Vinegar arms.
Before I start, I want to share with you all that I have a new background, and it is Emperor Zombie from Mike Mignola's one-shot wonder-book, The Amazing Screw-On Head.
Ah, here it is:
Now, on to the story proper:
Today, I was thinking a lot right before lunch.
I was thinking, "Man, I'll never, ever wear a cool mask thing for paint crew. Never."
I was thinking, "Lunch today will probably be unfulfilling and leave my hungry."
Mostly, I was thinking, "Oh, fuck, this mini-fridge is going to rape my arms all the way up this hill, and it won't even work when I get home, and besides, I don't have anywhere to keep it."
The Warren Wilson Free Store (where my favorite pro-am writer,
grendelity gets basically everything she owns) is located at the campus recycling center, and is open to students, faculty, and, lucky for me, staff. It's just stuff nobody wants anymore, so they drop it (stuff) off to be recycled, and it finds newer homes, until the next student doesn't want it anymore.
So I got off a half-hour early for lunch, and Alex got off 20 minutes early, and he says to me, "We can't go get Caroline early... but I saw some mini-fridges at the Free Store."
"Let's go," I said grimly.
Alex and I had been chasing mini-fridges at the free store all summer, but they were always gone. Luckily, it had only been 25 minutes since he saw them, and there were three of them sitting outside the door when we came upon the employees.
"Do any of these work?" Alex asked.
"Those are the ones that made sounds when we plugged them in," said one of the clerks, smiling.
So Alex and I picked out the two smaller ones (he insisted on taking the "Legalize Hemp" fridge, which appears to have been manufactured in the early '80s) and made our way up the side of the mountain to where he had parked his car.
Don't get me wrong -- Alex hasn't picked a poor or obscure place to park this morning or anything, everything at Wilson is up or down a mountain from where you need it to be.
And on that hike, I had those three thoughts I listed above. The face-mask thing was about the safety diagrams I'd seen in the paint office, at least a dozen of them, instructing painters to always, always wear masks while painting. These diagrams had never even been mentioned to me before, but I had noticed some large, cumbersome, and completely fucking amazing gas masks hanging on a wall right before I left for lunch, and was wondering if I'd ever get to use them.
The lunch thing was a result of yesterday's bland offering from the usually delicious Warren Wilson cafeteria. I had been extremely... disappointed.
And the mini-fridge, while not particularly heavy, was just wide enough from all angles that my short arms couldn't reach all the way around it on both sides, making transporting the bastard close to suicide. I just knew that after all that work, it wasn't going to work.
So, anyway, lunch today was pretty good stuff.
And after lunch, I used a dust mask to avoid breathing in the lime dust pluming outward from the wall we were scraping.
As promised by the folks manning the recycling center, the mini-fridge did, in fact, make sounds when I plugged it in. And fifteen minutes later, the freezer section was cold. And now, my beverages and selected food items are chillin' out in my free mini-fridge, which by some miracle functions perfectly, as far as I can tell.
Said the Crypt Keeper, "Watch out behind you, kiddies!"
>>> Also, strikes me that I should have said something about the title, since it's kind of strange. You see, Vinegar arms is me. I spilled vinegar on my arms today. We were using it to neutralize the lime (ACID + BASE = COOL LULZ), so I spent the last hour of my day scrubbing vinegar onto a wall. Yay. This concludes my emergency edit.
Ah, here it is:
Now, on to the story proper:
Today, I was thinking a lot right before lunch.
I was thinking, "Man, I'll never, ever wear a cool mask thing for paint crew. Never."
I was thinking, "Lunch today will probably be unfulfilling and leave my hungry."
Mostly, I was thinking, "Oh, fuck, this mini-fridge is going to rape my arms all the way up this hill, and it won't even work when I get home, and besides, I don't have anywhere to keep it."
The Warren Wilson Free Store (where my favorite pro-am writer,
grendelity gets basically everything she owns) is located at the campus recycling center, and is open to students, faculty, and, lucky for me, staff. It's just stuff nobody wants anymore, so they drop it (stuff) off to be recycled, and it finds newer homes, until the next student doesn't want it anymore.
So I got off a half-hour early for lunch, and Alex got off 20 minutes early, and he says to me, "We can't go get Caroline early... but I saw some mini-fridges at the Free Store."
"Let's go," I said grimly.
Alex and I had been chasing mini-fridges at the free store all summer, but they were always gone. Luckily, it had only been 25 minutes since he saw them, and there were three of them sitting outside the door when we came upon the employees.
"Do any of these work?" Alex asked.
"Those are the ones that made sounds when we plugged them in," said one of the clerks, smiling.
So Alex and I picked out the two smaller ones (he insisted on taking the "Legalize Hemp" fridge, which appears to have been manufactured in the early '80s) and made our way up the side of the mountain to where he had parked his car.
Don't get me wrong -- Alex hasn't picked a poor or obscure place to park this morning or anything, everything at Wilson is up or down a mountain from where you need it to be.
And on that hike, I had those three thoughts I listed above. The face-mask thing was about the safety diagrams I'd seen in the paint office, at least a dozen of them, instructing painters to always, always wear masks while painting. These diagrams had never even been mentioned to me before, but I had noticed some large, cumbersome, and completely fucking amazing gas masks hanging on a wall right before I left for lunch, and was wondering if I'd ever get to use them.
The lunch thing was a result of yesterday's bland offering from the usually delicious Warren Wilson cafeteria. I had been extremely... disappointed.
And the mini-fridge, while not particularly heavy, was just wide enough from all angles that my short arms couldn't reach all the way around it on both sides, making transporting the bastard close to suicide. I just knew that after all that work, it wasn't going to work.
So, anyway, lunch today was pretty good stuff.
And after lunch, I used a dust mask to avoid breathing in the lime dust pluming outward from the wall we were scraping.
As promised by the folks manning the recycling center, the mini-fridge did, in fact, make sounds when I plugged it in. And fifteen minutes later, the freezer section was cold. And now, my beverages and selected food items are chillin' out in my free mini-fridge, which by some miracle functions perfectly, as far as I can tell.
Said the Crypt Keeper, "Watch out behind you, kiddies!"
>>> Also, strikes me that I should have said something about the title, since it's kind of strange. You see, Vinegar arms is me. I spilled vinegar on my arms today. We were using it to neutralize the lime (ACID + BASE = COOL LULZ), so I spent the last hour of my day scrubbing vinegar onto a wall. Yay. This concludes my emergency edit.