Thorin F-ing Oakenshield, Or: Hubby Scowls, The Family Howls

Thorin F-ing Oakenshield. Read on… it’ll make sense in a minute! =)

 

OK, so this might just be my last blog post. Ever. If Hubby finds out. Happily, he still doesn’t seem to show a lot of interest in my PreoccupationWithArmitage, so there’s some chance I’ll survive.

The kiddos at the climbing gym. Young Love has reached the ceiling, and Little Sister is halfway there.

Yesterday was a Great Day for me. Because he’s in academia, Hubby always has these nice breaks between semesters, along with any holidays that the students have… and that’s cool because he gets to spend some extra time with the offspring, which last week included escorting them to the local climbing gym for their weekly Climbing Club. This was the first time he’d gotten to experience watching the little monkeys climb, and not only was he proudly in awe of their skills, but he mentioned to me that he really wanted to have a go at climbing himself. 

I would have rescheduled a lot more than one appointment if need be!

Now, I’ve already mentioned that I have a thing for rock climbers. Boy, do I have a healthy interest for watching those muscles stretch and bulge, watching all that concentration on their faces as they zen out on the rock face, or the climbing wall, as the case may be. So when Hubby said that, my ovaries gave a delighted little shudder, and I clicked straightaway onto my appointment calendar, and made a notation to reschedule the one appointment booked during this week’s climbing session, and notified the staff that I’d be leaving an hour early to *cough* take the kids to climbing.

I wasn’t about to miss this! For one thing, it might just be a one and done deal. If Hubby didn’t enjoy himself, and decided not to pursue it further, and I’d missed my one chance to virtuously ogle a male climber then take him home and… yeah, not happening. So yesterday, having successfully rescheduled that one appointment, I finished work early and off I hustled to the climbing gym.

It didn’t disappoint. Hubby acquitted himself very nicely, never failing to send each route he tried, and looking so very attractive as he did so. Naturally, I snapped a ton of pictures of him, paid him suggestive compliments, and at the end I even took a couple of videos capturing his final climb to the ceiling on auto-belay, complete with occasional commentary from me, such as “Mmmm hmmm” and “Hubba Hubba”,  and then a couple of videos of Hubby’s light-hearted attempts on the slack-line (where he didn’t acquit himself nearly as well!) All in all, it was a wonderful outing. He plans to keep climbing, which pleases me in all kinds of ways, and afterward, we all went out for dinner and relived all their greatest moments.  Everyone wanted to look at the pictures of themselves, but I held off, promising that I’d show them at home, when I could sync them to the TV and show them on the big screen!

Here is a screen cap from the vertical video.

Another vertical video screencap. See how much fun he was having? That’s about to change….

So we got home, and this is when the real fun started. We went through the still photos, and those were nice. I’d gotten photos of each of the climbers, but mostly Hubby. After all, the kids have been climbing for months and have archives of photos. Then, we got to the video I’d taken, and I honestly haven’t laughed so hard in ages. You see, my phone can take video either horizontally or vertically, and on the phone or on the computer, the vertical orientation plays back just like any other video. I’d taken the video vertically to be able to better capture the height of the ceiling that Hubby climbed to, of course, and I’m sure it was a lovely video.

 

 

 

Early horizontal video screen cap. Can you hear the snickers and the giggles?

Later horizontal video screen cap. Can you hear the howls?

What I discovered, though, was that somehow the screen-sync with the TV is incapable of playing a vertical video, and somewhere in that transmission, the vertically oriented screen is simply smooshed out and flattened to fit a horizontal template. You guessed it- something normally tall and lean suddenly becomes short and very, very wide! OMG! So first I tried to stop the video and tried re-orienting the phone and replaying it and did everything I could, all the while snickering as the kids were gasping “Daddy! Oh Daddy how did you get so FAT!?!” And then I gave up and just pushed play.

Pretty soon my snickers were turning into chortles, and as the kids started shrieking with laughter, my chortles turned into howls. I glanced at Hubby, and he was watching the screen with his mouth gaping open in horror as his own wide, stubby, dwarf-ass ascended and descended the wall. The kids begged me to replay it, laughing uproariously at the fat midget version of their dad, and pretty soon tears were running down my face as I tried to tear my eyes away from the TV screen just so I could see Hubby’s furious scowls. And needling him that my dialogue “Hubba Hubba” was meant to be “Stubba Stubba… or better yet Chubba Chubba!” After the third time viewing, the kids and I were laughing and shrieking and all but screaming at the hilarity, and Hubby was just shaking his head and muttering about whether I’d be laughing if Thorin F-ing Oakenshield was climbing!

Vertical screen cap of the Hubby’s slack-lining escapades.

The Slack-Lining Dwarf!

Next we moved on to the videos of the slack-lining, which would have been funny even if the man on the slack-line was of normal dimensions, simply because he was wheeling his arms, wobbling and toppling off after 2-3 steps every time. But the fact that it was the 5-foot tall and 3 feet wide version of our head of household being so adorably clutzy yet so damned determined made it all the more howl-worthy, or scowl-worthy, depending on the viewer in question.

I couldn’t help myself. When Hubby took the still-giggling kids off to the bathtub, I played the video a couple more times on the phone with screen intentionally rotated horizontally, and gleefully screen capped the entirety….

So…. It was nice knowing you! At least I’ll die with a big sloppy grin on my face! =)