Especially perfect for writers, with quotes like “My inner critic wears combat boots.” See http://azang.livejournal.com/64743.html for details.
My feet, we’re still not quite sure.
So yesterday I called my father in tears because I’d gone into a snowbank for the third time in a week. (I put a wheel off the road to let the farmer pass on the thin driveway, and then I couldn’t get back on. When the farmer tried to tow me, it got A LOT worse.) In my message I asked him to find a way to make it funny, and he delivered.
“Dear Demolition Derby Queen,
Y’know, most people would stop trying at one snowbank, or maybe two. But it takes true determination to keep trying to prove that an ordinary motorcar can proceed through, on and amidst enormous mounds of snow.
Would a 17-year-old Bill Gates have stopped at two snowbanks? Heck, no. Would Walt Disney? Not a chance. Would Henry Ford?
Well, Henry would have been on a horse at that age, so he’s a different case. But don’t think of it as poor fortune, incompetence or another expensive tow job. Think of it as exemplifying the pluck and spirit that made this country what it is.
You’re not a bad driver. You’re a great American.
Love,
Dad”
I love my father.
So, last weekend will forever be known as The Epic Car Trip, and it shall be commemorated with a random mention or hopeless shrug every time someone brings up tow trucks, Tiptons, cheap motels, two-hundred mile trips, ice, spinning, or Rockford, Illinois.
As of Friday night, I was making plans with a friend while walking home after drama. I wanted company at the barn, she wanted to meet the horses, sounded like a perfect plan. Except, as I found out the next morning, she couldn’t go. Busy or something; I don’t particularly remember why. So, after I spent the morning laughing with the darling Hesselink children (who triple-teamed me, tackled me, held me down, and tickled me as one of them kindly put blocks on my ear), I went out to a leisurely lunch at a diner with Mom. Sometime over the meal of hash browns and tilapia, as we had an important but ultimately unmemorable discussion, I was reminded of my wish to visit the church in Rockford again. I hadn’t been for a while, so I was due. Besides, I hadn’t had Confession since I last visited, and that was in September! To be honest, I hadn’t had Communion very often either. There is a church in Waterloo, but it isn’t truly home for either Mom or me. I love visiting Sts. Constantine and Helen’s, in Rockford, because of the people I know, the wonderful priest’s guidance, and everything about the church except possibly the choir and the fact that it’s New Calendar. Mom likes to be angry about Greek ethnocentrism, but she likes going to Rockford, too. I have to agree with her about the Greek peculiarities—mention Christopher Columbus, and the first thing out of a Greek man’s mouth is “Christopher is a Greek name.” The second thing is something about the island he lived on being somehow Greek at the time (coulda sworn Genoa was part of Italy, but Greek works too!). The third thing…well, never mind. It’s a long, drawn-out explanation of why the basis for Western Civilization all things good came from Greece. They somehow neglect to explain how, then, Greece isn’t to blame when Westernism is at the fault of everything. But anyways. I wanted to go to Rockford and see the crazy Greeks. Had the idea around 1:30, called up my favorite crazy Greek around 2, and was packed and ready to go by 3. Well, except for the potatoes, but I never did remember those anyway, so it didn’t matter. I was on target to arrive at the Bitsases’ well before bedtime.
Except, see, it’s never that simple. Not with me. So, to keep the balance of smooth and insane in my life, I backed the butt of my car into a snowbank in my driveway and got him stuck. Ain’t it dandy? Just shiny, I know. Well, I did everything I could, from oats to cardboard to decorative rocks, but the tires just kinda spun and Frank didn’t go anywhere. Insert the first tow truck, subtract 40 dollars. By five, finally, I was on the road.
