Forty is F'd Up!

Initially I was informed I would have a work audit performed on my birthday. This being my 40th, such boring, adult activity sounded par for the course. Then in a stroke of luck the audit was pushed out.

My birthday is a special day in history. Not only is it always the 1st day of the 2nd week of the 3rd month, every year; on the evening of my birth, Joe Frazier gave Ali the beat down while earlier in the day Radio Hanoi played Jimi Hendrix's rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. Important stuff.



I was pumped to (be able to) read on the calendar hanging from the fridge, while eating breakfast that my birthday would fall on Fat Tuesday. Pretty rad. Not so rad was that it would also be International Ladies Day.

In staying my course of optimism for officially being old, last Saturday A surprised me by gathering up a group of friends to take me out for a good long bike ride. This was sweet of her no doubt and my friends certainly savored getting to drag me over hill and dale for the first time in 3 1/2 years. I think they most enjoyed the shocked look G and I shared as they crashed our Saturday morning cartoon time with derogatory name calling and threats for me to get off the *&^%ing couch.


Ironically, I wasn't the one who bonked blocks from home. I actually fared well. All those boring evening rides on the rollers in the basement and weekend ski trips with G prepared me well enough to get back into the swing of big bike rides.

The flip side was that while I was out with my aging spandex clad posse, her and G bought paint supplies for me to paint and carpet the stairwell I've been blowing off for 10-years.

Which brings me to last night and the sobering vision of falling from my poorly engineered scaffolding as I reached the high corners of the stairwell with a 20ft telescoping pole complete with a soaked sponge and paint dripping onto my face. In full color I could see the wood shelf the ladder was supported by, breaking from too much Newma-weight and my getting tangled in it as we both fell, hitting the last 3 steps of the staircase and tumbling to the basement floor, breaking my legs into 4 or 5 pieces each.

Ultimately painting the far end of the stairwell went okay. It was the cutting in at the landing, the part where all I needed was a step ladder that I did the most shoddy work. I rarely sleep well as it is, but last night I tossed and turned to dreams of paint dripping from the ceiling. In reality it was in the corners, the easy to reach corners where the drips got the better of me.

Last night was a busy night for someone else too. In the morning as A and I were both heading out the door for work, she saw that someone had broken into her car. Tin snip cut like opening a can of soup under the door handle was the access point to steal the air bag out of the steering wheel. They also took her Sheryl Crow CD which is odd because Sheryl Crow sucks.