Road Hazards and Puppy-Sitting

When I woke up on Thursday, I found the weather to be most contrary. It was 35 degrees and raining. It was so slushy and icy, my work van slid off the driveway and into my neighbor's yard. The yard was so mushy, I got stuck. I got so stuck, I had Dad come pull me out. That went swell and I made it all the way to the top of the driveway and nearly onto pavement, which is where I got stuck again, a mere 10 inches from the road. We reattached the tow rope and got me out onto the road. The whole ordeal only took 45 minutes. Of course, 45 minutes with a dear friend from out-of-state has a much different length than 45 minutes with icy chains, pouring rain, and crawling around in the mud to attach the aforementioned icy chains.

 Silly van. You belong on the road, not in my neighbor's yard.

The reason I've been driving one of the business work vans for the past several days is because my car is in the shop, getting repaired. Last week, I snapped a photo of the minivan that my brother Shane had buried in a drift. I chuckled and declared that I'd never do something so silly.

 Literally two minutes later, I was firmly entrenched in a deep ditch of snow. I'm not even going to try to preserve my dignity: I was texting and driving. I received a picture message from a friend and was glancing down to see if it had downloaded as I took the inside of a large sweeping turn. I always take the inside of this particular curve, because it's on a minimally-traveled gravel road and it's banked so I feel like I'm in some kind of World Cup race event. Well, I failed to notice the slushy snow on the inside of my personal Indy 500 track. The snow grabbed my front tire and I plowed a furrow for 20 yards, trying to regain control. When my vehicle came to a stop, I was beached on a drift. The tires couldn't get traction because the snow was holding up the underbody of the car.

Shortly after assessing the situation, my friend Craig stopped by and offered to help pull me out. He had shovels, tow ropes, and a 4-wheel-drive SUV. We gave it a try but there just wasn't enough traction to pull me out. Craig left to get a tractor and I kept shoveling snow, vowing to amend my texting ways by buying a rotary phone, if I ever got my car out of the drift. While Craig was gone, a very kind neighbor with a very large truck came and pulled me out, easy peasy. Except I had failed to attached the tow rope to a sturdy portion of my car frame, so I ended up with a bent tie rod or strut or something fairly important that keeps my car from jittering like it has epilepsy. In hindsight, I should have realized that a 1/2"-thick steel bar is not strong enough to withstand pulling a 3,650 lb car backwards out of a snowdrift. Celia, we need to get you on a diet. In my defense, there wasn't really anywhere else to attach a tow rope. Chrysler 300M's have independent suspensions, which is nice and fancy but the tradeoff is that there's no axle to attach ropes to.

I missed seeing my awesome manfriend Doyle Byler by 30 minutes because I was busy digging my car out of the ditch. Never again will I giggle at someone stuck in a ditch. 

Had that been the end of my vehicular woes, I would have been just fine and dandy.

Yesterday we replaced a furnace in a home/daycare. The job was difficult but it went really well. There was no parking space in the driveway for all of our work vehicles, so we dropped one of the vans off at the Sycamore mall parking lot. After we finished the job, I ran over there with Dad to pick up the van. I whipped into the parking lot beside our van and let dad out. I was in "Big Blue", our 1-ton dually flatbed truck.

This is how Big Blue looked before we converted it into a flatbed. Because of its giant hip-like fenders, I nicknamed it the Hippo.

After the conversion (AKA the "hipposuction"), Dad named the truck Big Blue. Probably because the truck before it was called Big Red. You can see the converted truck in this photo. Well, half of it, since I was evidently more interested in the artistic composition of the leaves and sunlight when I took the photo back in 2010.

I normally enjoy that giant brute, but it has a particular weakness. As you can see when the power lift tailgate is up, the truck has a noticeably large blind spot.

I backed into a car. AN ENTIRE CAR WAS IN MY BLIND SPOT.

What makes me upset is that I saw the car when I drove into the parking lot, but didn't think about it until I heard the marrow-chilling *SKERUNTCH* which results when you back a giant diesel truck into a family sedan.

Big Blue was fine. He didn't even notice that his monstrous blind spot had effectively put a large, wet blanket on my day. I scraped the bumper, chipped the rear reflector, and bent the trunk lid of the Ford Taurus that was perched behind me. That particular model has the ugliest-looking back end of any vehicle I know, but adding a few dents certainly didn't help.

That isn't the vehicle I hit. This is just a reference photo of what I'm talking about when I say "ugliest-looking back end of any vehicle I know."

I left my name and number on a note, along with an apology for my mistake and for the inconvenience I've caused. I placed the note under the windshield wiper and left.

That happened at 3pm yesterday, and I haven't gotten a call yet. I feel a weird mixture of relief and guilty dread. I want to make things right and get that person's car fixed, but I'd be alright if they didn't call me back, either. My manfriends have reassured me that there was probably a body in the trunk of that car, and the car had been intentionally abandoned by the body-hiding thugs that owned it.

As I drove Big Blue back to the office in a particularly mournful state of mind, I came to a dreadful realization. That very morning, while driving Big Blue to the job, my mind had wandered back a few years to the time that Dad had bent the power lift on the rear of the truck by backing it into our shop. "Who does that!" I chuckled. "How could you possibly back into something if you knew it was there?"

I've never liked eating my words, because I'm not particularly good at seasoning them and they usually end up tasting like a big bowl of "I Told Ya So O's."

