Monday, January 15, 2018

Pressure on the Barrel and Fullest House

Several of us from various parts of the country descended upon San Francisco at various times on Thursday.  We had planned to spend a weekend hanging out in the city and heading up north to Napa Valley.

Disney Prince Hair Brandt lives in San Francisco now despite my repeated efforts to talk him into moving back to Salt Lake City so I can finally have some competition around here [runs a greasy comb through hair].

Look. I've never really spent time in San Francisco. I don't know much about it. I have no business being there.

BUT, what I do know is that Danny Tanner raised Olsen Twins in one of those houses and so there was absolutely no way I was going to leave the city without finding it.

I told Skylar this. He and I both had some free time on Friday morning while everyone else was working, and so we ventured off together to find the Full House house.

Skylar could not have been less interested in this activity, and I'm 120% convinced that he was intentionally singing the wrong words to the wrong song all morning just to irritate me. (He was singing "Our house--in the middle of the street" but he wasn't even getting those words right and then he would break into the "everywhere you look!" part of the Full House song but instead he would sing "everywhere you go, everything you do" and this was wrong and it was unacceptable and I needed him to just stop AND WE SHOULD JUST TOTALLY STAB CAESAR.)


We finally got to the house and that's when I decided that it was probably time for a "Waiting For Brunch" sequel, so I then spent the next 20 minutes being the most annoying tourist who has ever lived, performing various actions on the street with very specific instruction for Skylar to create the below video.

During the filming we were approached by a woman named Sonya who was visiting from New York and who initially pretended like she totally didn't care about this crap but she just wanted to get a picture of the house to show her kids later but the next thing she knew she was taking very specific directorial direction from Skylar and then getting dragged all over the entire city with us for the next two hours.

Also, the woman who appears on the phone in the video is our friend Beth who lives in the city and is probably embarrassed that we exist.


Don't worry. San Francisco payed us back for this.

On Sunday morning Skylar, our friend Charly, and I were having brunch with my friend Spencer who lives in the city, just before Skylar was supposed to take me and Charly to the airport (Skylar was staying in the area for work).

There we were, minding our business, being good people who aren't out to hurt anyone, when suddenly Charly got a call on her phone.

It was the police. Someone had broken into Skylar's rental car and the cops had found Charly's phone number on a bag in the back of the vehicle.

Someone broke into our car.

ON THE LORD'S DAY.

We were panicky, because of course we had left all of our possessions in this car, like the morons that we definitely are, and we didn't know what might have been taken.

This is one of those stories where I'm gonna be all like "we NEVER leave valuables in our car and this was the ONE TIME we did that" because, like, seriously. We never do that and this was the one time.

Everything was in there because we were about to go to the airport, we had parked on a heavily foot-trafficked street in broad daylight in a not-so-bad part of town, and we were only going to be gone for like 45 minutes, so it just didn't seem like that big of a deal.

Oh how I wish I had listened to every lecture Bob and Cathie have ever given me in my life.

We arrived at the car a few minutes after the call and found a few police officers there. Several neighbors saw someone come by, shatter the back window, grab our three laptop bags (with all of our work laptops), jump into a vehicle, and speed away.

People tried to chase after him and someone called the cops, who arrived very quickly. A neighbor even got a picture of the car, but the license plate was blurry and nobody saw it in time to write it down.

Obviously losing that stuff was terrible. But things can be replaced, and none of had any security information that could be accessed by a thief.

Except that I, Eli Whistletown McCann, did the stupidest thing of all. I had backed up, obsessively, two years worth of Strangerville recordings on an external hard drive, which was sitting in that bag, which means all of the hundreds of hours of raw recordings are just plain gone, including several long interviews I have done with elderly family members just for personal family history purposes.

Fortunately all Strangerville episodes in their final form are backed up online (and have now been backed up on another hard drive), but I'm sick today about what can't be replaced.

We made all of the relevant phone calls, thanked all of the neighbors who stood around us for support, and thanked the cops who were really wonderful and did not even give us a lecture about "you people are idiots STOP MAKING CRIME EASY."

I flew home and later that night I got a text from Skylar asking me how important my bags were because he heard about a place where people hock stolen goods and maybe he could do some investigative work and find it with Beth that night and then he sent me this video


which immediately prompted me to call him and scream into the phone "OH MY GOSH YOU ARE SO NOT EQUIPPED TO DEAL WITH RISK PLEASE GO HOME AND LOCK SEVERAL DOORS."

He was relieved, later telling me that he wasn't actually "feeling the confidence" he was "exuding" so "powerfully."

So, yeah. San Francisco punished me for making a Full House tribute video WHICH I WAS JUST DOING TO CHEER UP MATT BECAUSE HE HAD A REALLY BAD WEEK LAST WEEK SO I FEEL LIKE KARMA BROKE A LITTLE.

At least I can leave you with something happy. We have a Strangerville episode for you below, including an insane story from Stranger Christy.

I'm not kidding you about this. I still cannot believe this bad date story is real.

