My story-worthy week
I'm a fairly regular listener to The Moth podcast, which always encourages its listeners to "have a story-worthy week," but I don't know that that has ever been as true as it has been for the last few days. So I've got to see if I can spin this tale to do it adequate justice.
Step back with me to Saturday. I'm at The Grove, down in the boondocks and woods of southeastern Missouri. I've driven down there, and I'm taking advantage of my car to move some stuff around the property. So I'm in the car with zylch on Saturday afternoon, and notice that my cruise control light, the one that normally comes on when I turn on the cruise control but have not yet set it, is blinking at me. And my check engine light is on -- also weird, but I'm just past 15,000 miles on the car, and that might well be just my car whining for its checkup. "That's weird," I think I say to her. "I wonder if I drove over a rock and bumped a wire loose or something." But everything seems to run just fine, and so I figure I may have an electrical fault in the cruise control gauge.
Sunday comes, and its time to leave the Grove, this time with three Golden Doodle puppies in tow (half Golden Retriever, half toy poodle) which are to be delivered to their adoptive homes in Kansas City or central Kansas. But first, I'm heading to St. Louis, where I may do a much-delayed interview for my dissertation. To my disappointment, the warning lights are still on, and the cruise control doesn't in fact work at all. In fact, now the ABS warning light, the "anti-rollback" light, and the "stability control" light are on as well. It's like a Christmas tree in there! Dangit! I get to St. Louis 3 hours later, more tired than usual because of the lack of cruise control (and just the exhaustion of being on Grove staff this year, I suspect). I talk to my potential interviewee, find out she has family in town, and think "fuck it, I'm tired." Cancel the interview with my profound thanks, take the puppies inside to Marilyn Sue's house, and settle down for a nice evening of gossip and relaxation.
We went out to dinner, then came home and watched the end of the Oscars. We had just enough time to discuss how much we approved of all the awards for The King's Speech before the tornado sirens started going off. What the...? We moved down into her bedroom (which was at least on the lower level, if still with plenty of windows, and sat there, tense for 45 minutes or so, until the weather moved past us. We never really saw much more than lightning, but the sirens don't actually make for a relaxing evening. But eventually it all calmed down, and so I go upstairs to bed, leaving my three canine charges in their kennel on the main level.
It's somewhere around 3:30am when I'm woken by the sound of puppy whimpering, audible from a floor away. Oh, good lord, and I'm glad Marilyn Sue takes out her hearing aids at night. I sneak downstairs in the dark, not knowing where any of the light switches are, and fumble my way to the kennel. There's just enough light to operate by, and I realize that one of the pups is seemingly whimpering on every exhale, almost like a snore, but more musical. I open up the kennel, and ... oh, wow, it's drenched, in pee or sweat or something. The other two just sit in the back of the kennel and stare at me. I quickly change out the towel in the bottom of the kennel, and take the wet and whimpering one upstairs to a bathroom. It doesn't wake up, just continuing its regular noisemaking as I bathe and dry it, and then walk around in circles begging it to hush and get better. (I don't have a lot of maternal instincts, but I've seen parents do this for babies in movies, so it might work, right?) At least it seems to be breathing well and to have a good pulse, but the whole not-waking-up thing is scary. I imagine trying to tell C that I've put one of her dogs into a coma and my adrenaline spikes. After about 45 minutes, the puppy quiets down a bit, so I return it to its kennel and go back to sleep. After all, I have a 5 hour drive to Kansas City ahead of me tomorrow, and I need to be well rested.
Monday dawns. Marilyn Sue and I meet up in the living room to discuss the puppies, which ... just aren't quite acting puppy-like. They're not eager to go outside, not eager to eat anything (for the second meal in a row), not eager to move around their kennel. We exchange a few calls with the dog experts at the Grove (and thank heavens that Marilyn Sue is a nurse and can talk about things like "lethargy" and "ccs" with authority and calm), and eventually decide that, for whatever reason, the dogs aren't in a fit state to go to their new owners after all. P offers to drive up to St. Louis to get them, but I offer to meet her halfway, in Rolla, for a canine handoff.
I load the dogs and my luggage into the car, and start it up. But now my "low fuel" light is blinking at me, and the fuel gauge is sitting stubbornly somewhere below empty. I know I didn't run it dry last night, and it's willing to start just fine, so I drive to the gas station on the corner. Sure enough, my 15-gallon tank is only willing to take 12 gallons of gas, so it must be a gauge problem. Damnit. Somewhere around here, I realize that sooner or later, I'm going to have to face a mechanic who'll ask if I looked under the hood and checked all my fluids and connections, which I haven't done. So, despite my lack of actual mechanical knowledge, I decide to do due diligence and pop the hood.
