Wins and Waterloos

Why I Was Gone Right After I Came Back

I hit a rock with my Snapper lawn mower. When it wouldn’t start again, I knew what had happened. Normally I would take it to my local small engine shop, but the mower is old, so I watched a few YouTube videos and ordered the parts online. I had to take the flywheel off and replace the flywheel key. The flywheel didn’t come off easily. I watched more YouTube videos and bought… again online… a flywheel “puller”. Really, I bought two, because the first one I bought was the wrong size. Once I had the right size, it took a little work, but I removed the flywheel, then replaced the flywheel key, and the machine started up like a champ. It’s been running ever since.

Score: 1 for Gutbloom and the Mechanical Age

I had to take a trip to Chicago this summer because my only child, Mayor McFreaky, was graduating from Navy boot camp. The whole trip had to be 100% refundable due to the fact that the date of graduation could change right up until the last week. I booked through Expedia because it feels like a travel agent.

In my twenties, when I was working in the Boston Public Schools, I lived in West Roxbury. I went to a chain-smoking travel agent who looked and talked like my aunts. I would walk in and say, “I want to go to Bermuda” and she would ask, “how much do you want to spend?” I would give her a number and she would book the whole thing. She would hand me a manila folder with all of the papers… I think even the airplane tickets when they came in… and tell me what to bring, from passports to sunscreen. She was like a travel mom.

Normally I fly Southwest because I have points. I understand Southwest and Southwest’s website, but because I wanted a direct flight I got a ticket on American Airlines.

I still haven’t adjusted to the fact that the whole world depends on your phone. On my trip to Chicago, everything was done on my phone. I have a crappy old iPhone SE, which I love, and I use Tracfone as my carrier because I am cheap. The combination of the two made me obsess about having my phone die or stop working at some crucial moment in the trip. So, despite the convenience of everything being on my phone, I experienced a lot of “device stress”.

Related posts:

Narrative as a method for The Project will be defined as such: The Authentic expression of an Intelligent take on Humanity through the Craft of relating events. Specifically, these are Narratives in…

And picking up the pencil again he taps it twice on his nose then traces the lip of his coffee cup. It brings itself to his lips and he begins to chew anxiously, shedding tiny traces of wood fibres…