Addiction part 1

Liu and John got out of the elevator on the wrong floor. Liu wasn’t sure why she had done that. After all the preparation that had gone into getting him here, why was she letting John escape? Hand in hand they walked down the richly carpeted halls past oriental vases seated upon hardwood tables and door after numbered door. She kept them walking until another elevator opened in front of them. Out stepped a short, red faced man in a uniform to match.

                “Sir, Mam, You are on the wrong floor.”

John’s forehead crinkled, “How do you know…” His voice cut off as Liu swung her the heavy purple bag into the hotel employee’s face. Cartilage crackled and blood ran down his nose as he stood there dazed, until his legs collapsed underneath him.

                Liu tried to pull John down the hallway but her ankle twisted and one of her heels snapped off. She cursed the man who invented high heels and kicked them off her feet and towed the still stunned John down the hallway. There was window at the end of the hall, open to allow the hot July air to escape, it was the only way Liu knew how to leave the building without alerting more of Thayer’s minions. John pulled her to a halt before they reached it.

                “Liu, why did you hit that guy?!” John pulled his hand from hers and balled them into fists.

                “John, honey, we need to get out of here.” Liu pulled at him trying to get him to follow her to the window. The down arrow above the elevator lit up and the doors closed. His eyes met hers, she hoped that those brilliant green orbs could see her desperation. As always he came through for her.

                “Okay.” He grabbed her hand and they ran to the window. They pushed a table with a vase on it out of the way.

                “Careful, those look expensive.”

Liu glared back at him.

                “Okay, okay not the time.”

She looked out the window, rising skyscrapers blocked the setting sun and a hoard of yellow taxi’s crowded the street. They were five stories up, much too high to jump when all there was to catch you was hard concrete. She scanned the ledge to the left and the right, on the corner of the building was a fire escape leading to an alley. That would work perfectly.

                She lifted the skirt to her dress and threw one leg out the window, John grabbed her before she got the rest of the way out.

                “Why can’t we take the stairs?”

                “There are more of them in the lobby.” Liu pulled out of his grasp and out the rest of the way onto the ledge. Only two feet wide, it would be difficult for John. She stood up and carefully picked her way towards the fire escape.

                “Curse it Liu! You are going to get yourself killed.” She looked back to see John’s heading poking out the window looking at her.

                She called back, “I’m fine, you need to hurry up.

                John pulled his head back into the building. Liu heard him say something.

                “Whoa, officers I’m unarmed.” A gun shot sounded followed quickly by a crash and a several more shots. John scrambled out onto the ledge behind her.

                “Nice to see you John.”

                His eyes were wide, “They shot the vase.”

                She turned back forward and smiled.

                They reached the fire escape at the same time as two police officers stuck their heads out of the window. Luckily the ladder itself was around the corner so they couldn’t be shot at anymore. They began to descend the ladder.

                “So, why did those cops shoot at me?” John seemed to have calmed down a bit.

                “They were probably working for Thayer.” Liu chewed on her cheek, she didn’t like where this was going to lead.

                “Who is Thayer?”

                “The guy trying to kill you, and me now I would guess.” Liu knew what he was going to say next.

                “Why?”

                “John this really isn’t the place.” She reached the bottom of the ladder.

                He climbed of after her. “Then where is?” He looked at her tapping his foot on the ground.

                “I don’t know.” The she got an idea. “Wait, Mogol’s we’ll be safe there, for a while at least.”

                “Who is Mogol?!”

                “He lives only a few blocks away, let’s go.” Liu ran down the alley. A few minutes she heard John fall in behind her, she kept her pace quick enough that he wouldn’t be able to talk.

They heard a crack from above.  She looked up to see that a wall had been torn from the side of a building, right where the room she was supposed to take John was. Where Thayer was. A shill screeched pierced through the air, followed by the rest of the wall breaking off the building and falling out onto the ground.

