Well… this was a good weekend.  After last weekends complete lack of any adventure of insanity (hence my not posting anything; all I did was cook random munchies, play Call of Duty, and generally wish my ribs didn’t hurt) this weekend was a refreshing taste of insanity, combined with not having to wake up early 🙂

Friday night was a continuation of my newest standing-adventure; hunting for a new lounge to relax at.  Cigar Masters is a pretty fun place, but it’s a cigar place, and thus not the best for meeting ladies, or taking a female friend.  So the search began, starting with Mike and I, and adding Dave in for Fridays search.  We started at a little Irish pub called Solie ( I think).  It’s a pretty solid little pub, two floors and some sick bartenders.  BUT… not really a lounge.  Though their portion of scotch was rather nice, we ended up heading downstairs to check out the lounge located in the main-floor of the hotel next door.  The hotels personal-pub was called City Bar, and it was packed, but perfect.  Unfortunately it was standing-room-only at that point, so we decided to hit Cigar Masters for a bit to relax and wait out the crowd.  When we went back an hour or so later City Bar was still packed, but the place next to it was opened up a bit, efficiently called “City Table”, since they served food.  We headed in, ordered a few drinks and some snacks, and relaxed out the rest of the night complaining about work, school, ladies, and… pretty much anything that crossed our minds.

Saturday was the day of the Dark Horse competition; an exciting but sad prospect for me since yet again I couldn’t compete due to an injury, but exciting since it’s a SICK competition.  Daniel Woods came along this year for the Pro section, same with Francesca (last years bouldering champion, and resident of Metro Rock), so the pro-comp was going to be a rather epic performance to say the least.  I got there with Maddie just in time to hear the house band (Lady Sasquatch) starting to rock out, and for the first kegs to be tapped.  Yes, there was free music, beer, and climbing.  I seriously cannot think of anything better 🙂 The finals competition was just as epic as expected, with a near-upset (from what It seemed) of Daniel… our Mister Woods nearly got shown up by another boulderer who I’d never met before, though the two of them put on an amazing show of strength and general burlyness.  We hung out for the results, but by that time my rib was really starting to kill, and for some reason my stomach was not in a happy place.  So Maddie and I headed out, I dropped her off, and spent the rest of the night chilling out.  I did take some time to go shopping for the superbowl on Sunday… picking up 10 lbs of pork loin, three full bottles of BBQ sauce, a few pounds of ground beef, cheese, chips, and pretty much everything else a man could want for watching a game.

And an epic Superbowl day it was.  I stumbled out of bed at 8:00 Sunday morning to put the pork into the oven, and immediately went back to bed.  I woke up again to the smell of BBQ and awesome coming from the oven, since Rich and I had already marinated and prepped the pork before I put it in.  Around one I started pulling it apart, and by 1:30 we had a full pot of pulled pork seasoned and slow-cooking, nearly ready to eat.  After and hour or so of cleaning up the place, we popped Wanted into the DVD played, kicked back, and waited for people to show up.  The game itself was pretty sick, and all the food got annihilated scarily quickly; Dave brought some insanity-wings (and some “just-slightly-crazy” wings too, for those non-spice people), as well as a mini-keg and beer, while everyone else brought some form of drink or chip.  Katie and Snowman got there a bit before the kickoff, same with T and Maureen, and Taylor and her friends finally showed up almost an hour into the game… not their fault though, since… umm… yeah, it was just their fault.

So Sunday chilling (and screaming at the TV) commenced in rare fashion, and while we never got around to cooking up the burgers we did chow down on everything else, leaving a pound or two of pork, and a handful of wings leftover once everyone had left.  Nearly all the beers and the full mass of the keg had been drank, and more than one shot of espresso was requested by the end of the night.  I actually ended up getting a fairly nice massage from Maureen too, so… not a complete loss of a night 🙂  But now, back to the work week, to not sleeping nearly enough, and to waiting for this damn rib to heal so I can start climbing again!

I’ve never been in an ambulance.  Strange, I know, but somehow I’ve gotten lucky enough to have never needed a ride in the flashing metal box… until Friday.

So as you may remember, last weekend I spent my time carving up the Blue Hills ski area, reminding myself how to snowboard and having an amazing time.  But, I also learned how much crashing can hurt, and how long it can knock the wind out of you for.  At once point I tried to stop short to avoid hitting a little skier, not more than 10, and ended up superman-ing myself chest-first into the snow.  Knocked the wind out of me for a good few seconds, but I got right back up and carved that mountain like a thanksgiving turkey.  And it was good.

