{"id":264,"date":"2009-01-24T10:18:34","date_gmt":"2009-01-24T15:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/?p=264"},"modified":"2009-02-04T10:28:21","modified_gmt":"2009-02-04T15:28:21","slug":"understatement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/?p=264","title":{"rendered":"Understatement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vacuum<\/a><\/font><\/p>\n

I’ve often been called the King of Understatement. Well, if I’m the King then Jean must be the Queen. When I rented out the cottage, I brought just about everything in from the lake\u00c2\u00a0to the condo, including the vacuum cleaner. I think Jean liked it ‘cuz we had one for the first floor and one for\u00c2\u00a0the walkout basement. Now that I’ve gotten the cottage back, I’ve been slowly taking things back out. I was carrying the vacuum out the door and putting it in the back of the Jeep when Jean said, “I don’t think that works very well. It doesn’t seem to suck up very much dirt.”<\/font><\/p>\n

When I got out to the cottage and started to use it, I could see it didn’t suck up any<\/u> dirt. Being the inquisitive person that I am, I put the vacuum up on the counter to see if anything was blocking the tube between the roller brushes and the vacuum bag.\u00c2\u00a0The tube is\u00c2\u00a0about six inches long (remember, I always have something with me to measure) and, sticking my finger in,\u00c2\u00a0I could feel some balled up rug lint. I took the screws out of the tube holder, opened up the other end and I could see a plastic bottle cap that fit through one end of the tube, but was too small to exit the other end.<\/font><\/p>\n

I could tell this was going to take some specialized equipment to remove the plug so you can see, in the attached picture,\u00c2\u00a0the expensive tools I used. The bottle cap is there along with way more rug lint than you would think could possibly fit in six inches of plastic tubing. Once I got it all out and replaced all the screws I had taken out (if you don’t have any parts left over, that’s a good thing), I placed it on the floor and turned it on. A pile of sand, a nail, and a handful of unpopped popcorn kernels scattered all over the kitchen floor. The vacuum was so hungry for dirt, I had to shut it off before it sucked up two dish towels and a large bag of potato chips.<\/font><\/p>\n

At our “every-Saturday-morning-coffee-group” this morning, Bob Dickinson, owner of State Grounds, said he wanted to move the “Laura’s Hope” 5-K run from Ypsilanti to Hastings and would the Trilanders be interested in helping him do that? We said of course and talked for a few minutes about who to\u00c2\u00a0contact and where we could have it. After that, the conversation deteriorated quickly. It all started when Diane started talking about a “nude” triathlon calendar. Now, Diane is not a prude…she’s probably seen more naked men than Sher (get your mind out of the gutter…she’s a doctor), but this is the first she’s brought up naked anything. After that, people started bringing up real events that included naked runs and a naked bike race. It’s going to take weeks of therapy to get the images out of my head. Nightmares here we come.<\/font><\/p>\n

I looked outside yesterday and figured it was too crappy to run on the streets so I decided, for the first time this winter, to run on the treadmill. I got all my clothes around and went to the fitness center. There weren’t all that many people in there so I got my choice of treadmills. I kept it at a slow pace (10 minute miles) and had a difficult time keeping my heart rate down. As you know, I’ve just started back running after a good while off, so it’s been a struggle to regain any sort of fitness level. I decided to run a mile, then walk a couple of minutes, then run another mile, and so on. I only planned to run for 30\u00c2\u00a0 minutes, so I was about two minutes into my last 10 minute rep when the fire alarm went off.<\/font><\/p>\n

With the mental health offices above us and the old codgers (like me) in the fitness center\u00c2\u00a0inadvertently leaning against the fire alarms when they’re talking, fire alarms going off are a pretty common occurrence. Everyone continued to do what they had been doing until the staff came through and told us all to get out. We all walked out the back door and stood there for 10 or 15 minutes. I was in shorts and a sweat soaked t-shirt. It felt good at first, but that good feeling passed in about 2 minutes. I started getting colder, then the wind picked up. I looked around and there were several older people, yes older than me if you can believe it, and they were not comfortable at all. Some had come from the pool and some had been in taking a shower. I was elated when I\u00c2\u00a0noticed the\u00c2\u00a0people in the shower had stopped to put on some clothes and their jackets. The nightmares from this morning’s debacle are going to be bad enough.<\/font><\/p>\n

Just (Working My Way Back To Fit) Jack<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve often been called the King of Understatement. Well, if I’m the King then Jean must be the Queen. When I rented out the cottage, I brought just about everything in from the lake\u00c2\u00a0to the condo, including the vacuum cleaner. I think Jean liked it ‘cuz we had one for the first floor and one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories-with-pictures","category-weekly-email"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}