Broken Brake

It's the day after max tax day and I still haven't filed my kid's returns. Yesterday, I was trying to do them with the help of a friend who did the keyboard work while I tried to supply answers to the questions while shuffling through all of the tax related documents (W2's, 1099 ints/divs/oids/B's/sqeeze/please/shootmeinthehead) and drinking beer left over in the keg from my birthday party (pretty flat now Moose).

This was made all the more interesting because I was blind in one eye and wearing dark glasses. This was because earlier in the day, after driving back up to Duluth with a car full of tools, parts, and miscellaneous junk (like my golf clubs), I foolishly attempted to unload my tool box from the car. Now, this tool box is sizable and has the mass of a small black hole. The car sighed gratefully and rose three inches as I did the strongman squat and grunt (pants survived) and with a mighty heave, lifted the chest just far enough to slide it out of the back of the car. Not having thought this plan through I realized as I staggered backwards that if I fell or dropped the chest the headlines on tomorrow's paper would read something like this "Man posthumously nominated for the Darwin Award after being crushed by his own tool box. Found in his garage, pinned under his tools and apparently crawling toward the beer keg in the corner."

And as much as I would have liked a beer, it was in the opposite direction from where the tool chest must go. As I staggered in that direction, straining with all I had to keep the bastard box from amputating anything important, vision blurring and turning dark, I eventually reached the spot designated as the temporary tool storage area and came to another realization - I somehow had to get the chest to the floor without dropping it. Have you ever tried to gently lower something that weighs as much as an elephant without killing yourself in the process? It ain't easy.

Fortunately for me, I had an ankle to break the fall as the toolbox won the contest with gravity and slammed down to it's "temporary" location. Stifling the normal response to such an event I walked (well limped) away congratulating myself for not spilling blood on the new cement floor, or scratching the paint in the process.

Having deposited my butt into a soft chair in front of the computer to recover from my recent strenuous exercise, I noticed that the left side of my peripheral vision in my left eye was being wonky. This began to worry me a little because I recently learned that the fluid pressure in my eyes was above the normal limit and the doctor kept whispering to his assistant during the exam and of course I understood none of it, but he deadpanned a lecture to me that contained the words "retinal tear" and "vitriol explosion" and "if you keep that up you could go blind" and here I was going blind and counting myself lucky that I didn't just shoot my entire eyeball out and then step on it while foolishly lugging my tool box when I should have just told my teenage son to do it for me (not that he would have, of course).

So, I called the eye doctor and after much hushed conversation just off the phone handset, I was instructed to come right in, which I did - not wanting to go blind just after finishing the house project that resulted in wonderful views of Lake Superior. I went broke do that and now I'm going to sit and look at that damned lake for a good long time.

Once at the office I went though the normal drill - eye drops that dilated the eyes, but in this case it was just the left eye AND they gave me TWO doses of some super secret extra strong dilator that should probably wear off in about twenty-four hours the tech said. Then the doctor came in and shined an industrial strength light into my eye that finished off the going blind process. Then he tipped the chair back so that it was finally comfortable, but before I could go to sleep he blasted me again with the light business which was to distract me I guess as he started pushing some sharp tool into the exposed portions of my eyeball.

Now I heard that the genius Issac Newton once explored the regions behind his eyeball with a butter knife just to see what was back there and I can now empathise with how difficult that must have been. I don't want to EVER do that test again.

In the end, the doc said that I was probably going to be OK and to come back and see him in four weeks. Hopefully, I'll be dead by then.

So anyway, that's why I couldn't do the taxes myself. We finally stopped the effort and resorted to gin and tonics over some grilled burgers and the night ended on a high note.

Oh, PS The Wonder Dawg has made a good recovery from her little episode a few weeks back. She still looks at you with her head cocked to the side like the RCA Dalmatian and she staggers a bit when she walks, but then so do I so I call it even steven.

Oh, PPS I started out wanting to tell you about the "fixing the brakes on the Audi" but that will have to be a story for another time.