So today I blew off two things I was planning on doing. First, I was going to go to dinner with my parents and my sister and brother-in-law. I was also going to try to squeeze in a cake-eating session with my ex-girlfriend (sounds like her birthday wasn’t all that much fun, so she was baking a cake with friends). Well, instead I hurt my ribs somehow while mowing the lawn.

I have this old gas mower which I really shouldn’t use because the lawn is about the size of two parking spaces. But when the grass gets thick and wet, it’s too hard to cut with a push-mower. I haven’t taken enough care of the gas mower, and it takes quite a few pulls of the cord to get it started. I was pretty happy with myself, thinking that working out had made my arm and core strong enough that pulling on the cord wasn’t tiring me out. Unfortunately, pulling on the cord made my ribs hurt. I didn’t notice until I was through, when a friend called for help moving a wood chipper. The chipper has to be hauled up a hillside about fifty feet along a walkway with stairs and that was when I figured out my ribs hurt. I took a nap after getting back, and that put a damper on other activities.

I had dinner with a friend (the same guy who participated in the “drink the girl pretty” experiment last week) at the same pub, but it would have taken a LOT MORE beer to make any of the women today pretty. Actually, there was one fairly attractive tattooed girl playing pool, but she was stiff and unhappy looking, like she’d keistered a bag of drugs and she was uncomfortable with the movements of playing pool. I’m really not sure why she’d keister drugs and hang out in NW Portland, so it must have been something else.