{ye olde diy}

on wednesday or thursday, my eyes stopped working.

i woke up with a pounding headache, the vice-grip sledgehammer angry housewife frying pan to the side of the head kind of headache, the kind that you get when you've been somewhere especially loud for especially long, painting everything including your face with five or six coats of gasoline straight out of the pump.

that kind of headache.

consequently, every time i exposed my eyeballs to any kind of light at all they blurred and bent the picture beyond recognition and then produced oceanous amounts of salty tears.

consequently {again}, i spent most of the day flat on my back in the darkened living room, listening quietly to jian ghomeshi podcasts and my new hey ocean cd.

the day passed quickly and slowly and loudly and quietly and eventually barclay came home from work. he made me soup and then disappeared into his work room for three hours while i napped on the couch.

at roughly 11 pm, he emerged from the basement. he bent down and kissed my forehead, whispered, "suzy, wake up. i want to show you something."

i smiled and pushed the hair out of my eyes. i squinted into the dimly lit room where he stood, grinning proudly, behind his...

i squinted some more. "what is that?"

"it's a medieval trebuchet. and don't worry, i'm not throwing anything too heavy so it won't hurt you if it hits you in the face."

of course.

so we spent the rest of the evening flinging bottle caps and money around the house, adding and subtracting weight, and calculating and reconstructing. or you know, barclay did while i watched and flinched and ducked.

the moral of the story is that "diy" can be more than buttons and sewing and wall art. you can make medieval weaponry, and that's funner and more useful anyway.