Out With A Bang...

Some of this story appeared in an e-mail or two, but I thought that I would share it with all of you.

So I had a rather rough last day of 2005. My friend Emily from college had been staying with my folks and I for a couple days before her scheduled departure back to Chicago where she is a graduate student. She was supposed to leave early on the morning of the 31st from the Oakland airport, which is about an hour and 15 minutes from my parents house with no traffic. Things didn't go exactly as planned.

There was a HUGE storm the night of the 30th-31st and so when we got up super early to head out to the airport in my dad's car we found that the road out from my parents house was blocked by a small tree that had fallen across the road. Mind you this is a single lane road that runs along a mountain edge with no rail on the down slope side and it was still dark and pouring rain at this point. We drove back to my parents house and got my dad and a chainsaw. My dad decided to drive my mom's car out behind us, but as he was backing out of the car port he accidentally drove the left hand side of the car off the driveway and down a hill. The car was sitting at an precipitous angle and so we called the whole thing off and went back into the house. Emily simply had to get another flight and chew on the consequences. This is just the way that things go when you live out here in Woopwoop. She managed to call the airline and get on the same set of flights the following day which was the 1st.

We all went back to bed for another 4 hours or so and then got up, and we glad to see that the car had not fallen down the hill. The power had also gone off while we had all gone back to bed. Dad, Emily, and I got into his car and headed out the road with the chainsaw to see if we could get to the end of the road and out onto the county highway. We found that an even bigger (1 m diameter) tree had fallen parallel with the road since Emily and I first tried to get out to the end of the road. To get out we had to set to work with the chainsaw de-limbing the tree to make enough space to get a car down the shoulder of the road. This took about an hour and a half. We then drove further on, cut off the small tree that Emily and I had first encountered, and then had to cut off two more along the way to the county highway. We picked up the newspapers and headed back in from the county road. (It is 5 km from the county road to my parents house.) We went over to the ranch side of Djerassi and got the ranch truck which is a great big monster dodge pickup truck and brought it back to the house. Using it and some chain we managed to get my mom's car back up onto the driveway.

Because the power was out we made pancakes on a cast iron griddle that we placed onto the gas barb-b-que. We did bacon as well!

After I took a shower in the afternoon I was walking down the stairs and my mom's cat was hiding halfway down the stairs curled up again the vertical face of the one of the stairs. I did not see her and completely ate shit and slammed my back onto the edges of the really hard wooden stairs. They do not have any sort of padding on them at all. I now have a big bone bruise on my right shoulder blade and several large abrasions on my back. My right shoulder and right upper arm are really sore and it still hurts to do a lot of things. I also jammed several of the toes on my right foot and so I was gimping around. And the cat of course escaped unscathed.

Another big storm was supposed to blow in for the night of the 31st-1st so Emily and I decided that we had to get off of the mountain so that if more tress fell we would still be able to make it to the airport. So we headed down to San Jose where a bunch of our friends from college were going to be throwing a party. I was already planning on attending this party after Emily had left, but because of the storm she got to come to the party and I got to spend a little more time with her.

The party was really great and we all had a good time. Bob and Tina did a great job hosting and it was great to get to hang out with Dan and Emily (different Emily), Greg, Mike and Meghan, Dave, Chris and Katie (Congratulations!), and every one else who attended. I was going to take a bunch of pictures of everyone, but bringing out my nice camera while heavy drinking was occuring seemed like a bad idea.

Emily and I got up very early the morning of the 1st and I managed to get her to the airport and make it all the way back to my folk's house in one piece where I begrudgingly fed the cat, took two tylenol and two pepto bismol, unplugged the phone, and went back to bed for another 4 hours!