This weekend was glorious, wasn’t it? I hope it was glorious wherever you were. The sun was shining, the air was crisp. If you stood still you could feel the sun warming your skin and a cool breeze tickling the back of your neck. I had a lot of time to consider the beauty of the natural world this weekend. I was stuck in a tree for most of it.
I got up early on Saturday morning and packed a picnic lunch. The usual, egg and cress sandwiches, a thermos of iced mint tea, a brown paper bag of desiccated chocolate covered grasshoppers (originally when I typed these notes out for today’s Botched Inventions I typed grasshoppers. I think that’s funny and I wanted to share it with you.) Armed with my picnic hamper, blanket, book, ukulele, kite and water and sand powered phonograph, I set out for an adventure on my auto-velocipede. I settled in a lovely patch of meadow through a thicket of trees, far off from civilization. Everything was sweet and peaceful. I read, I ate, I played the ukulele, I watched butterflies, I flew my kite while listening. It was a perfect day. Somehow I got the bee in my bonnet that I should climb up into one of the tall trees and play my ukulele in it’s branches. That was…..unwise.
I climbed, branch over branch, digging my heels into the tree trunk and swinging myself up higher and higher, my trusty ukulele strapped to my back. Higher and higher I climbed, further on into the inevitable, higher into my doom UNTIL, I felt my ukulele start to slip from my back. I lurched forwards, gripping the tree with my legs and flailing at the ukulele. I caught it in one hand, but as I did my knees slipped from around the tree and I started to fall backwards. I caught myself with one hand and pulled myself up another branch, determined to make it higher into that tree. Until…I felt I could go no further. I was caught on something. I looked behind me and saw my bodice strings had become tangled around some lower branches, right were I’d almost fallen. Dangit. I climbed back down to try and untangle them and when I got there, found I’d caught my bodice strings again, on a higher branch. I tried to loosen the strings on the lower branch, but they wouldn’t budge, so I climbed back up to the higher branch, worked my way around it and with a sickening snap Ifelt the branch give out beneath me and I felt for the briefest of moments until with a sudden jerk, I hung there, suspended in midair, dangling from my tangled bodice strings.
The sky was a beautiful blue, very striking against the flowering trees around me. Birds were singing around me in the tree, full of beauty and various other things. And in fact, one decided to give me a beautiful little present, right on the back of my leg. Lovely. I twirled there, slowly, for a few hours, sometimes I’d give a shout, hoping someone would find me. After a while I gave up and started playing the ukulele, quickly running through my repertoire. Then running through it again, this time slower. I wrote four extraneous verses to Johnny Cash’s Flushed from the Bathroom of your Heart. It wasn’t all bad really, I practiced tuvan throat singing, which I still can’t properly do, but I did wind up making some funny noises and scarring some squirrels so bad they fell out of the tree. I used the tree to twirl around in tighter and tighter circles, you know the way you used to on swings when you were a kid? Then I’d let go and let the strings untwirl until I made myself a little sick. It was pretty great.
The sun started to set and I still hadn’t been rescued. It’s not terribly unlike me to go out on an adventure and not show back up on board the Calpurnia until 10:45 the night of our radio show, so I had little hope of Emmett coming to look for me. It was getting chilly and I didn’t have a wrap with me. The sun set, the moon came up and the stars were twinkling in the sky high above me when I remembered my boot knife. I scrambled and contorted myself, reaching around my back to the strings and sawing through them one by one, the whole time muttering about what a dummy I was. Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dummy.
The last string snapped on it’s own, and I tumbled down couple feet, landing belly-first onto the next branch before I gradually picked my way down, out of the tree and back home to the airship.
This concludes Klaude’s modest collection of botched inventions: Spring Funtime Adventure Edition!