The Grinning Geek

This post is going to be about how a broken window, a few swear words, and a sore thumb can put the Christmas Spirit in a choke hold.

It’s important before I tell you the story of how I crapped on Christmas, to tell you a little about my day yesterday. It started off unlike most Sunday’s in my house, because we were not raiding. Sunday morning is usually a raid time, so this Sunday was different. I had a few beers the night before at a friends house and didn’t end up getting to sleep til about 1am, so I was tired. The Wife and I slept in a bit, enjoyed the fact it was cold enough to provoke “hibernation sleep” and generally were lazy in the morning. My wife decided she wanted breakfast, and in what is an unusual turn of events she knew where she wanted to go.

I should have known that what I thought was “lucky break” was actually the setup for a cosmic joke. I got up and got dressed and logged in to school to do a few minutes of class discussion before we left. Diana got on the computer and dinked. For those of you who do not understand what “dinking” is, dinking in this case is when my wife sits down at her computer and is on the internet, but is not actually doing anything on the internet. She can do this for hours, and nobody knows exactly what it is she is doing – because she’s not really doing anything. It’s as if she derives some sort of nourishment from merely downloading packets of data through our network, the content isn’t important, it must merely be downloaded. Anyway, back to the point at hand. So we got dressed, finally got out the door, and I decided to take my car. We were going over to my parents house afterwards to pick up a few boxes of junk that we’d been storing in their garage since we moved back to Phoenix. Why we needed to pick up these boxes involved a new washer and dryer that are larger than the old one’s my parents own, a deal that “couldn’t be beat”, and the fact these are front loading washers and dryers, not top loading. Regardless, my car has a bit more room for junk (since I don’t use it as a high speed, gas powered purse) and while I noticed the front passenger tire was low on air, a quick stop at the QT gas station would remedy that.

We get to the QT, I pull up to the air pump, I turn it on, I put air in the tire, I rewind the hose back in to the machine, get in my car, turn the key and… nothing happens. It clicks once, flashes the dash lights, then dies. Completely. Son of a bitch. I try it a few more times, nothing. I bang on the steering wheel, because maybe my car just needs some discipline and it’ll understand where I’m coming from, nothing. I pop the hood to go look at the battery. Surprisingly enough, in my life, I’ve dealt with enough piece of shit car batteries to actually know a tiny bit about how they work. But I just replaced this battery a few months ago, and there’s no visible corrosion on the connectors or cables. I left my toolkit in Diana’s car, so I could not pop off the cables, but I gave them a good twist to make sure there was a connection, checked the wiring, everything looked fine… but nothing. So, my guess is, since the battery is new and the car itself is 15 years old, must be the starter. Son of a bitch. We call roadside assistance, tell them I need it towed back to the house, etc. They inform us it’ll be an hour before they can get someone out there. It should be noted here, that my wife brought up the point that the last time she decided she wanted something specific for breakfast on a Sunday morning, at a place we normally don’t go to – went out to find her car had been broken in to and her satellite radio was stolen. So in effect, when my wife says, “I’d like to go to X for breakfast this morning.” what she really means is, “We’ve not had enough auto trouble lately.”

I found the fact it would take an hour to get a tow truck to me, in the heart of phoenix, within a mile of -multiple- garages, on a Sunday morning, to be odd and irritating but whatever. I’d sit with the car, with no heat, because it’s freezing. And when I say it’s freezing, I mean Phoenix freezing so it was like 50 degrees. But that’s not important. What is important, is the tow truck finally shows up, the guy pops the hood, goes and yanks on my battery connectors (he does not worry about breaking off the battery posts, like I do) and wa-la, the car starts.

Are you kidding me? I just sat here in the cold for an hour, looking like a tool because I didn’t yank on the post connectors hard enough? Are you serious?

Anyway, we manage to go to breakfast (that’s another incident, but I’ll save that for another post), get the boxes of crap from my parents, and get home. Now it’s time to decorate. And this is where the real fun begins.

The Wife and I discuss how best to put up Christmas lights in the living room window and the sliding arcadia door. She lobbies for putting them outside, I think we can keep them inside, on a timer. Finally I win out, and I am convinced using a few nails I can get them to work. After getting the door up successfully, the window proves to be a raging pain in my ass and I realize the nails won’t work. I need the curved staple nails, to hold everything in place. I ponder if I really want to bother making a trip to the hardware store, and finally decide I do. I am not going to half ass this, not take the cheap and easy way, only to have busted ass lights falling down all season long, nails falling out on the floor, etc. I am going to spend the time and money now, to save myself the headache.

We get home, I get one side of the window up – no problem. Time for the second side. Due to an awesome combination of lights, there being some kind of metal framing near the window, the fact I am right handed and had to hammer left handed, and the fact my thumb doesn’t like being hit with a hammer, this was becoming more difficult than I had originally planned for. This put me in an irritable mood, a mood my wife quickly picked up on, and as irritability is the anti-thesis of Christmas Joy, she kindly volunteered to try and do it because “her hands were smaller”. Now, it’s important to remember, that in this case her smaller hands would likely have helped. But what I -really- heard was, “Let me do it, because you’re a jackass who can’t hammer a nail. Why don’t you go set out a nativity scene while I do the real work?” So I rather brusquely informed her that no, I will do it, and to go away.

About right -then- the Christmas Spirit took note of what I was doing. You see, to me, a few swear words and hanging up Christmas lights go hand in hand like, say, working on a car and swearing. This is how I was raised. Getting the lights up, only to find one burned out, the lights getting tangled, etc. These events are all worthy of a well placed “shit.” Turns out? Christmas Spirit doesn’t agree. Christmas Spirit doesn’t approve of a potty mouth at all, and so that’s why, at that very moment, as I strained up to get the nail in, the Christmas Spirit nudged my knee just enough to make contact with the glass pane window, pushed it just enough to… POP crack the glass pane right in half. You know, I am going to have to be honest here, I feel that while I understand the Christmas Spirit’s methods, I don’t think they had the desired result. Because if you think a little trouble hammering a nail causes me to swear, you should hear what new words I can string together when my knee busts out a living room window.

After this ordeal, my term as Chief Light Hanging Officer was immediately ended. I was impeached by the House Committee On Christmas Cheer, which happens to be headed by the Representative from the Great State of “I’m Pregnant and You are Ruining Christmas”. So I chose to leave the living room, come in here to the computer room, and go over in my head about how that plate glass window should have been able to hold against the ever-increasing pressure from my knee, that nail should have gone in, and this whole condo was conspiring to get me.

I went back out in to the living room, and while I know emotions running high is part of the experience, I could see my boorish behavior had upset Diana. This was a fun thing for her, and my jackassery was not helping. Windows can be fixed, thumbs will heal, and with patience those nails went in. Working together, my wife and I got the lights up, got the Christmas decorations up, and spent the rest of the evening cuddled on the couch watching Lost.

During which, she farted on my foot. But that’s a whole new post…

-J