Category Archives: humor

AND OTHER DUTIES AS ASSIGNED

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Hey ho, just another day in a non-profit director’s life. Follow, please:

The “free library if you pick it up” consisted of 15 boxes, books a friend had decided she wouldn’t need now she was getting out of the massage business. I was heading to Wise County in a couple of weeks to run a monthly session of our Community Nourishment Project, aka the CNP. I knew a friend who would LOVE to have those books. Since she’d had a hard year, what the heck, haul them over to her next time I was going.

CNP is a pathways activity from pre-med through residency interacting with people who live in rent-controlled housing, so everyone understands each other when they meet in an examination or emergency room.

I was looking forward to the CNP this month; in July we hold our annual school supplies picnic. Well, what fool would buy the supplies in Wytheville and haul them to Wise County, right? Just buy them online and have them delivered!

Except, the delivery times for school supplies a month out from school opening are pretty scattered and we had to have them for the picnic this Saturday. And Friday I had appointments all day, so no shopping there. The only day I could go was Monday, plus my car was half-full of books. Well, how big can those supply lists be and it’s only 30 kids, right? My friend Nora volunteered to help me shop.

Four fully loaded shopping carts later, I left two very happy check-out ladies who had opened a private lane for us guarding the stuff with my friend Nora, and went to pick up our pick-up truck. The supplies completely filled the bed.

The truck bed full of kid stuff, my car stuffed with the giveaway library, my phone rang. Did my community nourishment project want 12 dozen ears of free corn from the gleaning society?

I booked a rental SUV and rejoiced in all the good fortune coming our way for the community nourishment project.

Enterprise car rentals has let me down before, but the one that happened the morning I planned to load all the good fortune was particularly spectacular; Enterprise employees aren’t normally rude while being inept, but that guy was. So I left without the SUV they didn’t have, sporting 750 cubic feet of haulage space, to figure out how to fit school supplies for 30 kids, donations from the local food bank, drink donations from the local women’s club, an entire Reiki and Reflexology library, and five dozen ears of corn in my Prius.

Have you ever seen a Prius stuffed with 1527 bits of school supplies, 96 ears of corn (they gave us eight dozen) and four coolers? I can’t roll down the windows. When I open the back door, lunchboxes will fall out.  But I’m really proud of that little tunnel between the notebook paper and the binders, allowing me a six inch square to see out the back.

Another day, another problem solved. Non-profit directors get stuff done.

Would anyone like some corn?

Happy Landings

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Jack just gets under or over the wire in time this week

I finished my guest post last week about the re-roofing of our house, with a comment about the rain barrel being installed on the upstairs balcony at the back of the place. You access the balcony via a door off the landing at the top of our stairs.

This was clearly foreshadowing for Jack’s Big Adventure on Friday past… I had fitted a valve and attached a hose to eventually have the rain barrel feed our washing machine; Wendy wants to “reduce our footprint.” On Friday morning I went out in the drizzling rain to check that everything was secure and working and not sending rain straight down into the room below. As the balcony door behind me closed, I heard a click.

I had locked myself out!!

Wendy was in Knoxville, I didn’t have my phone and from this angle behind the house no neighbors would see or hear me. The rail on the balcony is fifteen feet off the ground below, which is a concrete slab. Drizzle turned to deluge as I debated what to do next.

I tried kicking the door to no avail. The nearest section of newly installed roof was wet and slippery and it felt unsafe to try again.

Then, I noticed the hose, coiled like a rope at the side of the balcony….

So I wound it around the corner post and let it dangle down, I clambered up onto the barrel and over the rail and then I grasped the hose to lower myself gently down.

A rubber hose in the rain isn’t something you can easily grasp; it’s rather like trying to hold the inside of a banana peel.

As the hose slipped through my grip I remembered my Dad stepping backwards off a painting tressle in the late 1950s and breaking both his ankles. He spent months in hospital recovering and every time it rained he had pain – – Time stretched as the hose slipped through my hands, and I wondered which bones I would break. Fate intervened. Just below was a tub full of empty cans we save for recycling. I broke the tub as the tub broke my fall, but none of my bones broke.

When I told Wendy what happened, she sent a couple of friends to check on me. We had a jolly supper together. You have to admit, it’s a funny story now that it’s safely over.

The moral of the story – always have your phone with you and friends close by!