Today I moved the contents of a 5x10' storage locker (which was packed solid) from the expensive storage place in our neighborhood to the cheap storage place on the south side of Kankakee, IL. I ended up renting a cargo van at Enterprise this morning, and making 2 round-trips (about 75 miles each way), so not only did I have to unload something like 400 cubic feet of stuff from locker #1, load it into the van, drive it to Kankakee, unload it from the van and then load it into locker #2, and drive back to Chicago, but over the two trips this ended up involving my driving something like 300 miles, much of which involved the notorious Dan Ryan
Oh, just to make things "more interesting" it turned out that the cargo van didn't seem to have any functioning headlights which made my last leg of the journey (in bumper-to-bumper traffic on 90/94 in the last fading of twilight) a bit like "driving by braille".
However, that's not the pièce de résistance of the evening ... no, that came when I left the place where I dropped off the van. I walked out of the parking garage and looked across the street to see that my bus was at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and there was no traffic, so I lurched out into the street, with the intent of scooting across and grabbing the bus home. Well, I don't know if it was that my legs were sufficiently fatigued by all the heavy lifting, or if I hadn't gotten my "land legs" back from the drive, but I took one step, one stumble, and a face plant right in the middle of Grand Ave. As noted (thankfully) there was no traffic in either direction for at least a half block, so I was able to drag myself up off the pavement and hobble the rest of the way across the street before I got turned into roadkill. Of course, the bus driver, despite seeing my having been risking life and limb to get there, blithely gunned the bus when the light changed and took off, leaving me to sit for another 20 minutes contemplating my wounds.
And what wounds they are! Both my left knee and my right elbow are "pizza" worthy of the X-games, and each is sporting a huge "mouse" much like those seen on NBA players following a head-butt. As my elder daughter observed, it currently looks like I have an extra elbow!
So, not only am I exhausted from heavy lifting, drained from extensive driving, sore from both of these activities, and cranky about the headlights, etc., but on top of it all, I'm all beat up. Not a fun evening! The only "good thing" is that my knee and elbow took most of the blow, so by the time my face got to the pavement, there was just an "eye print" on the inside of my glasses. I would have been really pissed if I'd "pizza'd up" my face and/or broke my glasses (even though the jury is still out on the condition of my cell phone).