Jacuzzi Diving with Hippopotami

 

Okay now, I really, and I mean REALLY (note the all caps, obviously I’m serious) hate to admit to this but I’ve managed, through severe lack of attention, poor decision making skills and a lackadaisical safety attitude, to have another water related accident.  Sigh.  Yes, I know.  You are all staring at your computer screens with your mouths agape, catching flies and letting spittle fall out, like…. “No… what?  You had another accident.  No way”.  Yes.  Yes way, I did. 

Kind of like this.

Now in my defense, I didn’t break any bones this time.  Not a single one.  Go me!  However, I am slightly concerned now that at my age (I am not in my twenties anymore.  Hell, I’m not even in my thirties anymore) I may have torn something that 40ish year olds bodies have a harder time mending without some creative medical intervention. 

But that’s not important right now.  First I need to describe my swan dive.  Oh, it was graceful:

 As all my local friends know, well, actually anyone on the planet right now knows that it’s really cold tonight.  Pretty much anywhere you live its cold.  No exception here in the south.  So Mark, James and I headed out to the hot tub to raise our body temps from ‘corpse’ to ‘almost human’ again.  Just a short while after getting in (still in the morgue fridge range) I got a spot of chlorine water in my eye.  Of course I rubbed my eye…. Ever so gently….. And somehow managed to dislodge my contact lens from my eyeball and send it scurrying off into deep eyelid territory.  Though this isn’t a huge deal, it is uncomfortable, and more importantly, it was my last pair of contacts.  So I reluctantly hopped my still ‘Walking Dead Cold’ tail out of the warm hot tub and scampered off into the house to find a mirror to help locate my wayward contact.  Once I found that little bugger hiding out in my brain stem and extracted it with our commercial grade shop vac, I quickly made my way back out to the back yard to ease myself back into the joyously warm waters of our hot tub.  My progress, however; was somewhat impeded by two bundles of Y chromosomes who just happened to have been sitting in the two most comfortable spots in the tub.  Coincidentally, both of these spots collectively blocked the entrance to the hot tub.  So, being that my feet were quite nearly numb from the ice cold concrete, I decided to step over the two floating hippopotami

into the center of the hot tub.  In retrospect, this was probably not my wisest course of action.  Hindsight suggests that I may have had a more favorable outcome by shouting “Move it or lose it”, then waited for the water moose to move out of the way and stepped gingerly back into the gloriously hot water, nearest the edge.  But alas, I am not well known for being patient and making prudent decisions when under some sort of pressure (and freezing feet is definitely some sort of pressure in my world).  So I grabbed the handrail to the stairs and swung my right leg out over hippo #1 toward the center of the tub, which happens to be about 12 inches lower than the seats and about 3 feet lower than my left leg.  At the exact moment that I had achieved proper momentum to launch myself elegantly  into the center of the tub, my Judas left leg decided it really didn’t like this plan and took its own course of action, heading directly up into the air and instead of landing graceful as a ballerina, into the center of the tub, I instead fell, like a bean bag full of Jell-O and wet mice, directly down onto hippo #1 and hippo #2, then rolled less than delicately into the center of the hot tub, completely immersing myself under the water.  As my head broke the surface I was treated to a chorus of giggles and guffaws from the hippo brothers, thank them very much.   Although, as my eyeballs cleared the water and fell on their happy little faces, somehow the peals of laughter faded away.  Go figure.  So in my Olympic grade maneuver, I somehow managed to strike the edge of the hot tub with my left ankle at Mach 78 and twist my left knee cap around so it was wobbling around in an area that I’m certain it wasn’t designed to visit.  Ever.  I, of course, wallowed around the tub for about 10 minutes, dunking my head under water when I felt the need to let out the string of vehement slang that included a lot of references to “ducks” and “monkeys”, that kept building up in my brain, while I was waiting for the throbbing to abate. 

The hippos continued to revel in the entertainment potential of my dive and ensuing rant.  Thank them very much again.

After the pain subsided enough, I limped out of the tub, carefully.  Very.  VERY (note the caps again).  Carefully.  I hobbled to the shower and then plopped myself down onto the couch, where I remain still. 

 I wish someone had placed a video camera just above our hot tub before the show.  I could have been a Tenthousandaire if AFV had a copy of the event.  Perhaps I could have used it to mount a campaign with the Olympic committee to add ‘Graceless Water Falling’ to the list of winter Olympic events.  Although, I don’t know that I would be willing to demonstrate the maneuver to the committee, so that’s probably a no-go. 

At this point, I just want to wobble off to bed and hope that a good night’s sleep and rest for my leg will, in fact, recover it enough that I won’t be dragging my leg behind and shouting “Sanctuary!  Sanctuary!” down the halls tomorrow at work.  There is nothing worse than having to explain to dozens of teachers and curious students, why I am limping.  I’m just not sure I can come up with that many convincing lies on the fly. 

Oh well, time to hobble off to bed.

Goodnight, sleep tight, and beware of Y chromosome hippos blocking your warm waters of life