                Thayer was furious. Her betrayal must have set him off and now he was destroying everything in sight. Liu looked at John, his jaw hung open and he was trembling. Why had she saved him? Why had she betrayed a partnership that had lasted for over a decade?

Insanity, annoyed at commercials, and the runaway truck

At this point some of you may be wondering “Seth! What is up with all of these sudden posts? You didn’t post for ages and now suddenly three in the same amount of days.” Well dear reader I’ll tell you why, the exact reason is that I’m bored. Yep I’m bored and I need something to do so I just said to myself, aloud. “Seth.”
                “Yeah what do you need?”

                “Well do you remember that blog you used to write?”

                “Yeah what about it?”

                “You should write in it again.”

                “Why?”

                “Well you keep telling me that you are bored and it would give you something to do, plus you would stop bugging me.”

                “Hmm that is not a bad idea. It would be good to write in that style again.”

                “Yeah plus you can post other stuff, like your story on there too, give anyone who wants to know an idea of what you’ve been up to.”

                “I agree. Let’s do it.”

Yep that’s pretty much exactly what happened and now. Da da da daaaa!  You get all sorts of posts all over the place. Earlier today I was thinking about posting a thought I had and it was going to attempt to be deep and meaningful but now I don’t really feel that deep and I’m a little tired so I’m going to go ahead and talk about something that I find annoying.

Commercials.

 Yep I don’t like them. I know, way to break away from the group, right Seth? Well this came to mind at this moment because I’m listening to Pandora right now and they had one of their commercials on. Now I’m not actually annoyed at the existence of commercials. Businesses like Pandora have to have them otherwise they would no longer exist, it’s how they pay for what they do and I don’t begrudge them that. It’s just the intelligence or rather the lack thereof in some that just drive me up the wall especially when I’ve heard it for the thousandth time. This particular commercial was for Carmax. I cannot say in particular whether or not Carmax itself is worth anything, I’ve never used it. It’s just that the commercial they have on Pandora makes me want to rip out my own hair and then hit someone.

 This particular commercial drives me to the brink of insanity and violence. I don’t think it did the first few times I heard it but after hearing it so very very many times this year I have come to despise it’s stupidity. The premise of it is the best way to do [insert activity here] is to start [some stupid place that really isn’t true] and they usually give two of these examples and then they say “the best way to buy a car is to start at Carmax. Again I have no idea whether or not that has any truth to it, but if it falls in with the other two examples that they usually give I would have to going to Carmax is a complete waste of your time. Here’s one of their examples, they say that if you want to learn to play an instrument the best place to start is air guitar.

Really.

Air Guitar?

Do they realize that it doesn’t really have anything to do with actually playing guitar? I mean I’m just assuming but wouldn’t the best place to be getting yourself a guitar and practicing chords? But what do I know. Another one, they say that the best place to start when teaching your dog to stay is with a really lazy dog.

Umm I don’t think it counts as teaching your dog to stay if he wasn't moving in the first place. Might as well claim you taught a rock how to stay.

So pretty much after hearing that a THOUSAND times I've gotten pretty sick of it.

                Wow I went on about that a lot longer than I meant to. Well hmm is there anything else I want to say. Oh yeah about the story part I was supposed to post. You see I was in the middle of editing it yesterday when Word decided to crash on me. Not sure why, all I know is that my work is gone and I haven’t felt like redoing it yet. I promise it is coming just not until later in the week.

                Last time I told you about a runaway truck right? Well let’s get on with it then.

