Busted, Disgusted, and (We) Can’t be Trusted

We have a confession to make, and it’s about as embarrassing as anything we’ve divulged to our loyal readers. So here goes: We totally missed the Shoot-out in Paso Robles this weekend. When I tell you why, you may decide you want nothing further to do with our lame asses. All I can do is hang my head in shame and beg for forgiveness.

It all started, as have some of our least auspicious adventures, when Montana Barn Cat loaded up Xena with a bunch of dried-up paint cans and a dead tree and headed to the dump. Now, for about the first year we lived here, we could take our detritus to a landfill in town, which weirdly overlooks a subdivision full of houses with million-plus-dollar price tags, but I guess the folks who live out there got tired of having dirty stinky dump trucks rumble past and of fighting off the approximately one bazillion seagulls who lived up there, snacking on trash, and they decided to throw their weight around.

The upshot is that the city closed that landfill and directed us to take whatever we couldn’t foist off on the garbage men to a dump way west of here. Fortunately, it is located right on the interstate, so even though it’s roughly 20 miles away, you only need about 15 minutes at the state-mandated speed limit of 75 miles per hour and one left turn to rid yourself of all the crap that’s been crowding the car out of the garage for the past year. Xena in particular was pleased to participate in this exploit, since it means she now has a roof over her head. Considering that three weeks ago we had a record-breaking thunderstorm pass through, with winds topping 60 miles per hour and golf-sized hail, that’s an outcome worthy of applause.

So Barn Cat headed out and I settled down to watch Unbreakable, a very underappreciated flick, on the tube. Finally it occurred to me that it was taking him unusually long to get back, even if he’d had to carry those thousand paint cans out of the truck one at a time. Then he suddenly stumbled in, ranting and raving, and that’s when the trouble started.

Seems he’d found an old house that he thought would be perfect for us to buy and rehabilitate. Some of you may not know that we are addicted to rehabbing old houses—between us, we’ve worked on about five, including a joint effort on a 1904 Craftsman in the Garvanza district of Los Angeles that very nearly did us in. It’s been more than 10 years and I still can’t look a putty knife in the face. The only good news was that the paint in that house wasn’t lead-based, since I spent the better part of three years scraping it off the woodwork. It’s fortunate that whoever decided to “colonialize” that house is dead, because I’d still like to slap him/her into next week.

But though we curbed our lust for broken-down old houses that take every dime and spare minute we’ve got when we moved to Bozeman, we aren’t cured, not by a long shot. I can’t even claim that Barn Cat was entirely at fault, because what happened the second he roared in here telling me all about his find? Did I maturely counsel him to sit down and breathe deeply? Did I point out to him all the potential pitfalls to his proposal? Did I just keep my mouth shut and take a big swig of Jack Daniels and wait for him to come to his senses? NO! I immediately jumped into Xena’s passenger seat and demanded that he drive me out to the scene of the crime, so I could assess the situation personally.

By the time we got back, the Shoot-0ut was long over, and I regret to state that since ESPN2, unlike Versus, apparently doesn’t run their programs over and over and over, the Paso Robles event most likely is lost to us forever. We literally didn’t remember till we closed the front door behind us again that we’d been sitting on the edges of our seats for more than a week, slobbering in anticipation for it. I have never felt like less of a devoted PBR fan than I did in that moment.

I’m feeling a little better now, but that’s mostly because SoCal Jay has come to my rescue with a report on the coverage of the Shoot-out that I’ll post here in just a few hours. For some reason, the whole experience reminds me of how much grace Michael Phelps showed this past week when he opted to take part in three relay races at the Olympics, even though that meant he was handing control of whether he would reach his goal of eight gold medals to his teammates. I can only be grateful that yet again, one of my friends has saved my bacon, and I can only hope that the rest of you will forgive us for letting one addiction trump another.