Two and a half hours later it was dark and snowing. It was getting dusky around Dubuque, pretty hard to see by Galena, and the tar-colored sky in Elizabeth and Stockton was only marred by sweetly drifting white flakes. Damn little flakes add up fast, though, so about seven miles out of Stockton, IL, the sheet of ice covering the road was nicely blanketed by a good two inches of the white stuff. Now, my car handles snow and ice well. Frank’s a luxury/sporty/whatever car, even if he is a Buick. But he started to fishtail hugely, in a way he never has before, and as I more-or-less-calmly countered the motion it got worse. I was slowing down, things were going to be fine, and then Frank spun to the right and slid backwards, facing West. For the record, in case you’re three-dimensionally challenged, that’d be the direction I didn’t want to be looking at when in my lane. Exactly 139.3 miles down the road from home, I hit an obliging snowbank. Once again, I didn’t have a hope of getting out alone. This time I don’t think I tried, seeing as the icon hanging from my rear-view mirror was at a 45% angle, and I could see snow up against the driver’s window. I was acutely are of the fact that God was good and I was alive. (Actually, make both of those statements present tense.) Insert second tow truck here, but in a leisurely and small-town manner.
First I called my mom. Then I called the cops. Then I called my insurance company. Yes, in that order. Sheesh, I was fine, you expect me to talk to the police without first assuring Mom that everything was all right? Not that she’d know or care if I called the police first and her second, but it sure made me feel better. Debriefing with her is always a good thing. She has that annoying-but-useful motherly tendency to be right 97.8% of the time. In this case I already knew what to do and I wasn’t panicking, but…again, it made me feel better.
I was fairly peeved that none of the cars who’d seen me spin off stopped to help, but people started pulling over fairly soon. It took a while before someone who stopped had a towing chain, but he was fairly confident that he’d be able to get me out. I still had grand ambitions of making it to Rockford that night. Hah, hah. Oh, the irony. O. Henry would be proud. (He wrote “The Magi,” which always made me vaguely furious at its refusal to have a sane or pleasant ending.) Anyway, the truck ended up stuck in a snowbank about ten, fifteen feet in front of me and Frank. I lent the guy’s girlfriend my hat, since she was shivering rather severely and had forgotten to bring anything but a coat.
Along came another truck with a tow chain. Thankfully, it got Brant (Brad?) and Amber’s truck out safely, but it failed miserably at rescuing me. That truck showed up at the same time the sheriff did, and surprisingly he didn’t ask any questions. He did comment that I didn’t look old enough to drive, but he never asked to see an ID. Trusting small-town people. What wonderful oddities exist in rural areas. And how amusing that it took over 24 hours for me to realize he’d never asked for my ID, because it seemed perfectly normal to me. Wow. NYC would eat me for dinner in about five seconds flat.
So as the 2nd would-be-(amateur)-tow-truck guy decides he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting me out of there, a white car pulls up, blocks the one open lane of traffic the sheriff had been directing cars through, and starts commenting on how stupid it was to try and pull me out of the ditch from the front and how easy it would’ve been to drag Frank out if the chain had been hooked up from behind. I wanted to say something fairly snarky, like “Wow! What wonderful advice! Why didn’t you say that ten minutes ago, Mr. Einstein II?” Instead I waited across the road, by Frank, and listened to White Car Guy and the sheriff figure out, in that dear small-town way, exactly how and if they knew each other. Sheriff had seen White Car Guy around, and said WCG had attended some school that the sheriff knew of, knew a graduate in, or possibly had once attended. Boom, they’re friends, known each other for years. Proof? Sheriff calls me over and tells me that, since he’s the sheriff of the county where my accident was and not where the nearest town is, White Car Guy’s gonna take me to the closest cheap motel. Greeeat. Gee, wasn’t I glad I hadn’t said anything snarky?