                It was a Tuesday. I had just returned from lunch, ready to continue painting a very large black trailer under the scorching sun, when I learned that my Grandpa’s truck had shut itself down as he was driving out of town. Mike, the head mechanic, told me that my grandpa was a few miles out when he got a message on the dashboard to “pull over safely, now” and so he did. When he had come to a complete stop on the edge of the freeway the engine shut off and refused to start again. This was bad as my grandpa needed to be somewhere and so Mike sent me out with his truck so that he could continue on his way while we dealt with the broken down truck. I arrived at where my grandpa had pulled off the road shortly and after pulling some chains out of the backseat my grandpa drove off, on his way to his meetings and such, leaving me with truck. I waited for a while until Mike arrived with a trailer in tow. The trailer was the tilt type, meaning if you pulled out the pins the back half could tilt back and touch the ground to allow vehicles, usually heavier equipment to drive right onto it. We unfortunately couldn’t drive the truck onto the trailer as it wouldn’t start. Therefore we had to attach a come-along to the truck and the trailer and pull it on ourselves. If you don’t know what that is, it is essentially a steel cable attached to a ratchet. It allows you move heavy object that you normally wouldn’t be able to move, like a large ford truck with a diesel engine. Having to do it with the come-along was a lot of work. Each time we pulled the ratchet it only moved the vehicle a few inches. Eventually we managed to pull it mostly onto the trailer, only a few more inches and the back tires would have been completely on it. As the front tires crept farther forward onto the tilt we noticed something. Apparently the heavy equipment that this trailer was usually used for had a shorter wheelbase than this truck did, meaning the length from the front tire to the rear tire wasn’t as long. Well this turned into a problem as the weight of the truck tilted the trailer off of the ground. The already difficult job was becoming more so. In order to deal with this problem Mike and I did two things. First he stood on the edge of the tilt to try to weigh it down. Second we jammed a pole under the other side in order to keep it from moving down further. Neither of these were perfect and the trailer still hung an inch or so off the ground. We kept going anyway hoping to be done with it quickly so that we could be done with this. So while Mike was standing on the trailer it was my turn to work the come-along. I pulled and I pulled bringing it closer and closer until it hit the edge of the trailer. I kept pulling, hoping to be able to pull it up that last little lip onto the tilt because then we would be done. I pulled again until suddenly, the cable snapped.

                It rolled off the trailer. Backwards. Down the freeway. Towards oncoming traffic.

Needless to say Mike and I were somewhat worried. Feeling this way we both ran after trying to stop it. I was behind Mike as I was stunned in shock and it took a second for me to realize what was happening. Luckily instead of gaining speed going down the hill it turned sideways, covering as many lanes as possible, but this allow Mike to catch up to it, jump in, throw it in park and slam on the brakes.

                He jumped back out and we both stood in front of the truck frantically waving our arms trying to get people to stop before they hit it. Incredibly this all happened during the largest gap in traffic I’d seen the entire time I was out there. When we were certain the other cars had seen us we pushed the truck off the freeway and rethought our strategy. We decided instead to hook the chains I’d retrieved onto the truck and tow somewhere safer and try again. After about another hour we got it onto the trailer without much incident. By the end we were both pretty giddy from adrenaline and feeling pretty blessed that no damage had been done and that neither of us were injured or killed.

                Oh and if you are curious the reason the truck died was that it had been overfilled with oil and the excess had burnt out the O2 sensors. When they were gone the computer shut off the engine. So yeah make sure to do your oil right, or else it could cause some pretty big problems.

Burn Baby burn

  Today I got to do something that most people don't really get to do. I got to set fire to 250 acres of dry grass using what was essentially a flamethrower whilst riding in the back a truck. This is actually not an uncommon practice, farmers and such often will burn down stubble and such instead of trying to get rid of it any other way, its just cheaper, easier, and actually pretty good for the the ground. Still I don't think that most people have had this experience and I thought it was pretty cool. A massive column of smoke erupted from the ground as the flame roared across the field. There was just enough wind to push the flames like wildfire. In just a few minutes though the flames died down and the smoke began to dissipate leaving a black, ashen plane in it's wake. Every so often the heat would meet the breeze and suck the ashed into twisting dust devils. It was a very cool experience for me.  I took some pictures of the aftermath sadly none of them are of the inferno itself. I was a little busy working the torch didn't think of taking any until after the flames had died down. Hopefully I get them on here in a bit.

