NSTIW

It's been one of those days.

Today was my first weekend since classes start. It's the time when I try and get into a rhythm to clean the house and work on projects for the coming week. Well, I am still in the process of cleaning and de-junking the house so my project today was to launch another assault on the front room. However, before I sent in the army, I wanted to at least start on a project that I've been meaning to play with for several months.

To start things off I was working in the guest room and starting a project that I had on a shelf since Josh, my ex-roommate, had moved in. A friend of mine had asked me to repair a book of fairytales for her. It's an older book from the sixties or seventies that was well warn and very well loved and the pages were literally falling out of the spine. The pages had to be cut free from the spine and separated and then repaired. Each page can take hours to repair - not for the actual repairs but for all of the time it takes to allow the cleaning agents and glue to dry. So once I had one page in the drying phase I could attack the front room.

While cleaning on the front room I got a call from Dan, the Fish. He was in the area and wanted to swing by and catch up before he headed back up to Athens. So I took a break when he got to the house. I hadn't gotten much information about "The Family" lately but assumed that things were progressing well and measured as most things (save for people screaming on a roof) tend to do. Heather was on her way to Indiana, Morgana was in preparation to move into the dorms and start her education at Ohio University, and Dan was gearing up to start classes in Lancaster.

After a while Dan had to go because he was needing to get back to Athens so he could change in time for his weekend gig as a drummer for Barbara's restaurant, Salam. Yes, my friends are just that cool. So I bid him fare well and started to attack the front room once more.

A bit later, Josh and his buddy, Mike, showed up to grab a load of Josh's stuff. They were in and out in only a few minutes but it was another small break. Once they were gone, the spot that was once occupied by Josh's box was cleaned and things were moved to accommodate the new, open design. (AKA: No More JUNK.)

Em wanted to come over lunch and I decided that I could use some of her AbFab (that's ABsolutely FABulous) sense of design with me moving things around in the front room. A few more boxes got cleaned before she showed up and I took another break to catch up with her after her first week of classes.

Most of the conversation, after the consumption of some pizza, was flavored with me cleaning and pitching junk from the piles of things in the front room. While in the last throws of sorting, I received a phone call from Josh's cellphone. It wasn't Josh.

Mike was calling me to let me know that he and Josh had been in a wreck; the word he was used was 'T-boned'. I'm not sure exactly what I asked him but it was something akin to "PUT JOSH ON THE PHONE." I'm sure it was polite and civil (in my usual manner) but there was no doubt in my mind that I could, at that very moment, teleport through the phone if only to make sure that Josh was ok.

Josh explained what had happened but there were a few words that popped into my mind and didn't want to leave. Words like: Jaws of Life, and Backboard, are hard to miss when someone's telling you that they're ok. I think he actually repeated that he was 'ok' a few times in between his description of how they had to remove the ENTIRE PASSENGER SIDE of Mike's car. Not the door, the whole side. That is, both the back door, the front door and the connective membrane of metal that would separate the two.

At that time, Josh was waiting on the results from his x-ray to see if anything was broken. Josh's mother works at the local hospital were he was taken (and is also skilled in the taking of x-rays) so she was right there with him. I asked him if he needed anything, but since he didn't know when they were going to tell him what was going on and his mom was there - he didn't need anything at the time.

So I got off the phone with Josh, told Em the basic jist, and then unleashed a torrent, nay - a stream of cleansing energy; that is to say that I cranked up my tidy genes and organized and pitched with more gusto. My friend was hurt but there was nothing much I could do for him at that particular moment. So, being the controlling person that I am, I decided to bring some much needed order to my house - whether the universe wanted to allow it or not.

A few minutes later Josh called me and asked if he could get a ride from the hospital. Mike's car was totaled and his mom couldn't leave work. So Em took off so she could get ready for work and I put the Saturnator's headlights (they're the closest things to nipples) to the wind and was off to SOMC.

Long story short....


.... Too late.


Josh is crashed in the guest room right now with the right side of his body aching and twinging with pain. There is no bruising after several hours and he's on some mighty good pain killers and muscle relaxers. He could have gone back to the dorms but his bed is the top bunk. He would not have been able to crawl up to the top with his body so whacked out of shape by the wreck. So, since I had just cleaned the guest room and such, ran him to get his 'scrip filled at Walmart and down to his dorm to get some clothes and piled him on the couch for a while. Mike's parents eventually came and picked him up so he could figure out what he will do because of the accident (he was sited for failure to yield to a stop sign).

After I got some chicken-rice down him so that he would have something on his stomach to help the meds work, I poured him into the guest bed so that he could try and sleep to let his body heal.

Yes, it's been one of those days.

-Tom

P.s. NSTIW: No Shit There I Was... How -else- do you begin a blog such as this?