This blog is about living off the grid. But naturally there is more to life than just being off the grid and so an honest blog would include other things in my life that may transpire even tho they are unrelated to remoteness. Like my being nominated for an award. Here’s the story:

As you know, I hurt my back last week. Herniated disc. Painful. But, by the time my son and Katie came to visit this weekend, I could walk straight and move around. This should have been a good thing.

Ben brought his trials bike, a motorized version of a mountain bike and something I have always wanted to try. We took it up the old logging road and I went for a spin. When I got to an open field, I tried a few ‘antics’ to get a feel for the thing. It was really neat. Trials bikes are very well-balanced and one can pull wheelies with them much easier than with other motorcycles.

Or so the theory goes.

It was not my finest moment. I cranked the throttle, pulled up on the handle bars and went screaming through a chain-link fence with both wheels off the ground and crashed on a pile of boulders with the bike on top of me.

My first thought was, “Geez, Ben is gonna kill me if I hurt his bike!”

My second thought was, “Geez, Sal is just gonna kill me!”

My third thought was, “Why do I smell BBQ?”

I pulled the red hot exhaust system off my bare leg after it had seared a blob-shaped scar into my thigh and turned my thoughts from BBQ to moving the rest of the bike off of me and then me off of the boulder jamming up under my back.

I managed to get home and have been in bed ever since.

Sally sent in an application to the Darwin Awards people. Seems I made the cut in the ‘still-alive’ category and my name is now on their database to be followed up on the safe assumption that I will soon make the finals.

Life is a bowl of cherries and I just ate a pit.