We took the girls on their first trip to NYC a few weeks ago and they ended up being very popular at the gay pride parade! We dressed them up for the occasion - DeRosa wore a blue cotton hoodie and Doris had on her favorite Chicago Cubs jersey.
THE SETUP
We always have a great time visiting New York but the drive home is always miserable. This particular Sunday afternoon was extra frustrating due to the construction occurring outside the Holland Tunnel - adding an extra hour and a half to our commute. Needless to say we were both irritable and eager to get home.
I was playing my umpteenth game of solitaire on my iPhone when we finally pulled up to our building. John asked me to retrieve the hotel cart out of the lobby while he got the dogs and our "crap" together.
The doormen usually assists us with loading our luggage, groceries, etc. into the building - of course the one time we actually needed his help he wasn't around.
As I exited the building, with the awkward hotel cart, a young woman kindly held the door open for me as she saw that I was struggling to get through the double doors.
Like most everything in Philadelphia, our apartment building is old school. According to one of our doormen the building was originally office space built in 1850 and within the last decade it was converted into loft apartments.
John handed me the leashes with the dogs and left me at the corner with the hotel cart jam-packed with our overnight bags, the dog's litter box, their toys, etc. He then pulled the car around the corner to our parking garage which is located a block away.
Looking back on it now, I should have spoken up and said this was too much for one person to handle - especially with the difficulty I had maneuvering the cart out the door. But for some reason I was up for a challenge.
THE INCIDENT
The girls were on their leashes walking along side of the hotel cart as I slowly pushed our belongings (which were haphazardly placed onto the cart) down the uneven sidewalk. To my own amazement, I got everything to the front of the door without dropping anything.
The two front doors open out and can only be opened with a resident's access code and punching in the correct code a little light above the number pad turns green and the door opens. Doing this much was easy enough and I felt confident that I could make this happen.
I held the left door open with my left arm, the dogs leash was strapped tightly on my right hand and I tried to use my body/right arm to push the cart into the building. It wouldn't BUDGE. I look down and there's a step up in the sidewalk leading into the building which makes getting this heavy cart through the doorway a near impossible task.
BOOM! I lost the litter box. Luckily there was a garbage bag around it so the mess was minimal. I let the front door rest on the hotel cart that was only partly in the doorway. I picked up the litter box and some how managed to secure it back onto the cart.
I heard the dogs screaming and looked down at Doris and saw something in her mouth. DeRosa was getting very excited for what her sister had found.
GROSS! Doris had a bird in her mouth. I yelled, "No Doris, drop it!" She quickly let it go and I pulled both of the dogs away from a tiny-baby bird. The poor little baby took its last breath under the menacing step up in the doorway. The only thought that raged through my mind was, WHERE'S THE FREAKIN' DOORMAN!
The girls wanted to attack the bird as it laid still from its sudden death. Did Doris kill it? I'm not sure. Either way, I was standing in the front entrance of my building with a dead baby bird at my feet and two excited dogs ready to pounce on it - not to mention the hotel cart lodged halfway into the doorway.
With the cart firmly leveraged into the door I took their house (a black bag we use for airplane rides - big enough for them both to fit into) and placed them into it. While zipping up the bag and telling the girls to relax, the hotel cart some how squeaked out of the doorway and began rolling rapidly towards a parked car in front of our building...YIKES!
SMASH!@#$ BOOM!@%$# The cart hit an old white Mazda parked directly in front of our doorway. I looked around to see if there were any witnesses and amazingly enough, no one saw it all go down. There were scrapes all over the car so it was hard to tell if the scratch across the passenger side door was done by the hotel cart or if it was done prior to this incident.
Honestly, it did look like the cart did some damage but I tried to convince myself it was already scraped up and it didn't really matter. I pulled the cart towards the front door and just stood there for a moment.
I then looked down the street and could see John walking towards me. I said, "I had a lot of problems getting into the building! Look, Doris killed a bird!"
He was a man on a mission and after our long drive home he was focused on getting our "crap" and our dogs upstairs and laying on the couch to read his book. He said, "Birds carry diseases, leave it be. I'm surely not touching it!"
I held the door open as he pushed the hotel cart easily through the door. I grabbed the dogs who were wrestling around in their house/carrier thing and we went upstairs.
THE CONCLUSION
Once we got upstairs I took the garbage bag that covered the litter box and headed back downstairs to pick up the dead bird and place it in the dumpster on the side of the building - a sad burial for this poor tiny creature.
When I got outside I saw the new doorman checking out the babes walking down the sidewalk and having a cigarette. He watched me pick up the bird with the garbage bag and throw it away into the dumpster.
When I was walking back into the building I saw him putting his cigarettes away in his white Mazda parked in front of the house.
