Category: Local

I probably will. I’m not a huge fan of the fanfare around this holiday for a variety of reasons (some personal ones that I’m not going to go into here), but mostly I haven’t slept well for a couple of weeks. I’ll probably just play with my new DS Lite a bit (haven’t had a chance to play with it much) and then crash well before midnight. I have to work tomorrow, so that’s a partial motivator. So we’re just having a couple friends over to play some board games, and then I’m probably going to crash.

Anybody else going to fall asleep before midnight?

Regardless, I hope everybody has a happy and safe holiday, and please, please, please call a cab if you’ve had more than a couple drinks. I don’t care how coherent you think you are and how fine you think you’ll be, you won’t end up hurting yourself, you’ll hurt somebody else (read between the lines there and you’ll know why I’m not a huge fan of the holiday).

Here are the local numbers for the local taxi companies. Print them up and bring them with you wherever you party tonight (all area code 541 if you’re from out of town reading this):

• Bend Cab Co: 389-8090
• City Cab: 385-3304
• Owl Taxi: 382-3311
• Redmond Taxi: 548-1182
• Yellow Cab Co.: 330-1600

And remember, it’s better safe than sorry.

The icy rain we got last night has already caused some chaos, and it’s already bruised me up pretty bad, too.

I woke up this morning and went outside to get some firewood. Our woodstove is our primary source of heat this time of year (our furnace just sucks up too much electricity for how effective it is), so I went outside to get some firewood. I generally load a bunch of wood into a back storage hallway that’s just off our backyard patio into our house. The icy rain made our concrete patio pretty dangerous, so I walked carefully as I went across it to get to our wood pile. I grabbed a few rounds to put in the hallway, and made the attempt to walk gingerly across the patio. I took two steps, with an armload of wood, slipped, and went flying. I flew down forward, onto my knees, with the firewood coming down on top of me. I bruised the living bejeebers out of both knees, scraped up one of them, and bruise my elbow as well.

I couldn’t walk for a few minutes, so as I’m laying there in pain on the patio, my six year old daughter — who’s the only one up with me at this time of the morning — is looking out the window with a look like “Oh my is he dead?” I looked back at her to make sure she knew I was OK, and would come back in the house when I could get up again.

The problem was we still needed firewood as it was dang cold outside, so I had to get some more wood chopped and into the hallway. Needless to say, once I got back on my feet, I didn’t cross the patio unless I had to — I threw the wood into the hallway from a distance. I got the wood inside, got a fire started, and then just plopped down on the floor with some ice on my knees.

I eventually made it to work this morning (and was greeted with four inches of snow) after trying to loosen up my knee. It still hurts like a bugger (not like it did this morning). Once my Advil kicks in I’ll be OK.

In the grand scheme of things, however, I’m just glad I’m not in Colorado right now. My brother’s in Fort Collins right now, and getting beat up as well.