Do us a solid and check it out below or on your podcast app.


This time in Strangerville, Eli confronts Meg about her offensive comments regarding their relationship and a woman tells the story of the worst date. Like, ever.

Story: "Pressure on the Barrel" by Christy (music by bensound.com)

Production by Eli McCann and Meg Walter
 

~It Just Gets Stranger

18 comments:

  1. So what you meant by this...

    "Everything was in there because we were about to go to the airport, we had parked on a heavily foot-trafficked street in broad daylight in a not-so-bad part of town, and we were only going to be gone for like 45 minutes, so it just didn't seem like that big of a deal."

    Was...

    We left the car in the Tenderloin district at 5am so we could go to breakfast and we were gone for 2 hours.

    Just kidding. But I love Detective Skylar and his Law & Order monologue was impressive, get that guy an agent!

    Seriously though that sucks about the hard drive. I've had those moments and it is absolutely disheartening. Who knows maybe someone will eventually listen to the hard drive and feel the need to seek you out and return it. Stranger things have happened.

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  2. Karma is broken. Can it be fixed though, I thinks the thing to focus on. Amy Rose

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  3. WHY WAS MATT'S WEEK BAD IS OLLIE OKAY???

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    1. Not Ollie related. He lost a very close friend to a tragic accident. Mr. Pants has been a good snuggler the last few days.

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    2. Geez everyone needs hugs, I feel like I'm falling down on the job here.

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  4. I’m so sorry. But it was al worth it for the Fullest House video.

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  5. So as much as I love this post, and I do, I love it, (all except that Matt is hurting) when I saw the title I thought this was going to be in part a recap of yet another round of episodes from Fuller House. If you don't write a general blog post about it, at least send me an email on your thoughts, there are things I want to discuss. Is that too needy of me?!

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  6. This is one of my new favorite things you've ever posted.

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  7. Was Skylar standing at the back of airline security on Thursday? I may have been on your same flight to San Francisco if it was delayed 1.5 hours!

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  8. The one and only time I went to San Francisco our rental car got broken into to....5 mins after we had walked into Denny’s in a busy part of town in broad daylight. There wasn’t anything valuable taken, but a bunch of stuff that was important. It was tragic so I feel your pain :/

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    1. Yikes! Ok ok I got it. Never leave valuables in the car. I'm good about locking my car and house doors, but have definitely basically lived out of my car while visiting Utah last year. Mental note to not do that again. Or maybe I'm just really good at buying stuff that nobody else wants.

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  9. Eli! I’m very concerned that you may have forgotten about your bachelor recapping duties this week! Do we need to alert meg?!

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    Replies
    1. I want you to know that this comment actually got me to write the stupid thing.

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    2. Thank god! I really thought Meg would have texted you using her dragon voice asking where it was before I would have to!

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  10. One time when I was travelling in the US (from Canada where I live), I stopped at a mall somewhere in Denver because the last Harry Potter book had just been released and I had promised my son that we would buy it the very day it came out even though we were on holiday driving around here and there (our ultimate destination that year was the Grand Canyon). Anyhow. I went into the Walmart with my five children to get the book and we wandered around for awhile and looked at all the things and meandered around for a bit and when we finally came back out to the parking lot, we discovered that I HAD LEFT THE DOOR OF THE VAN WIDE OPEN!!!!! My heart just sunk because everything we had was in there including a camera (this is back in the olden days) with all the pictures we had taken in the previous nearly 2 weeks of our vacation. But LO AND BEHOLD, absolutely nothing was taken. It was all there. I nearly cried with relief. An elderly gentleman came over and said he had noticed it and had been sort of keeping an eye out while his wife was inside shopping and no one had nosed around so he didn't have to scare anyone off and that really was the day I started to love American people.

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  11. I live for your Mean Girls references.

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  12. I see your San Francisco car theft story and I raise you a San Francisco KIDNAPPING story. We live in Northern California, so when our relatives in Utah want to prepare their children for The World, they send them to us and we take the innocent darlings to San Fran for the weekend so their eyes will be opened. On one of these trips, we were also accompanied by Flat Stanley, who had been sent to us by a Utah niece's 2nd grade class. (If you don't know about Flat Stanley you need to Google him now or none of this will make sense). We'd been able to get some great footage of Flat Stanley at the Golden Gate Bridge, the slides on Seward, and the science museum. We were looking forward to more footage of Stanley in Chinatown. We took one picture with Stanley in front of the fortune cookie factory, but when I went to pull him out of my back pocket to join us for some moon cakes.....Flat Stanley was GONE! Apparently he was mistaken for a wallet and became the victim of a pickpocketing gone wrong. While we had a good laugh over the thief's mistake, we were fairly distraught over how to explain this to the 2nd grade class in Utah eagerly awaiting Stanley's return. We fixed it by sending Flat Soon-Yee back as a replacement, explaining that Flat Stanley and Flat Soon-Yee had decided to do a student exchange program together. Stanley went to Hong Kong, Soon-Yee came to Utah.

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