Had an interesting weekend for sure. Went up to New Hampshire to visit my parents, where the temperature, I kid you not, was 375 degrees below zero. Unfortunately, my grandmother passed away, and she really was one of a kind – more on that later, perhaps. I did manage to get out of the house, though, and take some pictures such as this one, which is Lake Winnipesaukee, frozen. In the background are the beautiful white mountains. In the summer, you can find people on the lake boating, tubing, water-skiing, jet-skiing, etc. Here, it’s just me, freezing my ass off, but taking pictures nonetheless. I tell you what, it was colder than the stare on Russell Crowe’s face last year when Denzel was announced as Best Actor.
When I got home on Sunday, it was off to The FleetCenter, as my Christmas gift to my dad was tickets to see the WWF Royal Rumble! Thass right, dogg, good ole’ pro wrasslin. The first few matches were pretty regular, but the last two matches were just phenomenal. The last match of the night was called, hmmm, The Royal Rumble, and here’s how it works: it’s a total of 30 wrestlers and one wrestler enters the ring every 90 seconds. A wrestler is eliminated when he is thrown over the top rope and lands with both feet outside the ring. Madness is supposed to ensue, and it did. At one point, there must have been 15 wrestlers in the ring. In the end, a puffed up big dude (no way!) named Brock Lesnar threw The Undertaker out of the ring to win it.
Please click here to see that photo larger.
On the way home, my dad told me one of the funniest stories I’ve heard a long time. Since they’ve been driving all over the place for preperations for my grandmother’s service, at one point last week he had to board their two dogs (another topic entirely). So he puts the dogs into the car and then the car seems to get stuck in the snow. Easy solution, right? Just shovel some snow away from the wheels and off they go! Well, no. The dogs get a little excited about my dad walking around the car and shoveling snow and lofting it out of the way, and in the midst of that excitement one of the dogs steps on the “lock” button in the car and locks all the doors. While the car is running. Perplexed, my dad runs through the potential scenarios – smash the window, find out from my mother if there’s another remote to unlock the door. The former option is crossed off the list when he sees BOTH of their cell phones in the front seat of the car, which is running, with the dogs inside, locked. Yikes.
However, being the incredibly resourceful person my dad is, he gets a screwdriver and a hanger, and McGyver’s the window barely open with the screwdriver so he can insert the hanger and hit the unlock button. No problem, right? Uh, no. The dogs, again sensing extreme exciteness by this clever manuvering, get right in front of the window and breathe on it enough to fog the window so my dad cannot see the button. One can only imagine what was running through my poor father’s head at this point. Nonetheless, he gets the door open after a few minutes and off he goes.
After an uneventful drive back to Massachusetts, he takes care of business, and having not eaten all day, stops at the local pizza shop for a sandwich to take back to my sister’s house, where he’s staying. When he gets in the car and starts driving, he gets a flat tire. Now, is this the worst possible day one can have? Still, in retrospect, quite amusing.