Part 2 of the Turkey Chronicles. Here is Part 1: Prelude to the Turkey…
We head back to O-Town on Monday to check on the house and so I can hit the Florida Creatives happy hour. A little family dinner time and a few loads of laundry and I head off to the Crooked Bayou for a beer with geeks. Home to a chill Steino, we enjoy the quiet of no extras in house and go to bed early.
Tuesday does not go nearly as smooth as we had planned. Christina needed to hit the office for some testing stuff while I hung with the Nut to pack and get a few things together. She took a long time and the few things I had to do were way to complicated for any fun and ended up dumping the nifty stuff. I fumbled with my dead iPod, finally giving up on it, instead leaving us to suffer through Christina’s poorly updated iPod. Before we know it it is late, 6 o’clock and we are cranky, hungry and rushed to get back to the Planet Mogg. The Element is packed like we are moving from Orlando. We have enough clothes for all three of us to open our own department store.
We hit the metro Inverness at 8 or so, chow on some pea soup at the new Mogg compound.
The next morning meant more stuff to do. At some point I was singled out to make up for my lack of “real” jobs on previous days and was conscripted to move the immovable beast, the 1940’s jeep from the previous Mogg compound to the backwoods locale of Steven, Christina’s brother. Mr. Mogg and I stop by to make sure it will fit on a trailer, tape measure in hand, and to assess the real work. Tires were only 9 inches in dirt and the transmission was merely wedged into the gaping hole in the floor board and the ground below. Not bad. Doable in 3 days time. We were going to get it done today.
We needed a car trailer so we are off to the rental joint. That is a trip that all must make to get an essence of southern culture. Blue Collar Comedy tour fans to the bone. Nextels, Camo Baseball caps, rebel flag t-shirts and the standard twangy dialect that blends an impression of intelligence and worldliness into an amusing retard monkey kind of experience. And there exist mechanical beast that have never been seen before. Such as the lawn mower sized tractor with a hitch that was very handy to move the trailer ten feet that would have normally been handled by moving the car back to meet it. Rednecks don’t by gadgets, they buy tractors and guns.
Back at the old hacienda, the immovable beast glared at us. Tires flat and 13 inches in the ground, it was not going to move easy. We had to dig it out and wrench it up with a come-along. Resorting to soap under the wheels and scary combinations of ropes, chains and cables wrapped around way too many things, we load it and strap the bastard down. We are taking it to the third Mogg (Steve) child’s homestead. Now for the drive to nowhere.
Steve leaves in an abyss. A wooded abyss. It is uncomfortably close to the Villages and its army of golf carts but it is far enough from anything real to classify itself as technically nowhere. Winding roads and cattle farms are the only fun. Amazingly the bastard jeep stays put and things go well for the trip. I think it it had fallen off or crapped out I would have just said fuck it and walked home. I would think about calling AAA just to see them freak on a wrecked jeep on a wrecked trailer half way out to nowhere but I would probably have just kept walking away. Maybe leaving my father-in-law to die with the bastard jeep. I was not liking the bastard jeep.
Once we get there the flat tires that attempted to thwart us in the loading are now exacting revenge in the off-loading portion. Bastard Jeep. Since they are flat we decide that air is the answer. We need a compressor, check, Steve has one. We need a chuck to get the air into the tires, … no check. We assume that Steve has one. But Steve’s filing system is of the “stand at the door and chuck it” variety. It looks like his tool box barfed all over the shed. We call him, he says, “oh yeah, it’s in the toolbox”. We figure that he means the shed as a whole not really the red thing that normally serves as a toolbox that now stands empty at one end of the shed having just barfed all over itself.
We curse. For a while. Then we randomly tie it to things and pull it off for the next [insert really long time]. It finally comes off and we tear off the road to dump the trailer back at the redneck resting grounds and head home for more crap to to do.
Christina and I finally get reinforcements with the arrival of Randy (her brother) and Andrea late that night. We crash until Sam wakes up.
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