White Car Guy says, “Hi. My name is Terry.” First thing I notice is he’s overweight and smoking. But, his car is fairly clean and he has a friendly (kind-uncle-ish, not hi-young-alone-girl-ish) smile. He lets me call and update my mother using his cell phone, since mine is inexplicably low on battery, and when he drops me off at the el cheapo motel he walks me in to make sure there’s a room. Terry even introduces himself to the very-pierced guy behind the counter, although albeit again in that darling small-town way. He says, “Hi. I’m a Tipton. You know any of the Stockton Tiptons?” Guy-behind-the-counter, whose name I believe is Jeff, says he doesn’t. But, now he knows who Terry is, and so—in that small-town way—they’re now vaguely friends. Or at least acquaintances.
I’ll sum up the next twelve hours in one run-on odd list that could only come from me: random semi-pointless and fairly frustrating calls to the local towing guy and my insurance company’s supposed roadside assistance program, watching just the happy part of an ABC Family made-for-TV movie right before the point in the plot where things get awkward, a clean but sparse two-bed motel room without any shampoo, a cold but decent night’s sleep, waking up too early, Food Network holiday shows that made me drool, the 2nd tow truck coming to pick me up late and then chatting with the woman (Shirley, maybe? Presumably Jeff’s mother?) about car accidents in general and specifically the three-person car-vs.-semi fatality not far from where Frank & I hit that lovely, soft, snowbank a mere meter or two from a less-friendly wire fence, and finally getting Frank out of the ditch.
The tow truck driver, Joe I do believe, also commented on how young I look. As he was dragging my car by the rear tire axle up onto the bed of the tow truck he told me he didn’t think he’d ever let his sixteen-year-old daughter drive so far alone. He also told me about a guy who’d flipped his car so badly he couldn’t get the darned sedan to flip back over and had to drag it back on its roof; even after another towing guy tried to set it right-side-up and failed, the owner wanted to take it to a body shop and refused to accept that it was totaled. I saw that car. It was totaled. However, once we got back to the NAPA Stockton Service Center, I heard Joe tell some stories to guy who’d wandered over; the towing-upside-down story was one, the three-person fatality was another, and a cute little one about his son taking the car and going to Rockford without asking permission Friday or Saturday night was the last one. Hehe, made me chuckle. Joe cleaned the snow off Frank for me, again because of the whole him-having-a-16-yr-old daughter thing. It was great.
Anyway, I was on the road again (that’s my ringtone, hey!) by 9:30 and at church by half past ten. The rest of the story…well, it’s not much, but it continues the Epic. Unfortunately I’m tired, so I’ll see y’all later.
So I haven’t been posting much any more, and that’s okay. I have bigger “haven’t been ___ing” problems than my blog! Like, say, writing. Or exercising. Or studying. Or cleaning. I’m fairly well behind in…most everything. But I’m not drowning, just…well, not swimming. Treading water. Getting nowhere rather slowly. I’m workin’ on it, and things’ll improve. They just are kind of stagnant right now, with my daily to-do list being conspicuously short on checkmarks.
But, there’s also good news. Being the strange and nonsensical people that we are, Mom and I exchanged gifts yesterday. It was the Entry of the Theotokos. Mom’s rationalization was that the Theotokos (the Mother of God, lit. God-bearer) was Joachim and Anna’s gift to God, just as Christ was God’s gift to humanity. My take on it is that she didn’t want to wait til St. Nicholas day to give me my new camcorder.
I have a camcorder! It’s very fun. Small, without many features, I believe it’s called a Flip or something. I like it. It’ll be fun to play with this winter.
Well, I’m signing off, since I’m supposed to be doing several other things this morning. Not that the school’s internet is working reliably anyway….
I’m doing pretty well in all my classes, and I’m not totally failing in terms of personal goals and discipline, but somehow things aren’t going as I’d like them to be.
JROTC is going fairly decently; I’m not being an exceptional leader but I am involved, so that’s something. But it’s sure a change from being Platoon Sergeant my freshman year, and S5 Public Affairs officer the next!
ELP is wonderful, of course, and crazy as can be. In whatever strange game Mr. YK’s cooked up, my top 4 partners were all made unavailable because they became “sages”/judges. Curse it! We still have no idea just what’s going on in that class or why we need partners, but any of those 4 would’ve been amazing team members for anything!
AP Lang/Comp is going fine, and I’m scoring As on my essays. But I do wonder if I should be, since the College Board will probably judge more harshly.
Chemistry, I get a little behind and then somehow end up ahead, and I’m getting a high A in the class. But I feel as if it’s somehow unstable (radioactive elements, anyone?), since I’m not working steadily and on-target all the time.
Japanese…it’s been hard. It’s a college-level class; the assignments and tests aren’t horrible, simply the amount of time I have. I need to finish 3 1/2 major modules and 5 minor modules by June, and I don’t know if I’m going quickly enough. It kind of worries me some days, although I am having fun. Soon I’ll be getting extra practice by babysitting a little four-year-old half-Japanese girl named Klaertje, who probably speaks and reads more fluently than I do! Her little brothers, Anton and Vinnie, are also adorable. I’m going to have so much fun–at least, once I figure out how to maneuver my schedule so that I can babysit them in the middle of the school day! I’m working on it.
History. History has not been going so well. I mean, I’m doing all right, but not exactly. I keep forgetting to do the chapter outlines, which is exactly the problem I had in freshman AP World before I moved here and got stuck in Advanced World Studies, which should be called Lame Western Studies, With a Momentary Glance at Other Parts of the World. I’ve decided I’ll have to re-do all the chapters at home. I’ve re-done the first chapter already, which was fairly easy as that was one of our “gimme” chapters; each unit, Mrs. P gives us a fill-in-the-blank outline for one chapter, and I’ve thankfully managed to do all of those. How pathetic would it be if I hadn’t! But as for about half the others…I’m struggling. I’m really struggling. Grade-wise and study-wise, I’m doing okay. But it’s like in Chemistry: I’m doing fine, but it’s just not steady! It bothers me that I’m not doing better. I had expected to be.
At home, things aren’t always a total disaster, but it’s pretty messy. I’ve delayed vacuuming since Friday, my room makes the horse barn look tidy, and I don’t even want to think about how awful the study is right now. And worse than that, I’ve made a liar of myself. I make a promise (“I’ll exercise every day.” “I’ll write a draft of this every day til it’s due!” “I’ll make sure I go to the horses.”) and then don’t keep it. Yeesh. Some days I really feel despicable.
In other news, a cow fell on a car in Washington. It had been missing for several days before toppling off a cliff 5 miles from its home. Interesting. I prefer my beef in two-pound packages, preferably with a label like “ground chuck” or “top sirloin.” Actually, I think “Porterhouse” is my favorite.
I made NHS and have started the volunteer work, singing Christmas carols outside HyVee for the Salvation Army on Saturday and working on planning our “Alpine Escape”-themed Winter Formal.
I sold an article for $20 to the WritingKids newsletter, which isn’t bad for maybe an hour’s worth of work. Grace Tierney still hasn’t paid me for winning the contest, but I’m not worried. Winning was more exciting than the prize. (EDIT: She did pay me just a little later; she’s good people.)
I’ve discovered that I have weird feet. Bunions, and bunionettes. Explains why my big toes are stranger-shaped than my parents’.
I’m thinking about going to the DLI at Monterey. I’d have to take the DLAB, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, although it’s a hard test; it’s just that the DLAB tests things I know I can do. Although, ironically, I won’t get to take the DLAB unless I pass the physical fitness test; what would be the irony in acing the DLAB but flunking out anyway because of the shuttle run?
Squirt’s finally pottytrained, joy! I’ve been taking him for 1.5 mi runs. We’ve survived two so far. We’re also conquering his fleas.
The horses are also doing pretty well. Braveheart’s been improving greatly, and we’ve gone for several rides from the Lawrinenkos’ (where we keep them) to nearby McFarlane Park. It’s a great ride, and the park’s beautiful. But what makes me even happier is how
I haven’t been writing as much as I should be. I have three main in-progress stories and about twenty others I should get back to. I’ve been reading a lot, though. Mostly chick-lit/cliché romances. The Matchmaker is a good one, http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2271023/13/ . I’m not sure that it’s finished, although the author updates regularly and there are 28 chapters to read while waiting for the next one.
Life’s been decent. Not great, but that’s okay. If I put more effort into the things I want to do, it would be. And I know that. But right now I’d rather read and drink my tea.
Just won Grace Tierney’s Fake Contest Contest. Here was my entry:
Mrs. Fussbottom’s Perfect Novel Contest—judged by Mrs. Junice Fussbottom herself—is now accepting entries. Mrs. Junice Fussbottom, an eccentric widow with very precise tastes, is searching for a book that suits her. Nothing in the bookstores is to her taste. She is looking for a witty and realistic novel of literary value set in the Victorian era. The main character, who should be nearly perfect, must be a no-nonsense sort of woman who can handle her own problems with minimal help from others and who also tends to solve every other problem that comes her way or in her general direction. The novel should contain no dull spots, less-than-credible events, romance, children, or plot twists of any sort. Mrs. Fussbottom does not like such things. First prize is $25,000 plus a permanent position writing for Mrs. Fussbottom; there is no entry fee or other prizes. All entrants should be aware that by entering they forfeit the right to sue Mrs. Fussbottom for any reason, including but not limited to cruel and unusual punishment or murder of their literary muse. Contact Mrs. Fussbottom’s personal assistant, Mr. Lawrence Theodore, if you are interested or have any questions. Please!
I get $25 from Amazon and 2 free ebooks on writing from Grace Tierney.
So, made it into National Honors Society. But, strangely, I don’t care much. In Des Moines I really wanted to be in it, especially because there was a gold cord available only to NHS members. Here, I filled out paperwork (and corrected it as I did so- “criterions”?!) and wrote a semi-crappy essay, and I was in. Where’s the charm, the magic, the golden cord? Oh, yeah, it’s in Des Moines with the Red Bulls.
I don’t think I’m going to ask how how my old battalion friends are doing. I don’t think I’m brave enough to want to know.
…is actually pretty good. I don’t know why, exactly. I’ve been sick, sleep-deprived, and/or grouchy for the past [insert indefinite period of time here]. But, at the same time, I’m happy. It’s strange, my definition of happiness. I can be unhappy at a moment because I’m focusing on something else, like how tired or crabby I am, or how annoying a situation is, but even at that instant I consider myself happy. Life is so wonderful. I mean, this world kind of sucks some days, but somehow that’s not a problem. I’ve been pretty blessed lately, and actually for my whole life, so I guess I’ve just been noticing that even when I’m whining about school, work and sleep (or lack thereof, in the last case), I still feel loved and safe and blessed. I know, I don’t make sense, but maybe that’s okay. This crazy world probably isn’t supposed to make sense anyway.
Also, I’ve written another article for TheOnionDome.com and expect to contribute regularly, I’m looking into writing competitions to help pay my way to Italy, I’ve been working less at the nursing home (about 2 days a week instead of three) and it’s been helping a lot, the middle-schoolers I watch when I lifeguard each Thursday are terribly amusing and slightly disturbing in the what-is-the-world-coming-to sort of way, my dog still hasn’t become potty-trained, my cats are roamers, I’ve been buying flowers for school workers who I think could use or appreciate it (the lunchladies should expect a potted mum today), I’ve become slightly addicted to fictionpress.com, I killed my car battery a while back by leaving the lights on, I haven’t been doing half as much cleaning or housework as I should be, I love ROTC PT even when it consists of manual labor, and baby kitty Hermione is the most adorable pumpkin fluffball on the planet. Watching Hermione and Squirt together is like seeing teenage boy/girl sociology acted out. I can’t explain it properly. It’s just hilarious.
Well, I have nothing huge to write about, so I’ll sign off. My love to all.
