Okay, for anybody wondering what happened after that long 2008 recap, what happened was a very pleasant holiday vacation -- with one Christmas Eve automotive disaster.
Monique and I decided not to go to the Florida Keys after Christmas this year, but instead planned to go out to Portland, Maine, to visit our friends the Gavens on Dec. 19-20; for me to attend a Patriots game in Foxboro on Sunday, Dec. 21 with my brother; to generally enjoy Christmas in upstate New York with my large and complicated family; and then to come back to Michigan to laze about the house and enjoy a very relaxing start to the New Year.
It all pretty much went according to plan, except for the snow. A giant vast storm was scheduled to crush the Midwest and the East Coast the morning we were supposed to leave on our trip. So we accelerated the journey by a dozen hours, loaded up Lenny the Leftymobile early, started on Thursday night, drove straight through, and arrived in Portland about noon on Friday -- three hours before they got more than a foot of snow.
The score: Hard-Driving Magees 1, Snow 0.
Alas, on Saturday morning when I checked the weather forecast for New England, another giant snowstorm was scheduled to crush New England on Sunday morning. After much soul-searching I was forced to admit that I just wasn't manly enough to drive through a vast blizzard to sit in the sleet in the upper-deck to watch the Patriots slap the Cardinals around for three hours. I called up Mike and cancelled out of the game, citing an attack of extreme cowardice as my only excuse. Instead, we spent a very pleasant Sunday snowbound in Portland as the city got hit with another foot and a half of snow. (In fact, they set the single-day Portland, Maine, snowfall record!)
The score: Cowardly Magees 1, Snow 1.
Now personally, I was willing to call it a tie and move on. But apparently Winter wanted the rubber match, and it got it around 10 pm on Christmas Eve when about a thousand pounds of snow slid off the slate roof of my folks' house and caved in the roof of our new car, which was parked safe and sound (or so I thought) in the driveway. Oh no, that sound above wasn't the click-clack of tiny reindeer hoofs. It was a Honda-crushing avalanche.
When I think of all the pieces of junk I've parked in that driveway over the years it amazes me that the one car-crushing avalanche came the one time I parked a new car there. Good heavens, why couldn't it have crushed that old International Scout with the iffy brakes, the VW Bug with the electrical woes, the Plymouth Volare with the stalling problem, or maybe even the Chrysler Town & Country Wagon with the bad transmission? Those would have been mercy killings!
Fortunately, none of the glass was broken and I was able to push the roof back up enough for us to be able to drive it back to Michigan with a dented and dinged roof. And I've been assured by the mechanic that after a week or two at the body shop this month our little car will be as good as new. But Lenny the Leftymobile is now known as Lenny the Lumpymobile.
The final score: Poorly Parked Magees 1, Snow 1,001.
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I'm sorry about the Magees vs. snow tally. The Magee cars vs. ice covered trees tally isn't much better.
ReplyDeleteAnd all these years, I thought you called yourself a football fan. Bah.
Forget whatever we were thinking about the body shop using one of those cool suction cup thingies to suck out the dents. The guy at the body shop took one look and said that Lenny needed a new roof panel and a new head liner.
ReplyDeleteAs for the game, the decision point really came when I thought, "Would I try to drive to this game even if it was in a dome?" And the answer was, "No!"
(Sure we have a stinky team in Detroit, but at least we can watch them stink in climate-controlled comfort. Come to think of it, though, a retractable roof might've been a good idea at Ford Field. We need some way to clear out the stench of that 0-16 mark.)