Lessons of the City 2 and 3

Lesson Number Two:

When you carry an umbrella in the city, it is your responsibility to maneuver it away from others walking down the sidewalk. These maneuvering skills include rising it up, tipping it to the side, walking off of the sidewalk completely or sometimes you have to just close the umbrella all together.

It was pouring last night as I walked to the train to meet Tylan for our Wednesday SBS corn hole league. (By the way we won our first game!) Normally I would drive to the train stop when the weather is nasty so we don't come home looking and smelling like wet dogs. Due to the fact we were taking the truck home, I walked to the train stop. Knowing it was going to be pouring my nice boyfriend Tylan left out an umbrella for me to use, little did he know it was going to create a great story!

All was going well on my way to the train stop in Wakefield. There were a few mishaps when I found out I couldn't fit in between the light post and the fence. Besides that the large umbrella was very much appreciated.

When I got to the city, I did as I saw everyone else and opened my umbrella at an appropriate distance from the outside door to avoid poking anyone's eye out. Where all heck broke loose was when I enter the narrow streets. I realized I wasn't fitting very nicely on the side walk. My umbrella keep bouncing off the building.

Suddenly BANG! I nailed a man on the shoulder. Oops. I said I was sorry, but he didn't acknowledge me as he seemed in quit the rush to make his train. Woo... got away with that mistake. Following that I got trapped in between the side of a building and one of those large electric boxes. People stared, I was scared I was going to electrocute myself. I nailed two other people and was knocked off the sidewalk before I started to catch on to everyone's clever umbrella moves.

And that's where lesson two was learned. If you use an umbrella when it's raining, it doesn't mean you rule the side walk. You must move your umbrella to avoid others.

This night was a special night, because I got to indirectly learn an additional city life lesson:

Lesson 3:
When you plan on driving into the city and don't want to pay to park in an expensive parking garage..
Not only do you check if there is a hockey or basketball game, but check if there are any concerts happening.

Because if you don't you might end up driving around for a hour and a half before you have to pull some super man parallel parking maneuver and barely make it to your SBS corn-hole game!

Construction lesson #1

Demo day lesson one:

Make sure the watch you are relying on is set to the correct time.

Today we tore down the bricks the wood stove hearth on the third floor. To do this we first attempted with hand tools but realized quickly that it wasn't too reasonable. So we found out that Home Depot offers a great tool rental program.

This morning we woke up early, fed ourselves a delicious hearty breakfast at Brothers (a classic must go to in Wakefield). Then went to Home Depot to rent an electric demo hammer drill for four hours for a total of $35. Not to bad, we thought. We had estimated it would only take 4 hours to do this job.

Tylan had me set my watch alarm for 1:15pm which was 3:45 hours from when we rented the tool to make sure we returned it on time. We knew it would be loud with a drill so we thought the wrist watch was the best option to keep us on schedule.

Well all was going well until I looked at my watch and saw that we only had 15 minutes left and still had to pull up the entire base! We looked at each other and decided that we might as well take a water break. Tylan decides he should call to ask how much it would be to rent tool for longer...

This break went on for about 13 ish minutes before I realize that I never changed my clock for daylight savings time! We still had a whole hour left!



Well to not make a short story long, we finished up the entire thing minus the clean up in the four hours we estimated EVEN with my silly Windows 95 mistake!