Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

Lately, it seems that I will go to great lengths to keep from working out. It started in the middle of last week, Wednesday night to be exact. My little boy had fallen asleep in my bed watching television, so my husband decided to sleep on the sofa. About 12:30 am (okay, technically early Thursday morning), I was awakened by the sound of banging or knocking. I lay there, getting rather perturbed at my neighbors, then realized it wasn't the neighbors. I then began getting ticked at my husband. So, I got up, went to the dining room, and said, "Dave, I hear something. What are you doing?" To which he responded, "You mean that wasn't you?" Immediately, there was someone banging on the French doors that lead to our deck.

To set the scene, let me describe the layout of our house. We own two lots, the corner lot and the lot next to it. Our house sits caddy-corner, with our back yard enclosed with a privacy fence. It is surrounded by our neighors' yards, one of which is enlcosed by a privacy fence, the other is approximately 75-100 yards off the road.

Now, back to the banging. Dave jumped up and ran to the doors (in his tighty-whities of course). As he was flicking the light switch up and down because the lights would not come on, this bearded man was standing on the step saying, "I'm staying up the street here, and I just need some water and I'll be outta here." (What the bloody you know what?!)

Dave said, "Hold on!" and ran to the study. As he was loading his 9mm, I threw him some jeans so he could at least put on his pants. When Dave got to the door, the guy was gone.Dave called 911 and requested an officer come to the house.

Our backyard was the most bizarre scene. The guy had

• rearranged the furniture on our deck
• removed our propane tank from the gas grill
• removed the igniting switch from the gas grill
• unscrewed the light bulbs at our back door
• opened the water heater closet (we have an external water heater)
• attached a water hose (not ours) to the water heater
• placed a container of citronella torch fuel in the water heater closet
• had another propane canister close to the closet
• broke a board off the side of our wood bin (even though the doors were not locked)
• kicked his way out of the wood bin
• scattered our lawn chairs around the lawn
• took the swing from the frame, turned it around backwards, and hung it back up
• unscrewed the awning from the swing, removed the supports from the awning, and draped it over the back of the swing
• leaned the board from the wood bin up on the swing
• hung a tiki torch from the top of the board (it looked like a shrine!)
• and kicked his way out of our privacy fence

All I could do was walk from the front door to the back door and say, "This is so bizarre." It is God's grace that he did not burn our house down! Needless to say, we did not sleep the rest of the night. We both took off work to fix our yard and beef up security around our house, so no workout for me!

ANYWAY, it does weird things to you when you narrowly escape being the burnt sacrifice to some mosquito god.

Oh, yeah, the other two excuses I came up with for not working out was (1) I've had a bronchitis thing going on and (2) I'm exhausted after Dave and I built my mom a 30'x16' deck and had a birthday party for Jadyn combined with a surprise party for my mom. I JUST DIDN'T FEEL LIKE IT!

(Post Script: We think they caught the guy. He was a methamphetamine addict with felony warrants out for his arrest in the neighboring county. He probably was setting up camp to cook up some meth in our backyard. If the DEA finds ingredients for meth in my yard, I can say, "Hey, just take a look at my size. Do I LOOK like I do meth?!")