Except… not so much.  By Tuesday, my right ribs were starting to ache; a dull throbbing punctuated by a sharp stabbing pain.  The pain was nothing bad though, and definitely not enough to keep me from climbing Tuesday or Thursday.  Not enough to keep me from having some fun on Thursday either (see previous story).  But Friday comes along, and it hurts.  A lot.  Mostly from climbing the night before, I think to myself.  But either way, I head into work, prep my day, and started moving some boxes of shelves around.  The first box hurts a bit, but as I’m rotating to put it down… *POP*

As soon as I hear the pop from my rib, my mind snaps back to when I broke my elbow back in Manchester.  My vision starts to dull, and I start to sweat.  “I’m going to pass out in about five minutes” I think to myself, trying to calm down and not think about the rib that I may have just broken.  I quickly unbutton my shirt (yes, I have an undershirt on), and decide that it would be a good exercise in intelligent decision making skills to walk downstairs and tell someone that I’m hurt.

I get to the shipping area, right below where I was working, and quickly tell one of the guys what happened, saying “And…. I think I’m going to pass out soon.”  He gets this “deer in the headlights” look, and takes me to his supervisor, who has me sit down while he calls emergency services for our company.  They apparently tell him to call 911, because the next thing I know there’s a cop and firefighters asking me if I’m ok, while one of the company medics is asking me how I hurt myself.  I answer everything that I can, as I slowly start to feel better.  I actually never passed out, though I came close, so I’m fairly cognizant and aware, though every breath hurts more than I care to remember.  I get loaded onto the ambulance in fairly short order, and am taken over to the Cambridge Medical Center.

On the way to the ER I overhear the EMT’s talking about how their trying to call the hospital… to no avail.  “Ohh well, guess we’re surprising them, huh?” one says to the other.  Great.  Definitely the way I was hoping to spend my Friday; surprising ER nurses.  But we do make it in, and after a longer-than-I’d-expect wait I get my room, the EMT has me sign that I was taken there, and I’m waiting around for an X-Ray.  I get my ribs prodded and the rays taken, and wait around some more.  Finally the ER doctor (and her supervisor) come in to tell me the news, “Well, nothings broken, and you don’t have any major hemorrhaging that we can detect from the X-Rays.  But to be honest… It doesn’t matter.  We couldn’t do anything for a broken rib besides medicate the pain, so… yeah.”  Turns out its most likely a “Deep Tissue Bruise” that will take 1-3 weeks to heal; and all that time I get to be nicely hopped up on painkillers.  Not my goal for the week, but definitely not as bad as a broken bone, right?

So, last Thursday was a snow day.  Yes, I still worked from home (a full day, I might add), but that doesn’t mean that the work day was one continuous stretch.  No, that’s the advantage of working from home: 2 hour breaks in the middle of it.  And when you get two NUHOCers together, with extra energy and an hour to kill… well, things get interesting.

For the last few weeks my roommate Rich and I had been entertained by a low-key war over a parking spot near our house.  In Boston, if you clear the snow from a spot you generally get the right to lay claim to it, usually by holding it with a traffic cone or a spare lawn chair.  Sometimes someone steals your spot.  It sucks, but short of keying their car there’s not much you can do about it.  Not much, except WRITING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE NOTES!  Someone had seemingly stolen someone else’s spot, who then proceeded to start a war of words, in the note form, over who had the right to the spot.  This had gone on for a week or two, but now was the only time that Rich and I were hanging out with nothing better to do…

See, the last round of notes had focused on the idea that the person who put the most work into clearing the spot was, by rights, owner of said spot.  However, they had not taken the time to clear their spot out that morning.  By their own logic, anyone who took time to clean that spot could lay claim to it… logic that was perfectly sound to us.  So after drafting a quite excellent “old-timey” style note (complete with “dear sir and/or madam” and “Dictated, not read” at the end), we started clearing the spot.  Halfway through shoveling it down to the blacktop, a woman in a neck-brace came up to talk to us…

It turns out that her husband had initiated the note-war when someone had stolen her spot, a spot that he had cleared for her due to her injury.  She asked us what we were doing, wondering if we were her formerly-unknown opponent in the war of the notes.  We explained the situation in-depth, including our entertainment at their notes and our plan for the day, which she found rather hilarious.  For her, of course, this simply meant that she got to keep the spot, but didn’t have to clear it.  For us, we got some excersise, and a huge amount of entertainment.  We parted ways a bit afterwards, having learnt about one of the parties, and a good amount of neighborhood gossip at the same time.

Now, this would have been a fine ending to the story, right?  Right.  But how to make it better?  I get a text message later that night from Rich, while I was out at the climbing gym.  “Dude, did you see?!?” he wrote; “Umm… no?  What?  Huh?” was my reply, to which I got the perfectly cryptic “Don’t worry, you’ll see when you get home”.  I was hoping/expecting that the war had gone even further, with new and funnier notes.  I was sort of right; when I got home, there was a six pack of PBR Tall-Boys on the counter, with the following note attached:

NOTE HERE <– I’ll update this ASAP