"Arrrg" follow up: the day of mild disasters
I got up at 7. For those of you playing along at home, on a normal work day, I get up at 8:30. 7 AM is an unacceptable time in the morning to me. (The hour before that is "negative o'clock;" you count backwards.) But I did it, and dragged myself to the park, and met up with my team. Incidentally, all of them are way better fundraisers than I am; between the 8 of them, they raised almost $10,000.
We were ushered into the park around 9:30, and the walk began at 10. The walk was mostly fine. But long. And, uh, did I mention I'm way out of shape? And have something resembling chronic foot pain? Six miles is a long goddamn walk. The group was instantly broken up, my section was way fast, and we made fantastic time for the first 2/3 of the walk. Then we stopped to wait for the rest of our group. It took 20 minutes. That was enough time for the soreness to set in, so when we got started again, I was with the slower group.
Then I had a bit of a fight with the curb. Gravity refereed. I lost. It was actually kind of stunningly impressive; I stumbled forward, like, eight feet in my attempt to catch myself, but just couldn't do it. I damn near faceplanted, but caught myself on hands and knees. Here's how good physical therapy has been for my wrists; obviously when I caught myself on my palms, they took the brunt of my weight, but were fine! My hands weren't scratched, which was a surprise, because they felt like they should be. My knee? Well, it began to hurt near the end of the walk, and is fine whenever I'm sitting down, but man, that whole walking thing reeeeally hurts. We'll call the fall disaster #1, because ow.
So that was the AIDS walk. I didn't get to go to lunch with the team after; I had to run home, so we could proceed to Part 2 of the Day of Mild Disasters.
The plan was to hurry home, grab Blanca, and high-tail it to U-Haul. When I made my reservation for the pick up truck, I asked specifically about how late they were open for drop offs. They said 5. I double checked. Definitely 5. That meant it would be tight, but we should have been juuuuust able to get to Brooklyn, get the bed, get back home, drop it off, and get the truck back to U-Haul. Because if we couldn't do that, the truck would need to be returned Monday morning. (Upside: they wouldn't charge extra; technically it's mine for 24 hours. Downside: I haven't driven in 3 and a half years, I've never driven in the city, I am a nervous driver, I hate driving, and I've never even driven a moderately large car, let alone a truck.)
We arrived around 3. And were promptly told -- bum bum BUMMMM -- that the latest drop off time was 4. Disaster #2, because I had a FUCKING HEART ATTACK. Disaster loomed imminent! There just was no way humanly, physically possible to get that done. But luckily, by the time I had even PROCESSED that, Blanca was on the phone with our friend Cristina, who can and does drive, and who has graciously, wonderfully agreed to come into the city tomorrow to drive the truck back for me (HI CRIS, ILU).
So Blanca and I took off, got into Brooklyn, and promptly got lost thanks to crap directions. We'll call this disaster #3a, because it wasn't very big. We eventually got better directions and found the woman selling the bed; we moved it onto the truck, paid up, no issues. Except it's an open pick up truck, right? And an overcast day, right? And I was waaaay too busy and stressed to get a tarp, right? YOU CAN SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING, RIGHT? Disaster #3b, but the rain was thankfully brief and the mattress thankfully protected by an old mattress pad. So we headed back to Manhattan, but were stopped at the toll booth -- because we hadn't pulled over at the truck checking station, apparently. After lecturing us, we were waved on. Phew!
So that was basically the end of the disasters; after that it was just moving the pieces of the bed (frame, box, mattress) in, and moving the old POS futon and its frame out. Just FYI, if you've ever walked six miles and taken a dramatic spill in the process, wrangling large, heavy objects is NO FUN. But we prevailed. Blanca is a serious freaking HERO for all of her help here. (HI BLANCA ILU.) Now all that remains is cleaning my room (because it turns out I had a lot of crap in the 2 inches of space under the futon frame, who knew?) and putting sheets on the bed, AND THEN I AM GOING TO SLEEP FOR A MILLION HOURS.
I've already called out of work for at least tomorrow morning, for the truck returning adventure. We'll see about the rest of the day after that.
ETA: Ahahaha, how much do I suck? When I left the AIDS walk, I called Rachel and asked her to make me spaghetti so it would be ready when I got home, but we didn't have time, so Blanca suggested I eat in her car on the way to U-Haul. AND I TOTALLY LEFT THE BOWL IN HER CAR.