What a weekend it was…

..in that it already occurred and so not a weekend that will be…or that is occurring now… but rather was… but I undress.

Chapter 1

Some days ago, Baby Bro had called to see if he could procure the services of Old Blue, my environmentally rude pick’em up truck for Saturday. Old Blue is also the name of my nads but we’re talking about the services of my truck now. It seems Bro had purchased an inflatable above ground pool for his 5 kids. It was on clearance at the local home-improvement super-vast-and-confusing store during the winter and sat in his garage till now and he was preparing to set it up. I confess I thought inflateus.com was an entirely different kind of site, but I digest. The pool actually uses some of the water you fill it with to create the walls so it needs to be set up on level ground. Otherwise you get a scale model tsunami as the sides collapse. The location in Baby Bro’s back yard had a slope to it so he was going to use screened dirt from Gardenville. Gardenville is one of the few places left around here that will load up tractor buckets of landscape materials right into your pickup truck. I agreed to meet him there on Saturday morning.

In the meantime Baby Bro had squared and strung up the site with batter boards to calculate how much dirt he was going to need and discovered that he would need 4 yards. In case you’re not familiar with this, those are cubic yards and that’s really more or less dirt than it sounds depending whether you have metric dirt or not. Regardless it would be several pick’em up truck loads so he decided to pay to have it delivered on Friday morning. He called to say he wouldn’t be needing Old Blue on Saturday after all. Still the 4 yards of dirt would have to be moved from the front yard to the back yard so I offered - he did not ask - to knock off work in the morning to come help him. I arrived Friday morning around 8:30 with a couple of shovels. I actually have only learned to use one at a time, but maybe I was hoping a neighbor would see what fun we were having and want to pitch in. Baby Bro had his own shovel and a wheelbarrow. I don’t know why I didn’t think to bring a wheelbarrow. In case you’re wondering, 4 yards of dirt equals 30 to 50 wheelbarrow loads depending on the size of your wheelbarrow (And you know what they say about the size of a man’s wheelbarrow). But not to worry, Baby Bro had a buddy bringing by a trailer to pull behind the riding mower that would hold about 3 or 4 wheelbarrow loads of dirt. I can’t imagine how Baby Bro thought he was going to do all this by himself. I also imagine that right about now the incredible clearance price for the pool didn’t seem so incredible. After a bit of coffee we started digging in. We started with the wheelbarrow. In fact we probably did almost 1/3 of the dirt making trips back and forth with the wheelbarrow. The guy with the trailer showed up and dropped it off. We got a big chunk of the stack done before I had to leave for work. I had put in about 2 hours of shoveling. It wasn’t hot and it was a reasonable pace so I didn’t have too much soreness. I worked a couple hours at the office and had a checkup with the oral-wallet-surgeon (see previous post) and was back at the office for work when I called to check on Baby Bro’s progress. Well, it seems he miscalculated and would need 1 or 2 more yards of dirt. So I offered to meet him at Gardenville at 4 in the afternoon. They dumped a yard in Old Blue and she moaned just a teeny bit in protest. But she held her head high (if not her tail low) as we took the dirt to Baby Bro’s house a few miles away. We still had the buddy’s trailer and were able to shovel Old Blue’s load in a couple trailers full over about an hour. After raking and screeding the dirt, the truth in front of us was that he needed that other yard of dirt, but Baby Bro was spent so he was going to make do with what we had. We observed the manly rite of chatting while leaning with our forearms on the bed of the pickup truck for a while. More than one “yep” was exchanged. He thanked me profusely and I was on my way.

I was going to play keyboards in church on Sunday and really needed to practice because I knew I had a busy day on Saturday. I tried. I practiced for about a half hour. But I was just too tired to really give it much effort. I also needed to make up some lead sheets as the usual pianist usually plays with piano manuscripts written in a different key than the ensemble plays in. She just modulate using some buttons on her keyboard. Since I don’t really know her keyboard that well (hello!) and I also don’t sight read too reliably, I usually make up lead sheets with melody and chords. I was too pooped for that as well so I was going to have to wing it on Sunday.

Chapter 2

Besides being so charitable with my time and labor for my Baby Bro I had offered for my wife and I to keep the granddaughter while daughter/son-in-law packed for their ensuing move and held a garage sale on Saturday afternoon. We all had a wedding to attend that evening and we had already agreed to keep her that night. But I thought it would be helpful to not have her under foot during the garage sale. I am so !@#$ing magnanimous sometimes. We were going that afternoon to the University of Texas where my son attends. He is a member of a ’service’ organization (read frat-lite) and they were hosting a “parents day” tailgate party for the baseball game. I’m guessing “parents day” means 30% less beer consumption that usual. We picked up the granddaughter at noon in New Braunfels, and headed off to Austin. We scored a good, and forever to remain secret, parking place - a rare rare commodity in Austin and particularly at UT. We strapped the granddaughter in a stroller and headed to the parking lot where the party was. There was a nice grassy section in the middle so there was lots of room for the granddaughter to run around. Agreeing to be at a tailgate party AND tote around the granddaughter is totally against my usual curmudgeous credo but the sun dappling on the smiling faces of my wife, granddaughter and son were truly heart warming even for one as black as mine. My granddaughter is 17 months old and she is just starting to say some words. She is also doing this thing where she invites you to sit next to her by patting the area next to her and grunting. A lot of the college girls at the tailgate party were wearing t-shirts, short denim skirts and cowboy boots and hats. Sort of like a red-neck schoolgirl uniform. The granddaughter kept inviting them to sit next to her on the curb. She is, of course, irresistible so they would have to try and manage to keep the skirt down while they took a seat on the curb next to her. I could barely stifle the leer… er uh… grins. We hung out there a couple of hours. You can sort of see pics here of the tailgate party but they’re mostly of the granddaughter. Hey! I said she was irresistible.

