Oh, My Achin’ Back

Today was Hell Day.  The day when my in-laws expected their daughter and I to come by and help to clean up the garage in their continuing quest to make the house presentable enough to sell. To help you understand why this is hell, let me explain that its primary user — the father-in-law, is a retired auto mechanic who, despite his advancing age, bad back, and an assortment of maladies which include having lived through two or three strokes, still likes to play at being a mechanic.  He has loads of tools, drill bits, driver bits, saw blades, nails, spikes, coils of copper tubing, random bits of rubber tubing (now cracking and useless), rods of rebar, bottles of antifreeze, buckets of engine oil, a dozen jerry cans of varying sizes containing quantities of unknown liquids (possibly stale gas), outdoor power equipment (and pieces thereof) in various states of disrepair and decomposition, dead spark plugs, and loads of engine parts.  I know this, because a great deal of them lived on the garage floor in and amongst the oil spils and the sawdust that soaked them up.

Being Italian, he also fancied himself a vintner, so there were also huge, bulbous wine brewing bottles nestled in wicker baskets, some empty, some containing wine in varying stages of brew.  Various large bits of equipment also dotted the garage: An arc welder, a table saw, a compressor, a 5-foot tool chest, a 3-foot tool chest, and so on.  The left wall was lined with shelf upon shelf containing jar upon jar and box upon box of screws, bolts, nuts, nails, hose clamps, generic automobile headlights, boxes of bathroom tiles, zip ties, washers, bungee cords, coils of velcro strapping, spark plugs, automotive fuses, miscellaneous wires attached to unidentifiable bits that once presumably conducted electricity, and so on.

All in a 2-car garage.

No, there wasn’t even space to fit a motorcycle in it.  Or a bicycle.  It was like the entire Midas chain exploded in there somewhere around 1973 and nobody could be arsed to do anything about it. And the four of us all got to clean it out.  Did I mention the custom-built loft?  That’s where all other storage went.  And, apparently, itinerant rats, judging by the telltale signs of their former presence.  Yep; cleaning that part out was all my job.  So were a lot of other things, since I was probably the strongest and most capable person there amongst my wife’s parents and my wife herself, so, yeah, I got all the heavy lifting.  8 hours of this crap — though we did get a few breaks for lunch and dinner.  And when we put everything back in that was being kept?  It hardly looked any different than when we started, despite filling up three quarters of a full-size rental dumpster.

So now I’m beat like Michael Vick’s dogs.  I’m sore in places I didn’t even know I had.  And — joy of joys — I have my regular day job tomorrow.  I managed to get one review done this morning before we left for hell, but I think that’s all I’m about capable of doing today.  Right now I just want to curl up somewhere and let my muscles whimper for a while.

On a positive note, Chris of Movile wrote some awesomely nice things about me and Frapstr on the Movile Blog, which was really cool of him.  I didn’t even ask him to, either; he just did it out of a fit of love or something.  (And no, Chris, this doesn’t mean we’re even.  )  His release schedule for the next version of Theme Park Madness has been pushed back a bit due to some unfortunate and unforseeable business that left the next updates a bit high and dry.  Fortunately he still has all of the assets, so he just has to have the update code rewritten before it’s ready for a real App Store update.

Alright, that’s about all I can type.  I’m going to go watch a movie or something while things that are hurting work on not hurting anymore.

Tags: back pain, frapstr, house cleaning, messy garage, movile