I grew up with a kid just like Wiley- except named Gene- who was the highlight of my Boy Scouting career. Off the top of my head:
Gas leak in the basement- his dad went down to shut off the gas. Gene follows him down and flips on the light. The explosion blows Gene up the last few stairs and out the window behind him onto the lawn. His only injury- a piece of glass stuck in his forehead.
I watched him fall down an 80-100 foot chalkstone bluff bouncing on the way down ~4 times. Walks away uninjured.
Playing 31 and bidding with matchsticks. Gene falls over backwards igniting the matches in his hand on the picnic table igniting his shirt.
Using a 6 foot stick, he tries to measure the depth of a frozen lake ends up falling in through the hole in the ice he broke. Thankfully he just held out the stick for us to pull him out.
Hunting pigeons in the hayloft at his farm, he dives on two, rolls over, and falls out the loft door. He actually is knocked out (at last) but recovers quickly. Somehow during the fall, however, he has ripped the head and backbones (and many of the bones) out of both of the birds he grabbed in the loft.
Ended up in the hospital with arsenic poisoning after he was holding the twine for the ropemaking in his mouth.
Many, many years ago when I was in college I went to see a movie.
The next time I called home, I did not let Dad (who picked up the phone as usual) hand me over to Mom’s monologue, again as usual: I ordered him to take the whole family to see the movie. I did not ask him, I did not recommend the movie; I told him “I know you haven’t been to a movie theater since I got to be tall enough to go on my own, but y’all absolutely have to watch this one - that’s you-all including you-Dad.”
Intrigued by my unusual forcefulness, he did indeed take his Spousal Unit and sons to watch the movie. Next time I called home, he picked up the phone and, instead of “I’ll get your mother,” said “ah, hi, your brothers have to tell you something.”
So. One of my brothers takes the handset at the living room, the other one takes the extension in our parents’ bedroom, and they synch “we now know what Mom is - Mom is a 'toon!”
The reasons why my mother is a 'toon are too long to list, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a favorite movie for all of us. When Middlebro found out his wife hadn’t watched it (the horror!) he ran out to get to the videoclub before it closed and refused to sit back down to dinner until she’d popped it into the player and sat down to watch.
So on moving day, you’re taking your stuff from your old house to the new one, three hours away, and you take off with the U-haul containing your furniture, but without your husband? How was she going to unload all the furniture when she got there?
They took several trips to take everything over. He now comutes from there to the same station hubby does. My husband’s comute is nearly 2 hours. There are several others that comute 3 hours from Sequim and Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. If you look at the map in post #9, you’ll see it isn’t much farther, and housing prices are much lower.
We’ve thought about moving to Cle Elum too, but I’m not thrilled about that much winter.
Yeah, I just heard the story about the guy on the roof with his kid driving away last week. I think it might actually have been out on YouTube. I’m guessing either Wile E. is pulling your husband’s leg or your husband is pulling yours.
Just because it’s an urban legend, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. He is indeed, trained in high angle dangle, which means he knows how to secure ropes, that can be quickly detached.
His wife and a neighbor both witnessed it.
Perhaps the urban legend or the original episode of Emergency! referenced in the UL site is where he picked up the idea in the first place; he just forgot the second part of the story.
I knew a ‘Wiley’ when I was growing up. He was an eccentric who had inherited a huge house, but lived like a hobo in just two or three of the rooms.
He was the only man in human history actually to have chainsawed off the branch he was sitting on. He managed to throw the chainsaw away from him as he fell, and got away with only two broken wrists.
Another time, a cop said “Mr Wiley, do you know why I stopped you?”
“No,” he replied, mystified.
“Because you’re riding a motorcycle with no helmet, with the front and rear licence plates not matching, and your dog sitting on the fuel tank.” After accepting the warning, he waited for the cop to disappear, and rode off again, dog on fuel tank.
He had an obsessive scheme to improve rail travel by a) tunneling several dozen miles beneath the hills near us - despite there being a train line that went through the hills about ten miles from where we lived, and b) putting rubber tires on the train wheels, because the biggest objection as far as he knew to building trains was the noise.
He was also once to be seen in the pub celebrating his wife’s pregnancy - a year after the vasectomy he’d proudly boasted about.
The OP’s story reminds me of the Irish song “The Sick Note” (note this is a traditional song so no lyric copyright):