To my surprise, there is a rat sitting right on top of my engine. A fine, healthy-looking brown rat, looking probably as surprised at me as I am by him. I jump back, he dives down out of my sight, and a guy on the edge of the parking lot hollers, "Holy crap! Did you just see that? I think she had a squirrel in there!" (Well, at least I didn't imagine it, right?) The engine compartment is littered with seed pods and leaves, and I can see what sure looks like a nest of grass and moss tucked down in front. (I'd try to describe where it was, but my engine knowledge extends only so far.) But I don't see any more rat. I grab my ice scraper, the one with a long handle, and bang on the engine a little bit, knock off some of the debris, and then, at a loss, ask the guy in the next car over what he thinks I should do. He seems to think that the rat has scarpered, left the vicinity, and I should be ok. So...I close up the hood, congratulate myself on a GREAT story, and drive to Rolla.
Hand over the poor pups in Rolla to P, tell her the story of the rat, which makes her smile ruefully, and then drive from Rolla to Kansas City. The detour through Rolla didn't really make the drive all that much longer (though I opened my hood every time I got gas, paranoid, and even eventually was brave enough to reach in, barehanded, to remove the whole nest bundle) , and so I get into KC around 4pm, with enough time to have a lovely shower in my hotel room to remove the mental debris of the day from my person. Meet up with onecrane for dinner, tell him the story, get the surprised reaction I wanted, watch some Kung Fu Hustle to celebrate, and then go back to my hotel room for the night, ready to drive to Colorado the next day.
Tuesday morning. I check out of my hotel around 8am, load up the car, but ... it won't start. It'll churn, but not catch. What the...? I open the hood again, and am not totally surprised to see that Friend Rat is still with me, and has apparently been up to more mischief overnight. Close the hood, go inside, and call USAA roadside assistance. The call center guy is ... surprised, but agrees to send someone out. I IM with artemis112 and hess42 , trying to maintain my cool and sense of absurdity. David from Road Runner Roadside Assistance eventually arrives. He apparently didn't believe my story, because he jumped back and hollered when I opened the hood (again) for Mr. Rat's inevitable grand appearance. David grabs a crowbar from his truck, and uses its pointy end to stab down into the engine, attempting to dispatch the invader. (I'll admit that I was actually more worried about my hoses than the rat, at this point.) We see nothing, but after a few minutes, I notice that there's a limp furry body under my car. The rat is dead, and I walk around the car, squeamish, as David makes absolutely sure of that with a few more careful blows, and then moves the carcass farther away. (I did get a picture, for documentary purposes. You don't need to see it. Suffice it to say that net research says it was probably a pack rat, and that it was about the size of a good-sized and healthy rat you might see in a pet store.)
David, his heroics done with, tries jump starting the car, which is (after all) what he thought he was there for. It does nothing, as both of us suspect. He recommends a garage, tells me to call USAA again for a tow, and leaves. I call USAA, request the tow, and go back to IMing with artemis112 and hess42 , maintaining my sanity. Call Vic, leave a message to let him know what's up. Call around, have recommended local mechanics tell me that my car is so new that most non-dealerships don't even have wiring diagrams for it yet, and end up finding a Subaru dealership in Lee's Summit that tells me to come on over. The car is towed there, and I'm told that it looks like the engine wiring harness will have to be replaced, it'll run about $800, and the car won't be ready until Wednesday evening. Big sigh, but what can I do? So I get a ride back to the hotel with Luis the kindly tow truck driver, and start trying to figure out what to do with myself in KC for two extra nights.
Not wanting to spend the extra on hotel, I beg onecrane for shelter, as he's my best friend in town, and I already know his couch is comfortable. He graciously says yes, but he won't be able to let me until until sometime after 5pm. USAA arranges a rental car for me, but it won't be ready until 4pm, so I take the hotel shuttle to the nearby mall for lunch (at which point I realize I haven't even eaten breakfast yet) and hanging out. By this point, I have enough distance that I'm able to chuckle at it all -- I mean, who would have thought, right? Go back to the hotel, have Enterprise Rent-a-Car come to pick me up to go get my car, but ... when I go to fill out the paperwork, Enterprise won't accept my USAA card as the required "major credit card," despite its MasterCard logo. I call USAA, but to no avail. I call around, trying to find another car to rent, but nada. The Subaru dealership offers me a loaner, but I'd have to get 20 miles away, back to them, and can't make it by the time they close (despite the lovely offer from the hotel desk clerk to take me there after he gets off work). I droop, realizing that at least one thing that day wasn't going to sort itself out, and have Enterprise drive me over to onecrane 's house, where I wait outside until he gets home. By now, I'm just plain tired, and weary of it all.
