Ruinous Placements for Ladders

It took me a little more than a YEAR to get another opportunity to play D&D again.
Something unfortunate had happened in the meantime...

Back to May 2016 right after we played D&D. My friends who had never played before were surprised and pleased that they'd had such a good time.  They said they enjoyed digging around inside my skull (figuratively).  I enjoyed seeing their unique and beautiful brains interacting in a new context.

The next day, the Memorial Day holiday, I was feeling pretty happy.  Then, a dose of disaster struck.  My wife noticed really nasty oversize wasps with these two displacer-beast-tentacle-looking things trailing behind them infiltrating the house from the side porch.  My wife HATES any wasps, but especially these schmucks! I had to think of my 5-year-old kid vs. these hateful insects, too.  

So I grabbed a sticky wasp trap, grabbed the ladder, cursed quietly, put it on the slope of not very solid scree, cursed quietly, tried to hang the wasp trap near the roof gutters- where the wasps were seen coming in, cursed quietly, couldn't quite reach the gutters, cursed between my teeth, put one foot on the building- and then the ladder fell.  I fell. The ladder twisted with one foot still on it and the other foot launching off the house.  

Kind of looks Keith Haring-esque

I forget if the ladder fell on me a little bit, but I was really lucky to escape worse injury.  Some springy weed trees had broken my fall partially.  I'm glad I hadn't been a more anal retentive grounds-keeper and cut them down.

I was in pain.  I left the ladder tangled in the trees, picked myself up from the scree, limped with the help of a passing bicyclist to my front door, apologized for cursing in front of her halted convoy of bicycling kids, got my wife to drive me to the hospital with our kid in tow.  Multiple hours on a national holiday in the emergency room. Different tests and X-rays.  My kid went from bawling-concerned to bored.  I had purple bruises and scrapes all over my back but luckily not much damage under the skin to ribs and offal. I was fortunate my head escaped serious injury.  My foot was ground zero.  Broken toes.  Had to wear an immobilizing boot and move slowly.  Felt stupid.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!  Very annoyed with myself for this  preventable, lamentable execrable accident.  Haste makes hazardous.  Soooo lucky that this wasn't my driving foot!

So no more D&D that summer, garden turned to weeds, had to use spray cans with distance-shooting toxic foam vs. the wasps.  Fall 2016 was hard with changes with family and work.  

Spring 2017 I wrote a new adventure.  Getting myself together, getting my friends together for D&D and coordinating with their schedules was like herding cats.  But finally in JUNE 2017, it worked out...