Possumblog

Oh, sure--laugh at the weather guy get blowed away real good…

But don’t tell me YOU’VE never done stuff just as dumb!

Boy, I sure hope you have.

BECAUSE, today just happens to be Thursday, and after a long e-mail exchange with the always engaging, self-proclaimed weather junkie Sarah G., she just happened to hit upon an idea for a certain every-Thursday game we play around here. After witnessing Mr. Al Roker’s foolhardiness and subsequent fall-down-go-boomage during the late passing of Hurricane Wilma, Sarah said: “The Thursday Three should be about the most idiotic things you have done in bad weather.”
NOT BEING ONE TO TURN DOWN A REQUEST FROM A BRUNETTE WITH FOUR CHILDREN--we herewith offer you

The Axis of Weevil “Great Big Moron Against the Elements” Edition of the Thursday Three!

[polite applause]

Now then, we want you to name the THREE most idiotic things you’ve ever done to prove yourself against the forces of Mother Nature. This doesn’t have to be just weather, though, even though Sarah would probably like it that way, but can be any of the forces of Nature--gravity, weather, earthquakes, electromagnetism…

Was it that time you decided to practice being a Acapulcan cliff diver by jumping off the garage when you were 11 years old? Was it the time you ran naked through the dorm parking lot just to prove to your idiot roommate that you could do it in three feet of snow? Was it the hurricane you stood in to get a dramatic shot for television?

Well, whatever they were, either leave your three answers in the comments below, or a link to your blog entry per the subject at hand. Extra points will be rewarded for those instances where you required assistance to extricate yourself from your predicament.

As for my battles…

1. First, gravity. I’ve told this before, but when I was little, around 7 or 8, I had a condition called Legg-Perthes disease in my hip, causing me to either have to wear a leg brace or walk on crutches (this went on from the time I was six until I was nearly 10). Anyway, one day I was in the backyard of our house, and our house had a big hillside right behind it, maybe 10 or 15 feet high, that leveled off to a driveway up above. When I had been younger, I had been able to run down the hill and catch myself against the house.

ON this particular day, I stood there on my little crutches and wistfully remembered running, and got to thinking I could probably still do it. After all, I could get going on a pretty fast clip on level ground. So, I started running down the hill on my crutches.

Badly.

My forward motion caused me to nearly go tumbling head over heels, and I would have made it if I’d had about ten more feet of horizontal space for my crutches to catch up with my body.

As it was, I smashed my face right into the back wall of the house. Which was covered in rough split cedar shakes. Busted my lip open right under my right nostril by hitting it on the hose spigot on the side of the house--and still have a scar there today to prove it.

I didn’t tell my parents what happened until after I was grown, because I was afraid they’d get mad at me.

2. A stupid weather thing I did once was in college when I followed a long line of low-hanging hail and thunderstorms nearly to Tuskegee hoping to see a tornado. One never dropped down, but I am at a loss to explain why I thought I should be doing this, nor what I would have done had one suddenly swooped down.

3. Well, let’s see. Number 3 would probably be another weather thing, namely all those football games in high school we played out in the middle of thunderstorms. That was back before anyone really cared about kids getting struck by lightning.

So, there you go.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at October 27, 2005 08:05 AM