Tuesday, August 5, 2008

You Learn Something New Everyday

So Boyfriend has decided to become a prospector (it is actually kinda cute as I imagine him growing a long beard and giddily shouting “Eureka!” while doing a jig over his gold pan). So the logical first step in prospecting is to fly over in your private plane and drop 300 pounds of gear into your canyon of choice.

Boyfriend found his parachute on ebay and it arrived balled up in a garbage bag. Now you would think this might be a problem, since neither Boyfriend nor I have ever packed a parachute, but nah…we got this.

After watching a 3 minute video on youtube about how to fold the thing, we spread the 38-foot monster army green parachute on the green grass in the pitch dark night and began folding. We were pretty impressed with ourselves. We even found a high-tech solution to the lack of parachute sack by stuffing it into an old pillow case and stapling the sides. Genius. Look at us. We went from parachute packing virgins to mother-effing professionals in two hours flat. Sunday’s lesson was complete.

On Monday, Boyfriend went to actually perform the drop. And as the duffle bags crashed down from the plane with not even a partially-deployed chute, we learned the daily lesson: that you can’t learn how to pack a parachute from a youtube video.

Somewhere down there in that canyon Sasquatch is snacking on MREs and enjoying Boyfriend’s well-fitting shoes that surely fell out when the bags hit the rocky bottom at 200 mph and split open like melons. You know what they say…big feet…parachute-packing failure.

No comments: