Damsel (?) in Distress

Yeah, I stopped for another stranded motorist.
I'll get to that soon enough.

But first - I need to vent a bit, as when I walked out to the Cadillac after work a couple days ago, I saw that someone had hit the front bumper on the passenger side and left a good sized hole in it.

I'm not going to lie. This annoys me. This is the 3rd front end this car has got in the last year.

So now I'm changing up my plans a bit. Instead of slowly going insane and buying a street sweeper to use as my personal vehicle, I now plan to become an assassin...and my street sweeper will be fully armored, have machine guns and bullet proof glass (magnetic...if that's possible), and have blades that swing out from beneath to "Take 'em out at the knees!".

I also plan to have the top of the cab custom built to hold about 8 inches of dirt, and to plant English Ivy and something flowery and viney that will hang down over the windows.

Yeah...That should look nice. :)

But anyway. Back to the topic. Eventually.

Before I get to that, I would like to say that it is VERYVERYVERYCOLD here in MN.

I had to chuckle when I was at Job 1 last night. My crew looked like a bunch of Eskimo Ninjas with their cold weather gear and parkas over their face masks and tightly drawn hoods. It's so cold that the loading bays at both jobs get bitterly cold when the doors are open for any length of time, and a pipe froze and burst at Job 1 while our pops were freezing INSIDE at Job 2.

Indeed...It was so cold this week that even the Buick pretended briefly that it wasn't going to start.

"Silly Buick...You had me going there!" (I might keep "slowly going insane" for a hobby. I'm working that angle here.)

OK. The background details have been established. I'm ready to get to the subject.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you do something, and right as you do it you think to yourself..."Oops. That was not a good idea. This will end badly."

Well, that's how I would have felt LAST week if I had driven to Job 2 in the Cadillac and the roads were as bad as they were yesterday.

Seriously. I don't think I have EVER driven on crappier roads. And like I said, it's COLD!!!

So I called my boss and asked if he had enough work left to make it worth my while to come down.

He said, "Probably not."

So I went down.

When we were done 2 hours later, I swung over to the Wally for a couple of movies.
(I also picked up 11 post-Christmas clearanced "Terry's Chocolate Oranges w/Toffee". These are very good and I recommend you try them if you have not already done so. This has nothing to do with the story, but it's so cold that Wal-Mart was closed overnight tonight so I was not able to buy out the rest.)

And then I drove home...ward. (Whoa! De-ja-vu!)

By Cottonwood, there was a truck in the ditch.
I stopped and offered a ride to the person no longer driving.
But this time, I can't tell you if it was a male or female as the person was actually dressed for driving in horrible weather and I couldn't see any part of them except for a small bit of face.

English was not this person's primary language, so there was a bit of a language barrier - which didn't make it any easier to identify the gender.

At any rate, as you've already figured out, the person accepted the ride.
They lived "4 miles down Highway 4". That was the extent of the conversation. From there, I got as close as I was allowed to through hand gestures pointing the direction to go.

And Highway 4 was not pretty. There would have certainly been some "This will end badly" thoughts if I had driven on the road last week if it had been in the same condition.

But it's not last week, and neither the road or the car are in the same condition. And since the front end needs to get replaced anyway, I pounded snow drifts that I wouldn't even consider TRYING with the Buick... and I have way more faith in the Buick!

I shit you not. The road looked like "An Ocean of Snow in High Winds" with waves over a foot high in places and with wave after wave after wave pummeling the front end of my trusty car.
However, there were no thoughts of "ohshitohshitohshit..." like last time. Instead, there was some..."Hello!"s, and some "Oh, there you are!"s as my wheels reclaimed paved road.

In fact, I was having such a good time that the person had me drop them off at one of their neighbor's houses.

I heard them say "YOU bring me home!!!"

Funny. THAT came out clear enough!
Ha! I taught him or her to speak English.
(I suspect they were as white as I am by the time they got out.)

Then I drove home and woke up the kids to watch movies. I figured school would be closed for the day, and it was.