Three Tales Of Whoah!

So I made it to the last day of skiing and skiied all day without a fall, giving me a lasting memory through the summer of my very own winter greatness...

We've got a couple of "peak" hikes planned this week to take advantage of the snow before it's turned into cold creek water and sent to sea...

One of them is "Pearsoll Peak", which is informed upon here.

I've got three little tales to tell, all of them true, all of them recent...

-----"LEVITATING PAINT BUCKET"-----

I went to the local hardware store and bought a five gallon bucket of "PVA Sealer", which is essentially paint without much pigment and extra sealer in it. It's cheap for that reason and used as a first coat to save money.

Everybody was busy helping somebody so I set the paint inside the paint shaker and then asked a store clerk walking by to just "turn the damn thing on".

My paint was "shookin' " for three minutes and I then asked the gal who worked the register if she could just turn the machine off and open the door up. I'd grab the paint out and bring it to the register seeing as how it was 55 pounds and I was twice her size.

She went over and hit the button that lifts the top "plate" up off the paint. What this plate does is when you put the paint on the shaker table, you push a button and this top plate comes down hydraulically and pushes down on the lid, making a paint-bucket sandwich keeping the lid on tight and allowing the machine to shake away.

The thing of it was, when she hit that button to lift the top plate off, the 55 pound bucket of paint came up too.

So instead of being a bucket of paint sitting on the shaker shelf ready to be lifted off, there was a bucket of paint levitating 5 inches above the shelf that was designed to set 5 gallon buckets of paint on. It was as if yer daddy had grabbed you by the top of yer head when you were a kid and lifted you off the ground. It was weird. It was dumbfounding. The girl who worked the register looked puzzled and simply stated "I've never seen that happen before. That's weird."

Pretty quickly, word got out that something weird had happened, and store clerks were shedding their customers and coming over for a look see.

You'd think the paint was levitating on its own the way the men who worked their oohed and ahhed over the 55 pound bucket of paint stuck to the top plate of the shaker machine.

"Who's gonna get it off?" I asked finally. I mean, I needed to go home and paint after all.

"Not me."

"Oh no, not me."

"I'm not gonna take it off."

"Oh good Lord!" I reached inside the machine and grabbed hold of the cylindrical bucket and tugged gently on it. Nothing. Then I pulled quite a bit harder and broke the suction that had developed between the plastic lid of the paint and the top plate. The bucket dropped like a large stone and just missed my fingers as several hardware store employees barked out "Watch your fingers!" milliseconds after the fact.

"That was weird," they all agreed.

"This stuff happens to me all the time..." I said, as I put the paint on a cart and began wheeling it to the front counter.

-----"Whistling Falcon"-----

I walked into the house the other morning at about six thirty. The house was quiet and I could hear Mum's Oxygen Machine cycling in and out peacefully the way it always does. The machine increases the amount of oxygen in the air and then pipes this enriched air through a tube into one of those thingies you see pretty women on TV wear stuck up their noses while smiling palely for the cameras. Only Mum's never looks that organized while she sleeps, as it's usually wrapped around her head a few times and leaving half-tube dents in her face that eventually go away by lunch time.

She has a bit of sleep apnea and we've found that she wakes less groggy if she gets enough oxygen sleeping through the night. So she wears the tube set up up her nostrils, and she sleeps rock hard solid at this time of morning.

I also heard what sounded just like a hawk crying in the trees outside. Imagine a hawk cry and then imagine hearing it through the walls of a house. That's what this sounded like, and I thought "A hawk" as the sound repeated itself.

"A repeating hawk."

Then it repeated itself again.

And again. And now I was really curious. Why was a hawk in our trees out back crying over and over? I had never heard of such a thing before. I walked into Mum's room to get to the window opposite and look out and try to see the hawk who just kept on crying that shrill, hawk-whistly cry...

Mum's tube had sort of half fallen out of one nostril and something in that nostril was aligned perfectly so that everytime she exhaled, she made a hawk whistle in her sleep...

It went on well past my making a cup of coffee and heading back out to my room...

-----"Butter"-----

Our neighbor has chickens and brings us a dozen eggs every few days which she puts in our mail box. So fried eggs are a staple around here, and so is toast.

Which means we keep a plate of butter on the counter and a butter knife handy so that, when the time comes, soft butter is at hand along with a knife to do the slathering...

Makes sense right?

I think so too.

So I walked into the kitchen the other day to fry up some eggs. I pulled out a small frypan and set it on the stove. I turned on the heat and reached for the butter knife which I didn't see right away. So I opened up the cutlery drawer and grabbed the first thing handy, which was a spoon, and then turned my attention back toward the soft and ready butter sitting on the plate.

That was when I eyed the knife.

So what I did was (and this is important) absentmindedly set the spoon down on the stove, in the area between the four burners. I then picked up the knife and sliced off a good large section of butter. I was in a good mood and moving swiftly with some dance moves busting out inside my head, because rather than just wipe the butter on the side of the frypan and let it melt and slide to the bottom, I chose to "fling" it at the frypan by lifting up the knife and then karate chopping it downward. The momentum of the knife traveling toward the frypan and then abruptly stopping would send the soft butter hurtling into the pan and I would dance around to grab the eggs from their container and "crack" "splff" "tsss" set four eggs a-frying.

Only what I didn't count on was the upswing. My upswing was too vigorous- the lifting of the knife for the downward chop...

When I lifted and then changed direction, the butter flew off the knife and into the air in front of me.

There it was, this big soft gob of butter rising before my eyes right in front of me.

I thought "This can't be good," and then I thought, "this is going to be messy," and then I watched in amazement as this giant sloppy gob came down center smack dab onto the cupped and oval portion of the spoon I had just set down on the stove a moment earlier.

I thought "Now that was cool!" as I looked around for somebody to make witness to this most momentous of events...

As my English friend Paulie often said when introducing me to his other friends-- "This is Scotty. Stuff happens to him."