Labor, Interrupted

I should have known things weren't going to be as bright and sunny as a Tony, Toni, Tone song when I set off to work camp yesterday morning. So naive. You'd think I would know better by now.

Things started off okay as we unpacked and unloaded the machines but when we started trying to figure out how to put up this next set of beams, things started getting tricky. Seems the ol' beam weighed 250 lbs and also didn't seem to fit into the location it was cut for. This led to a bit of tension. And with tension comes irritation. And if you let the irritation grow, next you have bickering. The bickering eventually led to one girl leaving the worksite completely, headed for the hills, destined to never return. She would instead start a life on the road, alone, eventuallly ending up on a beautiful deserted tropical island where she could spend the second half of her life discovering edible flowers and making skirts out of dried seaweed and crabgrass. The key word here being alone. She was very excited at the prospect of never having to talk to another human ever again except possibly through her blog which she would somehow find a way to continue, perhaps by carving posts into the side of a tree with a conch shell. What would drive a girl to want to leave society altogether, you might be wondering? A grinding wheel is the answer.

We were having a hard time fitting this heavy piece of steel into the slot that it was designed to fit into. If you've ever had to move out of your home or apt and opted to do it the cheap way (i.e. yourself), it was like trying to fit a sofa through a doorway that is just too small, but there is no way in hell you're giving up because that sofa was expensive and you just know it will fit if you turn it at the right angle. I can tell you right now that there is no way this metaphorical sofa was going to fit. And I expressed that to Cheech and Chong who chose to just ignore me for an hour while turning it this way and that way as the hot sun beat down on us. After an hour of these shenanigans, Chong finally suggested exactly what I had been suggesting all along which was to cut a hole in one of the non-structural beams so that they could slide it in. This was the only way it would work and that was clear from the beginning but some times people think that girls are stupid and they just ignore them. A mistake since the beginning of time really.

In order to cut the beam, Chong, needed a machine with a sharp blade. He had the machine nearby but asked me to go get the blade out of the barn. Chong is usally very bad about his instructions but this time he was actually very specific and said "it's in the Metabo box. I need a grinding blade, larger than this one [shows me blade] but the same shape. A grinding blade." I was like okay and headed off to the barn where I found the Metabo box and the blades. The blades were labeled and it was weird but none of the grinding blades looked anything like the blade he showed me, so I grabbed a few of them, thinking that it had to be one of them and brought them back down to the site. Oh boy, let me just tell you about the verbal explosions. Chong went off on this tangent about how I never listen and he knew I would get the wrong blade and he didn't ask for a grinding blade, he asked for a cutting blade (not true) until the point that I just lost and said F you, I don't want to help any more and walked away.

I grabbed my backpack, stuffed my money and a Vitamin Water Zero into it, and headed off on the 10 mile walk to town. It was on this walk that I came up with my elaborate deserted island fantasy. I was totally immeresed in that world when my phone rang, 3-4 miles in, interrupting my dreams and happiness. I knew it was Chong calling so I didn't answer. But then it rang again and again and again and I finally accepted that my island trip was going to be ruined by my husband who wanted me to come back. I finally answered and said "I'm not turning back" and hung up but then he just drove after me and found me on the side of Route 519, sweating. I didn't want to go back at all but he made me feel guilty because his mom and dad and a close family friend bought us lunch so I reluctantly got in. I made sure that Chong knew that I wasn't doing it for him though. He said, I know. I'm sorry. I said "I'm sitting in the back seat" and I watched my island dreams float away into farm land and I found my way back home, like it or not. That Chong can be such a jerk some times.