  So last time I wrote I talked about the dirty dash and all that. So I guess I'll continue on with the other stuff I did this summer. 

  Here I'll tell you what I've doing as my job here at the ranch. So during my senior year I signed up for a diesel technology class and tried to learn how to be a mechanic. I think I did pretty well but i'm certain there is a lot more for me to learn. (of course there is it was only one year) So the class got me really interested in mechanicking and so I asked my grandpa if there was any need to someone to help out in the shop at the ranch he manages. He was a little hesitant at first because he said that his mechanic might not want someone else messing around with his stuff, but later he came back and said that if I really wanted to then there was a spot there for me. I thought this was very cool and immediately took advantage of it. Meaning I graduated high school on a Thursday, the very next Monday I was working at the ranch and living at my grandparents house. And that has been most of my summer. Other than a few trips home for weekends I have spent most of my time here working from 7 to 10 hours a day and just having a good time doing it.

  

It definitely hasn't been boring. Like I described earlier sometimes I get odd jobs like burning down fields which aren't in the regular mechanic area but even when I'm not doing that I'm still enjoying myself fixing or performing maintenance of all kinds of different vehicles and motors. There is I wide range of work to be done. I've done things as small as weed whacker services or rebuilding single cylinder engines in ATV's to oil and filter changes on semi's or repairing hydraulic leaks on a man-lift, and pretty much completely rebuilding a forty foot trailer.

  So yeah it's been pretty exciting, I think next time I'll be more specific about some of the interesting things that have happened. Hmm I think I talk about The Truck That Ran Away.

Long time, No see

I am officially an adult, a dolt... Essentially I am now legally responsible for my own actions. I don't know how I feel about that. Well that happened several month ago along with a goo number of other things in the long amount of time that has gone by since I last posted.
Hmm let me try to remember the important stuff. Well for one, I graduated high school, that was kind of weird, and really not as exciting as everyone seems to make it out to be. I guess that might  be cause unlike a lot of people and didn't have that time of confusion and aimlessness that other people have once they finish public education. Instead  I just kept of going keeping up a busy schedule. The week after I graduated I left home to live with my grandparents and work on a ranch for the summer. Although I cannot say that I don't go back down and visit often, the first three weekends I ended up making the two hour drive for various different reasons. Which brings me to the next things that I did. That first weekend I came back I did so because I and two other friends (I'll come up with nicknames for them in a minute) signed up for the Dirty Dash. It was AWESOME. I highly recommend it, especially if you are just getting into running and want to start out with something fun. Essentially it is a 5k or 10k, your choice that in your path different types of obstacles have been put in your path. As the name might suggest most of these obstacles involve the heavy use of mud. Have you ever floated in mud? If you haven't you should try it, it is a cool feeling.
So I did it with these two girls lets call them... Screw it  Their first names were Megan and Jade. I don't know why but I just could not think of a good nickname for those two. Anyway I was under the impression that we were going to run this well, RUN. So at least for the week before it i went out every night as it cooled off and ran two or three miles. Well it turns out all my work was for naught. The girls just wanted to kind of hang out and have fun so we walked most of it. Plus near during the last leg of it  Jade's knee got cut up pretty bad in one of the mud pits making running a bad idea. But it turned out as lots of fun, you can run or walk it and you should definitely try it sometime.
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Well it is getting way to late I need to go to bed so one more thing and then I'll have to continue to update you on my summer later.

So this July I began a free online creative writing class. I'm supposed to write around 2000 words a week and post 1000 of them of writeaboutdragons.com, but um I have kind of been slacking. I plan on catching up though I am only one week behind. So why is this relevant to you? Well you see when I post my work other students in the class give input on how I make it better and other editing things. This is where You come in those edited works with be posted here, FREE! For you to read whenever you want. This means you will more regular updates, isn't this just exciting. I will post the first edited part tomorrow.

P.S. The two girls I did the run with were quite attractive and yes you should be jealous.

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