Okay, in sitting down to put together this week’s column, I realized it wasn’t going to be easy! Every so often, there is ‘stuff’ going on, and time is at a minimum, or for some reason, I just don’t feel like it. Today, I just don’t feel like it, but there is a good reason.
Friday, my wife and I drove to New York to watch our daughter compete in an inter-collegiate horse show on Saturday. It was about a 5-hour drive, so we went the night before to avoid leaving at 0h-dark-hundred. The ride down to the venue was fine even if a little long. At one point, I had to make a pit stop, so on my way out, I bought a couple bags of no-name salted peanuts for snacks. Back in the car, I saw the expiration date of the nuts was a couple of months earlier, but since I sometimes live on the edge…. No problem. I ate one bag to tide me over; still no problem.
The horse show went well. My daughter won her class, which means the same thing happens again next weekend. This show was a regional show (8 NY colleges and 2 Canadian). Next week’s is a zone show which covers schools in much of the Northeast. Anyone winning next week goes on to the nationals in Kentucky (we won’t be joining her if she makes it).
We had had a great Saturday morning breakfast at the bed and breakfast in which we stayed, but I had eaten nothing for the rest of the day. As we began the mid-afternoon drive back to NH, I thought I was getting tired, so I asked my wife to drive. After the crash-test-dummy incident, I became the usual driver when we are together and going or returning from somewhere. I started to get a jittery feeling, so had a few slices of cheese and that other bag of peanuts. It took maybe an hour, but I started feeling a little off. The tipping point came when we ended up on a ferry that took us across Lake Champlain. I’m sitting there in the turned-off car, I look up, and the dock is moving – weird feeling. Then the rough water made its presence known, and it was then I knew.
Fortunately, my wife had recently cleaned out the trash bag that hangs from the gear shift, and I grabbed it and waited… for a few seconds! And then it came. I only had three good heaves, but it was a good start. Unfortunately, I do not hurl quietly; it is a loud, straining spewing forth. Vocally, it was more than a shout but less than a scream, so an onomatopoetic way, ‘Yell’ is a good comparative, descriptive word.
Unlike the general efficiency of genuflecting before the porcelain god, I thought I managed to hold the bag effectively, but there was some splatter. The remaining four recurrences of my body’s reaction to what must have been the peanut oil gone bad were equally only relatively contained. I usually don’t think much about my mustache or beard, but there are times… like yesterday that I had to.
I will spare you further commentary except to say that through it all, my wife did what any great wife would do – she tried her darndest not too laugh!
And that’s why I didn’t feel quite like doing a column this week.
Later.