constant loud cracks of those trees were haunting. The original part of our house was built in 1820, and it wasn't the first house in the area. These trees are OLD. I gave up counting the rings on the one I moved from the street. I guess after you volunteer for trebuchet duty, you can't count that high.
I started to panic. This was not just a school project; this was fun. Eggs! Flying through the air! Target practice down at the soccer field! This was my son's really good grade going out the window! And...remember my conservation policy? Not wanting to waste printer ink or more paper? The plans were on my computer!!!!!
My mom, who had power, had no landline telephone or Internet services. Nobody in my part of the town had power, and neither did the kids' schools. Time kept passing. My mom kept the kids; we slept out with Mr. Sapphire's snakes under the gas heater. We have a gas water heater, but the toilet was awful cold and showering left me, um, thinking about those Home Depot-purchased nipples and being jealous of them because they were out by the heater. We ate junk food and I read four books in four nights; I could now be a CIA agent or a vampire slayer. Two weeks later, I applauded when the hamster met its new friend, Ms. Delilah Snake, because that little twit was just noisy. It wasn't the snakes that kept me awake; it was the flippin' hamster! I bought candle after candle, but if the store had power, their Internet was down. Seriously. I checked. I did everything possible to get that project in motion!
I left to get ManCub from school on Tuesday. As I turned into the carport, Mr. Sapphire stood next to the door, flipping the porch light on and off wildly, him grinning from ear to ear. It was too funny! Relief washed through me and I had never seen anything so welcome as that light flashing on and off. Man, I had all my kids back with me where they belonged, which was the hardest aspect of the whole ordeal. It was nice...for about five minutes. Then they started fighting and making the house warm up just by their yelling and my added push of hot air for saying those typical mom things: "Qwitit! Stawpit! I'm telling Dad!"
So, our power came back on. Time was running out. Seriously running out. Six days, I think, we were without power. And we were lucky. The stores? They still didn't have power. Which meant I had plans, but, during assembly, we discovered the optional parts weren't so optional. The big hardware stores in the surrounding areas were last on the list for town survival, and our favorite one has normal hours. Go fig. Groceries be hanged, I needed hardware supplies!
I e-mailed Tiger's Eye history teacher and begged for an extension. I told him I didn't want to ruin the surprise, but we had spent a lot of money on this monster so far, and had no way to put it together. He gave us another three days, bless him, but the tone of the e-mail was "it better be good or else." Yikes. Pressure. I don't work well under pressure. I hadn't worked at all, period, in about a week, so I needed to drum up some extra income, too. What turned into a lackadaisical, fun project turned into mayhem.
Glue. Ahem. I read about the glue. I knew about the glue. What I didn't know that it would take more than 24 hours to dry. We were already behind schedule. Not only that, you couldn't glue all the parts together simultaneously. You had to do one part, let it dry, add another part to it, let it dry, and so on, as in you had to construct two bilateral frames, let them dry, and then construct the center frame around it and let that dry. No time!
I relied on the wisdom of the guy from whom we bought this
money pit dump rat's nest house.
Nails.
This story is so copyrighted! Reliving this trauma hasn't been cathartic. I'm on the schedule to see a shrink, so if you steal this and I find out about it, you'll be compacted into tennis ball size and launched. I won't need the trebuchet.
Sapphire wrote this. Sapphire Tigress has been around since 1992, when BBS was popular. I can prove it. My son can prove it. It's still in my mother's garage to prove it. A lot of impressed freshman can prove it. Please, just hand out the link. I lived through it. At least give me credit!
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