Atonement

When you have friends, the real live flesh and blood kind, there are all sorts of time honoured acts that you end up doing for them... often against your better judgement. You do these acts for a number of reasons; it's good to help others, you never know when you might need their help and of course, most importantly of all, sometimes it makes up for some mean thing you might have done to them. This day definitely falls into the latter category.

It was spent atoning for introducing them to the Valleys. A show that they, against their better judgement, sit glued to with all the horror and revulsion that show can generate. It was an act of bastardry that He might never be forgiven for and that we were trying to offset just a little. That was how we found ourselves helping clean out their garage so that it could be turned into a multipurpose room that would encompass a home gym.

Since going on the diet they have taken to early morning exercise with a great deal of enthusiasm. Their local gym is also damned expensive and they do not have time to go to it anyway, so having their own equipment is a sensible compromise. So we spent the day lugging and schlepping the accumulated detritus of two adults and their two offspring to the dump. Four people who, might one add, seem to have used their garage as a staging ground for all things that might come in useful (at some vague point in the future) and had unrealistic beliefs about how infinite garage space is.

Now if he can just find a way of getting rid of his children's dress up box and the chest of assorted Lego that they have almost outgrown, he will have enough room to put in a bench and a rack system for the weights that he is going to need to go with the twenty kilo bar he managed to acquire.

Was it wrong to plant that idea in his head? Yeah probably, but he is going to need somewhere safe to store the weights.

It's a safety issue...

We must protect the children... surely J