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 This should be graven in stone somewhere, as a true Americanism. This is not good, by the way, as six aspirins at a clip is hazardous to one's health. We had one good ole boy at work pass out from doing this, right in the middle of drill. Sometimes we firemen sometimes aren't the brightest beans in the patch. Human beans notwithstanding. The job, being what it is, can rightfully be termed hazardous to one's health, in and of itself. A burning building is a building under haphazard, sometimes rapid, deconstruction. Being in and around them at this time can sometimes promote injuries, even when you're seemingly doing everything right and 'by the book'. It's no wonder that on any given day, you're working with people with blown out knees, or popped discs, etc., until the day comes when they just can't function anymore. This particular guy was suffering with a bad back, taking painkillers, and muddling along. He was afraid he'd get hooked on the prescription stuff, so he switched to plain aspirin....lots of them! It wasn't long before he had severe stomach pain along with his back, which caused him to take even MORE aspirin, which caused even MORE stomach pain. Strangeness, no? Anyway, by the time he fell over like a big freakin sequoia he was bleeding internally, rectally..sheesh, from an ulcer or something caused by the amount of aspirin he'd been taking on the sly, and wound up in the hospital. I did something similar a few days ago. Not to me, you understand, but something similar. As you all know we had a significant snowfall the other day. While I DO own a snowblower, it'd been sitting in my garage for the last few years, vegetating because of the lack of snow. In the fall, noticing the woodchucks in a feeding frenzy and the squirrels in an absolute tizzy, preparing for the coming winter, I thought it may be a good thing to bring it to the local snowblower repair guy (aka Lawnmower fixit guy) for a complete upper and lower GI. All the old gas in there had gunked up over the years and needed to be purged and stuff. Ok, fine, I got it back. It worked, to a degree. Still sounded a mite weak, but it seemed to be making putt-putt (cough) sounds on a regular basis, so I thought it would be alright. Comes the snow..... Not the little bitty inch or two to let you get used to us again, but the 'HOLY CRAP, I HOPE THE ROOF DON'T COLLAPSE!', type of snowfall. No problemmmm...we'd gotten 4 days notice, I'd stocked up on milk and cookies, peanuts for the squirrels, we were all set. The following morning, I take my broom to sweep off a spot for the peanuts on my back porch - CRACK, the broom breaks in half. Hmmmmm..... omens and portents of things to come? Nawwwwww.... sit back with my tea and cookies, look out the back window and marvel at the beauty of nature at her finest. The roof, although groaning slightly, is holding up nicely. Old house, it groans when it rains even, I think it must have arthritis, like me; we sometimes harmonize our groans. It sometimes sounds somewhat beautiful, especially when the dog is snoring an accompaniment in the corner! The squirrels, probably searching for the previously buried nuts, are seeming playing 'Bop the Moles', launching themselves out of the snowdrifts in various places. Daydreaming of the Bahamas, they become porpoises, appearing and disappearing under the waves. (Funny where your mind takes you when it's cold out, and you dread going outside.) Eventually I put on my outerwear and toddle my way to the cellar, home of the snowblower. Dang thing starts right up! Coooool. Ok, it seems to be wheezing a little...but it's RUNNING! Hmmmm, I don't seem to remember this hand-numbing vibration. 2pm - OUT INTO THE FRAY! Zoooooomcoughcough-Sput... hmmmm....6" down, 75' to go.... x10 for the width. This may take awhile. Back it off, go into the Moby Dick whaleboat chase mode, grab the starter rope and:
'Pulllll me hearties! Pulllll me good boys! Puuuulllllllll!!! Doncha be lookin at that driveway, I'll do the lookin for ye....PULLLLLL!' 210hrs.... INto the fray! I soon found out that one could take 6 inch bites of the snow, if one took 6.1 inches, the infernal machine would stall. By 4pm, with daylight rapidly fading, I'd made one pass up the length of the driveway, and one down. My neighbors had long since finished theirs and were probably staring out their windows at the insane man clearing his driveway in slowmotion.
"Prolly a form of Tai-Chi, I could hear them thinking....he's into that weird stuff..." It was at this point that the bolt holding the handle on the snowblower vibrated off, sending me into fits of MobyDickisms as I almost fell into the beast's gaping maw....
"Ye DAM-MED WHALE!!! OH Ye Dam-med WHale, I'll send thee into perdition!!!"...as I dragged the offending machinery off to the garage. Long about this time, as I threaded the new bolt into the hole in the handle with fingers trembling with frustration, my Spirit Guide / Ancestor / all around goodguy that sometimes seems to watch me perform my antics, controlled his laughter long enough to offer the answer to my dilemma....
" Psssssst.... Idiot. Up the octane, trow drygas in.. " Oh yeah!!!! I'll just throw some drygas in! That'll do it! So, being a true American, I come to my aspirin whatchamacallit (metaphor??). If one ounce will solve the problem.... THROW THE WHOLE BOTTLE IN!!! Naw.... it don't matter if one bottle will treat 10 gallons. Cripes, this thing has a big gas tank, must hold a full quart in there! ..... so I DID! Spending a few years in the Air Force, the closest description of what happened next, is the sound a fighter aircraft makes when it's afterburners kick in. The snowblower, (which, hereafter will be called 'the infernal machine), no longer went Varooooooomcoughcough. Nope, it STARTED OUT like that, but within a minute, to borrow a phrase from 'Deliverance', was 'squealing like a pig'. I soon found out that, it not only would pull me UP my ice underlayed driveway (see my previous post), it would actually throw the snow OVER THE ROADWAY TO MY NEIGHBOR'S YARD ACROSS THE STREET!!! I'll tell ya, it was awesome, sorta like a snow rainbow. VERY impressive! In fact, my other neighbor, a long haul trucker, came out and MARVELED at the change! Of course, when I told him I dropped a full bottle of drygas into it, and it was running on almost pure alcohol....he beat a hasty retreat into his house, saying he didn't want to get wounded or killed by the engine parts when the motor exploded. By that time, I didn't care if it exploded or not, it was working superbly as far as I could see. All I had to do was hang on, I didn't even have to walk anymore, just snowski behind it! The only bad part came, well, there were two times. The first time was when I didn't know how to control it yet, and it dragged me into the road before I could figure out how to turn the darn thing around. Oh yeah, then there was the time when my wife let the dalmaitian out and the poor thing freaked, thinking I was being attacked, so tried to bite the blades...close call that. I finally ended up with the thing sucking up the bit of clothesline I use to tie the dog up with in the backyard and being dragged to the tree it was tied to. By the time I got it untangled from the blades, it was too dark to work anymore. I guess it will be ok, didn't blowup or nuthin', but I'm hoping it doesn't snow all that much again, as there's no telling what will happen when I start it up again. I'll let ya know though....
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