Chapter 3

The wedding that evening was actually to take place on a riverboat on Lake Austin. Daughter and son-in-law had made plans to actually stay the night at the Radison Hotel on Ladybird Lake with friends who were attending. [Town Lake or Lady Bird Lake and Lake Austin are all part of the Colorado river that flows through Austin]. We arranged to use their hotel room for a brief refresher stop between tailgate party and the wedding. We got to the hotel room around 4pm. We got darkened the room and that got granddaughter and wife to sleep for a nice nap. I slipped out for a walk on Town Lake hike and bike trail. While rounding the corner of the hotel toward the trail a guy briskly walks past me carrying a bicycle. I figure he’s got a flat and is now having to hoof it to his destination with bike in tow. But as I head down to the trail he does also but with a detour to the side. Under a tree, he whips a pair of heavy wire cutters out his shorts pocket and starts working on breaking the chain locking the front wheel. I take a few more steps as I ponder what’s occurring. I’m adding it up in my head and its clear he’s stealing the bike. I turn and watch at least a dozen other people walk by and he is in plain sight of all of them. I decide to go back and confront him. I don’t know what I expected to happen. He wasn’t a particularly big or mean looking guy. I guess I hoped he would just run. So I walked up to him and I said “Dude” (wanting to appear like I had some street cred) “it looks like you’re stealing that bike”. He replied without looking at me “@!!#$ off”. Huh. I hadn’t really planned past this point. Now what. I repeated myself with slight variation. “Dude, I really think you’re stealing that bike”. “!@#$ off” again was his reply.. still no eye contact. I was talking loud so maybe somebody walking by might wanna offer some assistance. None. I’d like to tell you now that I deftly and summarily disarmed him and detained him for the police. But instead I walked quickly back around the corner of the hotel to see if I could summon a cop. I was conflicted a bit, ‘narcing’ him out like that. But somebody was really gonna be bummed when they discovered their bike was missing. So I grabbed the Valet and told him a guy was stealing a bike and could he call a cop. He came around the corner with me while radioing to the desk for police. By the time we got back, Dude and bike were gone. I felt like the most pathetic avenger ever. Anyway, within a few seconds after that bicycle cops that patrol the trail showed up. I gave them a description of the bike and Dude. While giving the description a couple other bicyclist came up and asked if we were looking for a bike thief. They explained they’d seen a guy urgently peddling down the trail but missing all the gears so they felt sure the bike wasn’t his. One bike cop took my name/number info and the others peddled off in pursuit. After that I hiked down the trail for a ways all the while imagining myself spotting the guy somewhere along the trail and confronting him with my best Barney Fire ever. “My hands are registered lethal weapons!”. The trail is beautiful this time of year. After about an hour between police chase and my hike I returned to the room. I didn’t have time for an actual shower but I washed up and changed for the wedding. Daughter and son-in-law arrived and we drove to the boat dock.

The groom is a retired chef turned stock trader and the bride the divorcee of a wealthy lawyer turned school teacher. I think the groom had been married before too so they elected to go ‘whimsical’ for this wedding. Besides being on the afore mentioned boat it featured a belly dancer, sword swallower and those guy who shoot flames from their mouths. No, not the right wing republican radio talk show hosts. These were actual flames. Like the ones the talk show hosts will burn in for eternity. Although I had made a pact not to spend any more of my remaining days on this earth at weddings except possibly my own children’s I have to say it was kind a of a nice cruise. I didn’t even go on the top deck for the actual ceremony. I just stayed down and took in the scenery. The belly dancer was much cuter than the usual belly dancer fare I had seen before. We definitely locked eyes during one of her performances and I think we might have shared a moment there. I’m pretty sure she’s still thinking about me today but I hope she is able to move on. The sword swallower was from New Jersey which took some of the lustre from the act because in Jersey they’ll eat anything. I mingle-mingled a bit with the assistance of a beer and half a vicodin. The cruise was actually two trips. The first trip ended at 9pm so those who weren’t serious committed revelers could disembark. Wifey, granddaughter and I were among the disembarkers. Some pics are here .

We got home a little before 11pm. Granddaughter had fallen asleep in the car. I had hoped that she would remain asleep when I put her in her crib. We had elected to actually sleep in the guest room with her. She sleeps there when her and momma stay plus I had to be up early for church and I didn’t want to wake her. But she awoke and would not go back to sleep in the crib. Ultimately wife and I laid down with her in the guest room bed and with some singing and gentle massaging I got to sleep, er.. I MEAN she got to sleep just before midnight. Still, all night long she would stir and whimper a bit. This would wake me up as I was on already high alert and over stimulated from the day of college girls in short skirts and belly dancers. Somewhere around 5:15 I went to my own bed. The alarm went off at the most painful 6:30 ever. I didn’t even bother to make coffee for fear it would wake the baby. I dressed, and drove through a donut shop for some C- grade coffee and a croissant on my way to church.

It was a small group playing for church. Bass, rhythm strummy-strum guitar and me on keyboards. I got through all the selections for church, including intros and endings without too obvious of stumbles. We actually got some compliments on the ensemble sound so go figure.

Afterwards we grabbed breakfast at the local taqueria and then went to the house. I can’t tell you how exhausted I was and we still had several hours before the hand-off of the granddaughter. I just basically watched in a stupor as she littered every square inch of the den and kitchen with either her toys or stuff deemed not sharp or poisonous within her reach and thereby deemed her toys. I used only the minimalist of motions to keep her from breaking herself or my stuff. When we were driving to meet the daughter and son-in-law I actually felt like I might fall asleep at some of the stop lights. I had wife drive home.

Chapter 4

I still don’t know if Baby Bro got the pool up and going.