He has folks over for a meeting that night, and I doze off on the floor, no pillow or anything, apparently providing amusement to the crowd -- though the "a rat ate my car" story gets me considerable cred. I wake the next morning with a drippy nose and a shallow cough, still weary. Loiter around all day watching TV (a CSI and Mythbusters binge always makes illness more acceptable), and eventually get the car that my car is done ... but. There's more damage than they thought at first, and while it's now running, it still doesn't have cruise control or a fuel gauge, and the price tag for this is about to go up. Considerably. Arg. My host comes home, drives me out to pick up my car (though we did have to "play the boob card" as he put it, and make a frantic phone call where I pleaded that there was just more traffic than silly-ol'-me expected, and could they stick around for an extra five minutes past closing, please?), and I at least had my car back -- running and rat-free, if still with Las Vegas style lights on the dashboard.
I stayed over another night, watched Highlander and Ocean's Eleven for the zillionth time each, and when Thursday morning dawned, got in the car for the ten-hour drive across the "subtle beauty" that is Kansas. (I use that term in deference to zylch , who protested when I called it boring.) Without cruise control or a fuel gauge, so I'm just watching the odometer to fill up the tank every 250 miles -- plus carrying the weight of a quickly developing head cold -- and Kansas seemed longer than it ever has before.
But at last I made it back to Colorado -- to the power cord for my laptop which I'd been missing, to clean clothes, to a box of 'guaranteed rat-free" Thin Mint cookies which Vic had bought for me, and to the end of this particular road trip. Hoooolleeeeeee cow, folks. I'm wiped. Knackered, exhausted, spent, flattened, and ready to do absolutely nothing for a while. So now I'm going to go collapse. But I wanted to put this out there for y'all to read, gape at, laugh over, and learn from -- I don't know what I could have done differently, but maybe if I'd looked under the hood when I saw those first warning lights, maybe I could have found someone to dispatch Friend Rat far sooner, before catastrophic damage had been done. Or maybe not. No way to tell, really, and pointless to play the "what if" game here.
So hope you enjoy the story, really. Because .... uf-da, eh?
Step back with me to Saturday. I'm at The Grove, down in the boondocks and woods of southeastern Missouri. I've driven down there, and I'm taking advantage of my car to move some stuff around the property. So I'm in the car with zylch on Saturday afternoon, and notice that my cruise control light, the one that normally comes on when I turn on the cruise control but have not yet set it, is blinking at me. And my check engine light is on -- also weird, but I'm just past 15,000 miles on the car, and that might well be just my car whining for its checkup. "That's weird," I think I say to her. "I wonder if I drove over a rock and bumped a wire loose or something." But everything seems to run just fine, and so I figure I may have an electrical fault in the cruise control gauge.
Sunday comes, and its time to leave the Grove, this time with three Golden Doodle puppies in tow (half Golden Retriever, half toy poodle) which are to be delivered to their adoptive homes in Kansas City or central Kansas. But first, I'm heading to St. Louis, where I may do a much-delayed interview for my dissertation. To my disappointment, the warning lights are still on, and the cruise control doesn't in fact work at all. In fact, now the ABS warning light, the "anti-rollback" light, and the "stability control" light are on as well. It's like a Christmas tree in there! Dangit! I get to St. Louis 3 hours later, more tired than usual because of the lack of cruise control (and just the exhaustion of being on Grove staff this year, I suspect). I talk to my potential interviewee, find out she has family in town, and think "fuck it, I'm tired." Cancel the interview with my profound thanks, take the puppies inside to Marilyn Sue's house, and settle down for a nice evening of gossip and relaxation.
We went out to dinner, then came home and watched the end of the Oscars. We had just enough time to discuss how much we approved of all the awards for The King's Speech before the tornado sirens started going off. What the...? We moved down into her bedroom (which was at least on the lower level, if still with plenty of windows, and sat there, tense for 45 minutes or so, until the weather moved past us. We never really saw much more than lightning, but the sirens don't actually make for a relaxing evening. But eventually it all calmed down, and so I go upstairs to bed, leaving my three canine charges in their kennel on the main level.
