Entries this day: Work pm

Work

5:26pm CDT Monday 5 August 2002

Today Janette came home for lunch and offered me a job at her work doing manual labor. Excellent! I had just been wondering if I could work there. Really.

I worked today for 3.5 hours at her work, a big prop-making warehouse thing. I helped her sew a hem 110 feet long at the bottom of a 40 foot tall curtain. Excellent!

Great fun nearly wallowing in so much fabric as we moved it across and around the table to pin it and help her sew it. We actually got about 1/2 the hem sewed; we'll do the other half tomorrow.

pm

8:50pm CDT Monday 5 August 2002

After work Janette and I played tennis on the newly paved tennis court in their neighborhood. I sucked. I could pretty much hit the ball each time it came vaguely close to me, but getting just that correct angle was a challenge. I often launched the ball out of the court, once into the street, once behind the court, again into the street, and once into the trees on the other side of the court (when we switched sides, there were trees more closely looming over the court on the side I was facing, so they blocked the balls from going out everytime I hit them too hard).

About 1/3 of the time I would get a good shot back vaguely in Janette's direction. Usually she would have to run some to get to the ball.

Then we swang on the swings for a bit. The chains were relatively short, so I was quickly at the apex of swinging and would come thunking back onto the chains each time. I lept out of the seat a few times, marking with an old green ribbon how far away I landed. The second time I beat my first attempt by about 2 inches, but I never got past that, and then each time I got worse and worse until I made a desperate 1 leg landing and ninja roll to keep from knocking the wind out of myself.

Then to play frisbee we went on the other side of the park, where there were no dogs who might want to chew on a disc. We didn't play too long before Janette got a bruise on her finger and choose to quit after not much longer. So we climbed a nearby tree with huge sprawling branches that I easily climbed without using my hands.

The main difficulty in climbing was the number of branches all over; like a crowded freeway of tree parts. One branch I climbed was not as easy. Its diamter was about 5 or 6 inches and it ascended 6 feet at and angle of about 45 or 50 degrees from horizontal. It started quite near the ground, so I wasn't too worried about falling. I made it up and noticed the branches of another tree nearby... Hmmmm.

It looked like it would hold me, but I wasn't sure. I leaned over and grabbed on, but the tree gave too much for me to feel comfortable with leaping from my stable branch. So I pushed myself back to standing on my branch and turned around to descend again. I almost made it all the way down, but lost my balance when I lept from my branch to the same branch about a foot lower and horizontal. Bonked my back against an upward sticking old dead branch. Didn't hurt too much.

Chilled on a park bench until the mosquitoes came out.