Friday, February 29, 2008

The Joy of Old Trucks

I guess the picture says it all. On my way out of the driveway to get the kids from school yesterday. Backed up in front of the barn as usual. Started to pull out and the back end started sliding. If i had stopped then, when Connie got home we could have gotten the truck back down the driveway and everything would have been fine. But... being a meat-headed farmboy I thought I could get it out myself. Every move I made slid me further down the hill toward the corner of the barn. I finally gave up, but now it will take AAA or a big tractor to get me out.

One thing I noticed while I was spinning and swearing was that not one person stopped to help. Made me miss Wyoming. There people always stopped. Even folks who really didn't like you would stop to help if you were stranded on the side of the road. (It was always nice to have a good story about saving your enemies butt to tell down at the bar.) I guess that out west in the barren wilds being neighborly was a survival tactic. You helped folks who needed it because next time it would be you. Here, neighborliness seems to be optional and rarer.

It is snowing again today. The weather service said we would have flurries with little accumulation and temperatures reaching above freezing by noon. The "flurries" have piled up 3" so far and the temp at 11am is 24 deg. F. It would be nice to have a job where you could be so wrong so often and still continue getting paid.

1 comment:

jack-of-all-thumbs said...

Given that you made me laugh twice in one short post, you have a knack for this writing thing. Keep it up.

First was the six or eight year-old image you retrieved for me, of my small truck in a snow-filled ditch - facing backwards no less. I was carefully making my twenty-mile plus way into work on ice-covered back roads when I hit a shady patch and lost control. I was only going twenty and there wasn't a car or house nearby, so it was a gentle landing. But it took me a couple of hours to hitch a ride into work. When I arrived, there was an email waiting for me, sent by my local backwoods mechanic, who apparently recognized my truck while driving by. It simply read: "Yeah, those light-a** Toyota trucks aren't worth a flip on the ice, are they?"

The second laugh came at the end after the missed forecast: "It would be nice to have a job where you could be so wrong so often and still continue getting paid." It seems to me that the only other job to compare is that of a political pundit. Let's see how much 'snow' they have to dig themselves out of after Tuesday's primaries are over.

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