It's somewhere around 3:30am when I'm woken by the sound of puppy whimpering, audible from a floor away. Oh, good lord, and I'm glad Marilyn Sue takes out her hearing aids at night. I sneak downstairs in the dark, not knowing where any of the light switches are, and fumble my way to the kennel. There's just enough light to operate by, and I realize that one of the pups is seemingly whimpering on every exhale, almost like a snore, but more musical. I open up the kennel, and ... oh, wow, it's drenched, in pee or sweat or something. The other two just sit in the back of the kennel and stare at me. I quickly change out the towel in the bottom of the kennel, and take the wet and whimpering one upstairs to a bathroom. It doesn't wake up, just continuing its regular noisemaking as I bathe and dry it, and then walk around in circles begging it to hush and get better. (I don't have a lot of maternal instincts, but I've seen parents do this for babies in movies, so it might work, right?) At least it seems to be breathing well and to have a good pulse, but the whole not-waking-up thing is scary. I imagine trying to tell C that I've put one of her dogs into a coma and my adrenaline spikes. After about 45 minutes, the puppy quiets down a bit, so I return it to its kennel and go back to sleep. After all, I have a 5 hour drive to Kansas City ahead of me tomorrow, and I need to be well rested.
Monday dawns. Marilyn Sue and I meet up in the living room to discuss the puppies, which ... just aren't quite acting puppy-like. They're not eager to go outside, not eager to eat anything (for the second meal in a row), not eager to move around their kennel. We exchange a few calls with the dog experts at the Grove (and thank heavens that Marilyn Sue is a nurse and can talk about things like "lethargy" and "ccs" with authority and calm), and eventually decide that, for whatever reason, the dogs aren't in a fit state to go to their new owners after all. P offers to drive up to St. Louis to get them, but I offer to meet her halfway, in Rolla, for a canine handoff.
I load the dogs and my luggage into the car, and start it up. But now my "low fuel" light is blinking at me, and the fuel gauge is sitting stubbornly somewhere below empty. I know I didn't run it dry last night, and it's willing to start just fine, so I drive to the gas station on the corner. Sure enough, my 15-gallon tank is only willing to take 12 gallons of gas, so it must be a gauge problem. Damnit. Somewhere around here, I realize that sooner or later, I'm going to have to face a mechanic who'll ask if I looked under the hood and checked all my fluids and connections, which I haven't done. So, despite my lack of actual mechanical knowledge, I decide to do due diligence and pop the hood.
To my surprise, there is a rat sitting right on top of my engine. A fine, healthy-looking brown rat, looking probably as surprised at me as I am by him. I jump back, he dives down out of my sight, and a guy on the edge of the parking lot hollers, "Holy crap! Did you just see that? I think she had a squirrel in there!" (Well, at least I didn't imagine it, right?) The engine compartment is littered with seed pods and leaves, and I can see what sure looks like a nest of grass and moss tucked down in front. (I'd try to describe where it was, but my engine knowledge extends only so far.) But I don't see any more rat. I grab my ice scraper, the one with a long handle, and bang on the engine a little bit, knock off some of the debris, and then, at a loss, ask the guy in the next car over what he thinks I should do. He seems to think that the rat has scarpered, left the vicinity, and I should be ok. So...I close up the hood, congratulate myself on a GREAT story, and drive to Rolla.
Hand over the poor pups in Rolla to P, tell her the story of the rat, which makes her smile ruefully, and then drive from Rolla to Kansas City. The detour through Rolla didn't really make the drive all that much longer (though I opened my hood every time I got gas, paranoid, and even eventually was brave enough to reach in, barehanded, to remove the whole nest bundle) , and so I get into KC around 4pm, with enough time to have a lovely shower in my hotel room to remove the mental debris of the day from my person. Meet up with onecrane for dinner, tell him the story, get the surprised reaction I wanted, watch some Kung Fu Hustle to celebrate, and then go back to my hotel room for the night, ready to drive to Colorado the next day.
Tuesday morning. I check out of my hotel around 8am, load up the car, but ... it won't start. It'll churn, but not catch. What the...? I open the hood again, and am not totally surprised to see that Friend Rat is still with me, and has apparently been up to more mischief overnight. Close the hood, go inside, and call USAA roadside assistance. The call center guy is ... surprised, but agrees to send someone out. I IM with artemis112 and hess42 , trying to maintain my cool and sense of absurdity. David from Road Runner Roadside Assistance eventually arrives. He apparently didn't believe my story, because he jumped back and hollered when I opened the hood (again) for Mr. Rat's inevitable grand appearance. David grabs a crowbar from his truck, and uses its pointy end to stab down into the engine, attempting to dispatch the invader. (I'll admit that I was actually more worried about my hoses than the rat, at this point.) We see nothing, but after a few minutes, I notice that there's a limp furry body under my car. The rat is dead, and I walk around the car, squeamish, as David makes absolutely sure of that with a few more careful blows, and then moves the carcass farther away. (I did get a picture, for documentary purposes. You don't need to see it. Suffice it to say that net research says it was probably a pack rat, and that it was about the size of a good-sized and healthy rat you might see in a pet store.)
