holiday driving....

It's a regular winter wonderland out there this morning. I think the top hand is going 2 hour delay for work today. Which reminds me of my drive home from colorado on sunday... It was cold cold cold (about 10 degrees), and it had snowed about 6 inches of powder the morning I left. The streets were fine though thanks to the competent road crews. I'm headed out and doing fine. However, the windshield got pretty gross from the sand and general road gunk. I hit the wiper fluid and nothing. The wipers are going just fine, but no cleaning fluid is coming out. So I pulled over and cleaned up with snow. Then after just a brief bit of course I had to do that again. Stop # 3 or 4 I went into an auto parts place and got some more fluid. Then when I checked it, the reservoir is full. OH HELL, the thing is just broken. Off I go again and sure enough I'm pulling over every little bit with my windshield completely occluded. I stopped at a rest stop and a trucker helped me, or I should say tried to help me. We determined that everything was hooked up right and like that, just not working. The final diagnosis was, this sucks. So I thought, "what would McGivor do?" I got a sock out and soaked it with the washer fluid and put it on my windshield wiper. I was pretty proud of this solution, which worked for about 15 minutes, then froze, or dried out, or whatever, stopped working.
So next stop 7-11. I bought a bottle of 409. I practiced in the parking lot, driving and holding my left hand out the window squirting the windshield. Much harder than it sounds especially going 60 mph. That sort of worked enough to clear a 3 inch square of vision. As it turns out 409 is kind of greasy and didn't seem to be working that great. Another stop and I dumped the 409 and filled the bottle with the windshield cleaner. I got pretty good at all this and it included leaving the wipers going on intermittent. Every so often my hand holding the spray bottle would get hit with the wiper and got all scraped up. Remember it's cold as hell out and I'm getting washer fluid all over everywhere. So now I'm bleeding all over the place so I put my scraped up finger in my mouth, eeeuuu. Oh yeah, nothing like the taste of antifreeze. That can kill a dog right? There are dogs that weigh more than I do. I couldn't decide whether I should go to a dr or a veterinarian if I started to show signs of eminent death. I stopped again. Had to wash my hand and guzzle a ton of water to dilute the antifreeze in my system. Now I'm certain that this is plenty of evidence to support the long held theory held by many in my family, that I'm an incompetent nincompoop. I went back to the car and for some reason tried the washers again and eureka, they worked. The sun came out and the mist coming off my tires reflected little rainbows. From my vantage point, there were all kinds of colors coming off the back of the chevy. I knew I was going to make it home.


This is a raven out in my front yard probably saying "just because you made it home and didn't have to go to a veterinarian, doesn't mean you aren't an incompetent nincompoop...."