What I Did Not Do

Of course, using the Net anywhere in the house is of very little use to a man with a tower machine. But to a chick with PowerBook, life is good.

The reason we got the high-speed connection is Darin's consulting. I need to access the Web a lot, sure, but do I really need to read Cybersleaze at 128kb or whatever it is? No, I do not.

Now, many of the people who work with Darin or who employ Darin read this very journal day in and day out, and while I usually talk about moi, periodically elements of what Darin's up to filter through. Therefore, I must be careful with telling the next story, about what I did not do yesterday.

Yesterday I had to run over to USC to clear up my parking permit application fiasco, and I stopped at Orchard Supply Hardware in order to pick up yet more gardening supplies and find a power cord for Darin's old Black-and-Decker cordless drill. One of the gardening supplies I picked up was a 6-tine manure fork, the kind of pitchfork one associates with farmers, Grant Wood's American Gothic (the painting, not the TV series), and The Other. I got one to turn my compost pile. I'm making compost! It's so exciting.

Anyhow. I put the pitchfork in my cart and walked by the garden hose reel carts. Hm, thought I, I need one of them. I picked one up and was putting it in the cart when a salesguy walked by and asked if I needed any help. "I'm looking for a power cord for a Black-and-Decker," I began, as I dropped the reel cart in my basket.

On top of the pitchfork.

Which knocked the pitchfork over.

Right towards me.

The handle of the pitchfork (not the tines) slapped me on the left side of my nose. It hurt, but it didn't break skin, I didn't get a nose bleed, and thankfully I missed my eye.

The assistant manager ran over and started taking down my information, including my name, age, address, phone number...he wanted my social security number for the insurance company and I balked. "Tell them to call me," I said. "I'm not planning on suing you."

But my nose sure hurt. Plus, they didn't have the cord for the Black and Decker.

When I got home, I did not get a phone message from Darin saying that he was having lunch with his buds and he did not say that they were going to see Men In Black. We did not finally link up on the phone and he did not tell me to get my butt over to Burbank asap. I did not get to the AMC theatre in time for 1:55 show and we did not see MIB, an hysterically funny movie. We did not enjoy Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith's repartee or the "wall of monitored aliens".

Afterwards, since we were not at the movie, Darin did not have to drive Brent and Harry back to their house, and I was not forced to have lunch by myself at California Pizza Kitchen, thereby sparing me the ignominy of dealing with questions like, "Just one?"

I got home (from not being out) and proceeded to do what I was going to do before I did not get a phone from Darin: spray the citrus trees with insecticide. After much worry about what's wrong with the lemon trees, I finally ripped off a branch and took it to a nursery, where they looked at it and said, "Whiteflies." Time to spray. I got out my gloves, I got out my face mask, and I prepared the potion of whitefly doom. I sprayed the lemon trees, then the tangerine tree (showing a bit of whitefly annoyance), and finally the orange tree. I have to do this again in two weeks, to make sure I'm really getting the bastards.

Then I washed off all the spraying gear and put it in the garage.

I picked up my pruners and went to prune off dead branches on the orange and tangerine trees. I snipped dead leaves here and there.

Put all the pruning stuff back in the garage.

Walked around to the front, cursed the carob trees, which have dropped carob seed crap all over our front deck (anybody want a couple of carob trees?), and watered the plants.

I'm telling you all of this because of what happened to me when I finished with all my gardening cutesiness: I went inside, flipped through the mail, decided to log on and get my e-mail, went to wash my hands, and felt my mouth fill up with saliva.

In case you don't know what that means, I proceeded to dash to the bathroom just in time to lose that CPK lunch I didn't have. (And I lost it in stages too: first the dessert, then the pizza and the 3 glasses of lemonade....brrr.)

If this had happened right when I was spraying the insecticide or right after, I could easily blame it on that. But it didn't. I puttered around for 20 or 30 minutes more. So I have no idea where this came out of, other than my stomach and the beginnings of my upper intestinal tract.

I didn't do much yesterday after that.

Orchard Supply Hardware called me today to see if I was all right. Isn't that sweet?

• Everybody dies but his best friend.
• The psychic is the housekeeper's son.
• It's only a brain tumor.

Eeeeek! Spoilers I don't get! If you know what these are for, write me.

Mike Berry ruins more movies with:

• It is demonstrated that, indeed, there's no place like home.
• The sad, pathetic serial killer is captured, but the sinisterly charming one gets away.
• After singing "Que Sera, Sera" more times than the audience can bear, she and her husband rescue their kidnapped son.
• The two women drive off a cliff.
• He never finds his missing girfriend and is buried alive for his trouble.

And I have these to add:

• She ends up with her gay best friend.
• He was she and she was he in their past lives.

I'm not sure I agree that "It is demonstrated that, indeed, there's no place like home" is a spoiler. Please vote on whether it should be included on the Spoiler Game page I'm going to set up.

No, I didn't go running today. My quads still hurt too much. Tomorrow morning, I promise.