I was going to write an entry about how stupid people can be when they drive in the snow. I'm not expecting them to go fast, but I am expecting them not to stop when they don't have to. Driving in snow, my dears, is much more enjoyable if you don't have to stop. If everyone would just magically keep cruising kind of slowly...yeah. Cruising.
On my way up a very steep hill, I came to a blinking yellow light. The car in front of me also came to a blinking yellow light. They stopped.
Stopped!
It's cold and it's snowy and the roads are slathered in dirty, salt-laden slush that makes it hard for the cars to go. My car is included in that. I tooted my horn twice, short little toot! toot! The person drove forward. I think she had taken the blinkage for solidity. Understandable, I suppose. Nevertheless, why pay so little attention when driving up a slippery, frozen slope?
I don't know.
Then I got home. I tried to take our car up the driveway. It doesn't like going up the driveway sometimes. I was feeling its desire to get up the driveway. I could feel it trying to go up the driveway. All the way up the driveway! I wanted to help! So I drove up, and then backed out to get some momentum and then I'd drive back up.
Remember my irritation with the woman stopping on the hill? Well, add me to the list of people I am unwilling to understand.
I was so ready to get the car up the driveway, that the last time I backed out of the driveway, what was to be the last run up the driveway, I reversed the car right into the snow. Duh. The part of the snow that the plow makes? The dense, icy, heavy stuff that the plow shovels to the side of the road? Yeah. That's what I stuck the car in.
I walked up to get the shovel (I wasn't going to ask for help since I was to goofus who got it stuck). I could go neither forward nor back, but BrilliantEditor was there to help me. He dug out the car. He drove it up the driveway (smart guy, yes? not letting Miss Dotty back into the car?).
But I'm not the biggest snow-driving fool. The city bus was in front of me tonight on my way home. It was going five miles per hour, and I am not exaggerating, up a hill that was a 45mph zone. Five! I was afraid it was going to grind to a halt in front of me. I was afraid to go around him since it was so slippery and I couldn't see. I was afraid that my entire life might dribble away like the water from the bus's exhaust pipe.
I needn't have worried, though. I got home. Before that, though, I got out of the car, walked next to the bus, chit chatted with the driver for twenty minutes or so, exchanged email addresses, promised to write with that David Hume quote, and then skated back to the car with the hockey skates the driver had given me in exchange for the name of the lipstick color I was wearing (Fired Up).
Yeah, sometimes it pays to stop being angry with the annoyance and simply go and talk with the cause. Now and then, you'll get something swell out of it.
Posted by dotty at January 26, 2005 10:33 PM