Tag: car

“Be careful! You’re…an idiot!”

I must preface by saying that when I get scared, I am either yell unintelligble sounds (ex: “MEEUGGGGH!  HEMMA, HDIIIDGGG!”) or am overly articulate (ex: “Please be careful of my safety!” or “IMMINENT DOOM!”).

I never know what I’m planning to say, either.  I just…say it.  It’s kind of a stream of consciousness thing.  And yesterday was no exception.

Joey and I were driving home from church listening to CarTalk.  We drove into our parking space just as something really interesting came on.

“I want to hear this!” Joey said, bummed that we were getting out of the car.

“Well, it just started, so if we hurry and get in the house we won’t miss much,” I said.

So, Joey turned off the car and jumped out.  I was moving slower, like usual, in my high heels and, just as I opened my door and put my foot on the ground, I noticed something.  The car was moving.

Then I realized that Joey had forgotten to put the parking break on.

It was one of those situations where my brain ceases to function normally.  I remember thinking, “YELL SOMETHING so he can fix it!” Unfortunately, though, that was as far as my rationality lasted, and what I yelled was,

“BE CAREFUL!  You’re…an idiot!”

Joey, who is used to my semi-articulate terrified exclamations, instantly figured out what was wrong (the car was rolling and I couldn’t stop it) and dove inside to pull the parking break.  Which, when I thought about it later, I could have done too.

“I almost died!” I said.

“Um, no you didn’t,” Joey assured me.  Then, “Do you remember what you yelled?”

“Uhhh….yes,” I said, sheepishly.  “But I don’t really think you’re an idiot.”

“I know,” Joey said.  “But you have to blog about this, so that everyone knows you have Tourettes whenever you get scared.”

“Really?”  I asked.

“Really,” he said.

“But…but then I have to call you an idiot on the interwebs,” I said.  I really didn’t want to.

“Yep,” he said.  Joey was apparently unscathed by my previous insult, and, thus, I have paid my debt and now posted about how I have Tourettes.

At least my version doesn’t make me cuss.

CarSpa

About a year ago as Joey and I were driving north through Oklahoma on the way home to The Iowa for Christmas, I got really hungry for ice cream, so we stopped to pick some up.  I got a hot fudge sundae and Joey got an ice cream cone.

Henry didn’t get anything.

We took our ice cream back to the car, pleased with our sugary purchases, and I strapped myself into the driver’s seat.  Joey leaned into the back seat, holding his ice cream cone, to toss something in, and in the process somehow both he and Henry managed to knock the ice cream off his cone.

“OH NO!” Joey yelled.

“OH MY GOSH!” I shrieked, and immediately began having flashbacks to the time that The Brother spilled milk in the carpet of the red minivan while we were on vacation out on the East Coast when we were kids.  Dad must have sprayed an entire bottle of Woolite into the carpet to try to get the milk smell out, but it was to no avail.  (Not only did it smell like rancid milk, but we all got sick from the Woolite fumes the entire 750 miles we had to drive back to Iowa.)

I began flipping out over the melting ice cream, and the more I flipped the faster it seemed to melt.  Joey and I were sopping it up with napkins and dumping water on it like it was one of those chalk drawings Bert made in Mary Poppins, you know, the ones that washed away with the rain.

The one thing to be thankful for was that it was the dead of winter and it was unlikely that the milk would curdle before we got to The Iowa.  Plus Henry stayed back there for the rest of the trip, licking and licking and licking the carpet (and probably ingesting more carpet fuzzies than is good for any puppy), so we figured he got most of it out.

And when we got to my parents’ house, Pops came blasting out of the house, Woolite in hand, and attacked the problem with a vengeance rarely exhibited except in instances of milk spilled in vehicular carpet.

We thought the problem was taken care of…until summer hit.

The milk curdled.

It smelled like death, and we began to hate going anywhere in our car.

“When the car hits 40,000 miles, we’ll get it detailed,” Joey promised me.

I remember when our car was just a baby and we hit 1,000 miles, so the thought of him finally hitting 40,000 miles made me just a little bit sad, but the spoiled milk spill quickly took the edge off my nostalgia.

“You’re on,” I said.  And then I began going out of my way to add miles to the car so we could hit the magical 40,000 mile mark.

We finally hit it over Christmas.  And we finally had time to take the car to get detailed today.

So for the next hour-and-a-half to two hours I’m sitting here in a fake leather chair waiting for my car to get finished being detailed.  It is going to set us back just pennies shy of $100, but we figure that if it removes the creepy milk smell (which, granted, has faded over the past year) then it’s worth it.

Joey “played hardball” with the sales guy (actually, he didn’t, the sales guy just kept tacking extra packages on “for free” – which seems questionable but I’m not going to argue) and so we’re scoring a fancy wax job and money off the emissions testing, which we had to do anyway.

We brought Season 2 of Friends along, and our headphone splitter, so the 2 hours will probably pass quickly.

I hope.

This chair isn’t really that comfortable.

Here’s hoping we don’t ever, ever spill ice cream on the carpet again.