Upon the close of the workday, I ran home to take care of the children I'm babysitting. You may call them puppies but from my perspective, I've got two whiny children that bawl and fuss and cry for attention constantly wonderful purebred German Shepherds available to be adopted into your lovely home!

While Shane is off on a grand adventure to South Carolina, I'm taking care of his dogs.
The characters in my little drama are:
Nigel: Giant, fluffy bear that has masqueraded as a German Shepherd.
Mitzy: Elderly dog that has birthed half of the German Shepherds alive today. Probably.
Chasm: Neighbor's German Shepherd, daughter of Mitzy, mother of puppies.
Puppy 1 and Puppy 2: The unnamed little demons angels. Both female: one white, one black.

Like I mentioned in a previous post about these puppies, our standard operating procedure when releasing the puppies for exercise is to keep their 10-foot chains attached to their collars. The benefit of this is two-fold: it (slightly) slows the puppies down, and if a situation arises, we can grab them and tie them to the nearest tree. I'm thinking we could market this idea to mothers with multiple toddlers.

I got distracted throwing snowballs to Nigel and Mitzy, and when I looked up, I saw that the dreadfully malnourished Chasm (pronounced "Chazzm", instead of the normal "Kazm"/silent 'h' pronunciation) had led her offspring on a journey to the river's edge. I ran to apprehend the fleeing bandits but it was too late. Mother and children had smelled something interesting in Illinois, and they were making great strides to get there. They skipped out across the partially-frozen river, during which I envisioned all sorts of horrible scenarios in which the puppies broke through and froze to death or were pulled under and drowned by their neck-anchors. They got to the opposite embankment just fine, where I then immediately began to envision horrible scenarios about them getting lost forever or getting mauled by eagles or coyotes or something. Have you ever felt that cold sweat when the precious objects you've been trusted with are on the verge of being destroyed and/or lost? I don't stress about things normally, but I was right up there in Panic Mode. All I could see were $500-worth of energy and fur disappearing into some woods perched right beside a busy highway during rush traffic on the opposite side of an impassable river. Meanwhile I'm whistling and calling "Come here, puppies!" and wishing they had names but also realizing that if they had names, they still wouldn't respond to them, because they're still puppies.

I quickly surmised the situation and did the only logical option available: I ran up the embankment on my side of the river and crossed over on the bridge. Mitzy was with me, which was alright because she's smart and avoids cars. We crossed without incident. I quickly grabbed the puppies who were romping around in the woods and forcefully pulled them up the embankment to the road and began to cross the bridge. Despite being north of 100 lbs, Nigel managed to cross the questionable ice on the river and join in the fray. Now I had four German Shepherds and we had to cross the bridge. I grabbed the puppies' chains near their collars A) so they wouldn't have the ability to jump in front of a bus and B) so I could walk three steps without getting tripped by the weaving duo of chain-whipping mongrels.

If I was a dog, Nigel and I would be kindred spirits. He's fun-loving, energetic, crazy, friendly, and terribly distracted by everything. As we slowly progressed over the bridge, with semi trucks whipping a mere 20" away from us, I was sure he was going to turn into a large pile of Roadkill Du Jour. The puppies wanted to run every single direction EXCEPT the direction we were headed, Mitzy was carefully walking in a straight line and behaving nicely, and Nigel was everywhere. He would briefly listen to me when I shouted his name but with two puppies thrashing around, I was fresh out of hands to hold him back. After peering over the bridge bannister to a grim 30-foot drop, (at which I immediately became a hostage negotiator. "Please, step away from the edge. Think of the children!") Nigel busied himself with eating some road apples, which to the best of my knowledge have nothing to do with fruit. Consequently, I'll never again allow Nigel to lick my face.

Against all the expectations of my over-creative imagination, we survived. I drug the puppies to their kennels and reattached their chains. I took Nigel to his special zipline and tied him up. I patted Mitzy on the head and told her that I really appreciated her maturity through all of this.

Then I realized that Chasm was missing.

And I realized I had an hour before leading worship with the youth group, and my mind was far from worship. My mind was predominantly occupied with "If Chasm ever returns, I'll kill her."

I texted my youth leader Anthony and told him that I was having a pretty bad day, and that if he would be so kind as to pray, I'd appreciate it. He replied that he would be praying.

I decided to take a shower to remove the layers of filth I accumulated during work and dog-chasing. Chasm wasn't under my jurisdiction, so I didn't feel AS guilty that she was missing.

But, upon exiting my shower and finding her back, safe and sound, I was extremely relieved. It's a true, unexplainable miracle that she returned. No dog, malnourished to near-starvation, comes back to their kennel to get tied up again. I give credit to God for that one.

God provided even more blessings by giving our youth a fantastic evening of worship and fellowship, which is precisely what I needed.

Thank You, God, for being so good to me. I am blessed. Blessed with a giant yard that I can run around in, blessed with countryside and rivers and trees. I'm blessed with a car that, even though it doesn't double as a snowmobile, gets me to all sorts of places that I need to go. I'm blessed that nobody was hurt during my fender-bender.

I'm blessed with hundreds and hundreds of days of "normal" life. When things go wrong and I have a rotten day, it's rare. That's a blessing. If I were in the Middle East and there were constant bombings gunfire, and kidnappings, a day of simple fender benders and chasing puppies would seem like a ridiculous fantasy.

 "For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you." -Psalm 86:5

 "For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations." -Psalm 100:5

Yep, blessed.