I don't know if I should blame the full moon, or if I've just hit a patch of bad luck, but the past couple of days have been highlighted by mild disasters.
Sunday night, Jen and I made naan pizzas, and when we went to pull 'em out of the oven, the baking sheet overbalanced and tipped straight over. We went from naan pizzas to naan stuck to the inside of the oven door - the good news is that, thanks to a couple of spatulas and fairly quick timing, the pizzas were salvageable. Sure, they were ugly as hell, and I had to clean the oven door off later, but they tasted just as good as if they had come out perfectly.
Last night was a bit worse; I was covering the opening-night demolition derby at the county fair, and one of the video guys I know invited me up into the bucket of a fire truck to get a high-angle view of the action for a heat or two. The fire truck is old - probably from the 1960s - and though I've been up in the bucket in years past without issue, this was the year age finally caught up with it.
When Charlie, the video guy, hit the lever to take us up, the bucket shivered, started to move up, then settled right back down - because the hydraulic line right behind the bucket ruptured, sending fluid flying on us, our gear, everything.
The bad news is that it wrecked a bunch of stuff - our clothes, my water bottle, maybe my camera bag - but we were OK (for being bathed in a few seconds' worth of flying hydraulic fluid, anyway), as were our cameras.
The good news is that things could've been a lot worse. The line that ruptured was old, and the fluid was probably ancient, so it was more of a hydraulic sprinkler than a jet of fluid, which can send you to the hospital in a hurry. The fact that it ruptured as soon as we tried to move, rather than when we'd gotten into the air, or when we were trying to get down from 50 feet up, makes me feel better about the situation.
Plus, when I got home, Jen greeted me in a mock biohazard suit, which was hilarious.
Tags: work,
wtf 