David, his heroics done with, tries jump starting the car, which is (after all) what he thought he was there for. It does nothing, as both of us suspect. He recommends a garage, tells me to call USAA again for a tow, and leaves. I call USAA, request the tow, and go back to IMing with artemis112 and hess42 , maintaining my sanity. Call Vic, leave a message to let him know what's up. Call around, have recommended local mechanics tell me that my car is so new that most non-dealerships don't even have wiring diagrams for it yet, and end up finding a Subaru dealership in Lee's Summit that tells me to come on over. The car is towed there, and I'm told that it looks like the engine wiring harness will have to be replaced, it'll run about $800, and the car won't be ready until Wednesday evening. Big sigh, but what can I do? So I get a ride back to the hotel with Luis the kindly tow truck driver, and start trying to figure out what to do with myself in KC for two extra nights.
Not wanting to spend the extra on hotel, I beg onecrane for shelter, as he's my best friend in town, and I already know his couch is comfortable. He graciously says yes, but he won't be able to let me until until sometime after 5pm. USAA arranges a rental car for me, but it won't be ready until 4pm, so I take the hotel shuttle to the nearby mall for lunch (at which point I realize I haven't even eaten breakfast yet) and hanging out. By this point, I have enough distance that I'm able to chuckle at it all -- I mean, who would have thought, right? Go back to the hotel, have Enterprise Rent-a-Car come to pick me up to go get my car, but ... when I go to fill out the paperwork, Enterprise won't accept my USAA card as the required "major credit card," despite its MasterCard logo. I call USAA, but to no avail. I call around, trying to find another car to rent, but nada. The Subaru dealership offers me a loaner, but I'd have to get 20 miles away, back to them, and can't make it by the time they close (despite the lovely offer from the hotel desk clerk to take me there after he gets off work). I droop, realizing that at least one thing that day wasn't going to sort itself out, and have Enterprise drive me over to onecrane 's house, where I wait outside until he gets home. By now, I'm just plain tired, and weary of it all.
He has folks over for a meeting that night, and I doze off on the floor, no pillow or anything, apparently providing amusement to the crowd -- though the "a rat ate my car" story gets me considerable cred. I wake the next morning with a drippy nose and a shallow cough, still weary. Loiter around all day watching TV (a CSI and Mythbusters binge always makes illness more acceptable), and eventually get the car that my car is done ... but. There's more damage than they thought at first, and while it's now running, it still doesn't have cruise control or a fuel gauge, and the price tag for this is about to go up. Considerably. Arg. My host comes home, drives me out to pick up my car (though we did have to "play the boob card" as he put it, and make a frantic phone call where I pleaded that there was just more traffic than silly-ol'-me expected, and could they stick around for an extra five minutes past closing, please?), and I at least had my car back -- running and rat-free, if still with Las Vegas style lights on the dashboard.
I stayed over another night, watched Highlander and Ocean's Eleven for the zillionth time each, and when Thursday morning dawned, got in the car for the ten-hour drive across the "subtle beauty" that is Kansas. (I use that term in deference to zylch , who protested when I called it boring.) Without cruise control or a fuel gauge, so I'm just watching the odometer to fill up the tank every 250 miles -- plus carrying the weight of a quickly developing head cold -- and Kansas seemed longer than it ever has before.
But at last I made it back to Colorado -- to the power cord for my laptop which I'd been missing, to clean clothes, to a box of 'guaranteed rat-free" Thin Mint cookies which Vic had bought for me, and to the end of this particular road trip. Hoooolleeeeeee cow, folks. I'm wiped. Knackered, exhausted, spent, flattened, and ready to do absolutely nothing for a while. So now I'm going to go collapse. But I wanted to put this out there for y'all to read, gape at, laugh over, and learn from -- I don't know what I could have done differently, but maybe if I'd looked under the hood when I saw those first warning lights, maybe I could have found someone to dispatch Friend Rat far sooner, before catastrophic damage had been done. Or maybe not. No way to tell, really, and pointless to play the "what if" game here.
So hope you enjoy the story, really. Because .... uf-da, eh?