I have a love/hate relationship with power tools... well, actually, it's more a love/holey moley I could do myself some serious, permanent injury with this thing type of relationship.
The U.S. Navy Safety Office regularly puts out a summary message listing all the various ways folks associated with the Navy have managed to hurt themselves. Every time I find myself using a power tool (and it's always scary to walk up on yourself with a chainsaw in your hands), I figure I'm about three milliseconds from ending up on one of those messages. Being as uncoordinated as I am, at some point I might not be able to use the phrase "On the one hand..." but will have to modify it to "On my one hand..."
I'm pretty good at understanding how they work and everything...it's just a matter of a speed mismatch. Kind of the same reason I gave up skydiving after twelve jumps. I like being able to call a timeout in order to think things over a bit. In power tools and skydiving... putting up your hands in that "T" type signal really has no good affect.
When we lived in Panama, Cyrilee got me skydiving lessons for one Father's Day. It was a great present, I like doing adventurous things and since I really don't like flying, a sport where you get to get out of an airplane in mid-flight, something I always have an urge to do, seemed like a good idea.
I did have a couple of misgivings during the ground school part of the class though. The part on the ground is about four and a half hours long.. ten minutes talking about things when they go right, four hours and twenty minutes of talking about when things go wrong. Notice the verb... when not if...things go wrong. Then I figured since I lead a charmed life...what could go wrong.
During my twelve jumps, nothing went seriously wrong (I did get stuck in a cloud for a very long time on jump four or five) but I did notice there was a speed mismatch. Everything in skydiving happens at a hundred twenty miles an hour with no pause or rewind buttons. My brain operates at an average of about thirty miles an hour. Sometimes it goes faster, but when you calculate in the times I have to hit pause or rewind things for a bit of thinking, it averages out to about thirty.
About jump twelve, it dawned on me that at some point the whole speed mismatch would catch up to me. The jumping was fun (more fun after the parachute actually opened) but it wasn't enough fun for the risk involved. Twelve is such a nice even number too...
Same thing with power tools.. they generally have a pause button, but sometimes I'm not quick enough to get to it in time. In case you're wondering... no, I didn't manage to do any alterations to my appendages lately...just some early Saturday morning musings. Kind of an advanced explanation in case you see me with fingers numbering less than ten in the future.
A short twitter note: As you probably know by now I have a twitter account (and why don't you?). Since random folks from all over the world can start following your tweets, I find it interesting to speculate why a particular person chooses me to follow.
There is one person that keeps popping up on my follow list. Her bio claims she has a guaranteed method of how to get 2000 followers on twitter. The problem is, she has less than 2000 followers herself... When I don't follow her back, she will unfollow me in a couple of days, then a day or so later, she pops back up as following me again. Very amusing.
..take care.. t
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment