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So, I had a CRAZY weekend. I mean crazy with a capital “C” and “Razy”. As such, I didn’t get a chance to think up some nice content for today’s blog post. I thought I’d just open the floor to comment-questions.

Do YOU have any questions for ME?

Or topics you want to read about?

Feel free to ask about anything about publishing, writing, me, etc.

🙂

Now about my CRAZY weekend. Saturday had the Frenchman and I traveling four hours to reach an Ikea. We are, as I think I’ve said before (?), renovating our new house (the one to which we are moving all this week). We’re also installing a kitchen ourselves, and after a lot of research and comparing, we opted the Ikea kitchen route (we also had an Ikea kitchen when we lived in Germany, and that thing was really sturdy. Especially considering the cost).

Anyway, you don’t care about my kitchen. What you care about is what happened when we tried to purchase our kitchen. The Frenchman spent all last week installing a hitch to his old Volvo so we could tow a trailer to Ikea and then tow all the kitchen parts back home. All was going well, we reached Ikea by 2:00, spent a whopping 6.5 hours there, and then finally hit the road with our shiny kitchen at 8:30…

And a half hour into our 4+ hour drive, the Frenchman’s Volvo dies. I mean DIES. Like, panicked swearing, smoke everywhere, we-gotta-get-off-road-oh-****-that’s-a-lot-of-smoke. But of course, we were in the middle of nowhere, so we coast into a closed gas station…and the Frenchman inspects our engine.

“It’s kaput,” he said–and he would know. He’s an automotive engineer and car aficionado. “The radiator has a hole. We aren’t going anywhere.”

“BUT OUR DOGS!” I screamed in the panicked way only a person with first-world-whiny-problems can. “They haven’t peed in almost 12 hours! What will happen to them?” (In hindsight, they would have just gone in the house eventually and survived. But at the time, all I could obsess over was how unhappy and miserable they were. That and how cold WE were.)

After a calling our insurance for roadside assistance, we spent a long, long while roadside assistance tried to find someone–anyone–who could help us at 10:00 at night in the middle of nowhere. Turns out there weren’t many people. For about two hours, it was a constant back-and-forth with the poor roadside assistance people as they tried to find someone to help us.

Again, in hindsight, I can’t believe how FRANTIC I was. But it was cold (~20° F) and we had no engine…so we had no heat. All I could think about was that ridiculous scene in the even more ridiculous movie, New In Town:

Were we going to wind up buried in snow with my underwear flapping in the wind?

Seriously, though, the Frenchman and I were coming up with stupidly elaborate plans to get home (We could try to rent a car! Except nothing’s open… Okay, we can hitchhike to a hotel nine miles away and then rent a car in the morning. Then we can rent another U-Haul and tow our trailer home…blah-blah-blah, bad idea after bad idea).

Then our bad ideas about getting home turned into bad ideas about how to survive the night: We have two Ikea rugs in the back. We can lay beneath them and huddle close. Then in the morning, we can try to hitch a ride to… More bad ideas ensued.

It was sad and depressing how ill-equipped we were for this dilemma.

And all I could think the whole time was, WHY DOES ELEANOR MAKE THIS LOOK SO EASY?

Seriously, though, my heroines are such badasses, and yet my husband and I could barely handle a dead car on the side of the road. Yeah, it was cold, and yeah there was no civilization nearby…But STILL. All of my heroines would’ve been out of this situation in a snap…whereas I just couldn’t stop freaking out about my poor dogs having to pee.

Eventually, though, roadside assistance pulled through for us. 4 hours after we stalled out, a tow truck arrived to take us to that aforementioned hotel 9 miles away. The driver was SO NICE, and in a very hopeful voice, my Frenchman asked, “Is there any way you could tow us three more hours to our house? We’ll pay you!”

And the INCREDIBLY KIND DRIVER SAID YES. It took an hour just to get the car and the trailer onto his tow truck, and then it took 3.5 hours to drive us home. He dropped us (and our cursed Ikea kitchen) at 5 AM, and then had to get himself all the way back to where he lived–which, by the way, was nowhere near where we had stalled out.

So we made it home. Our dogs held their pee for 19 hours (poor, poor, poor puppies. Sometimes I wish they weren’t so well-trained and would just go inside already!), and we finally crashed in our beds as the sun was starting to make it’s appearance on the eastern horizon.

We were warm. We made it home. And it was all thanks to the kindness of a tow truck driver.

Mr. Tow Truck Driver, I doubt you’re reading this, but I want to thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You were so amiable, were an amazing conversationalist for the 5+ hours you were stuck with us (I seriously had never hard that about electrolyzed water), and I’m not exactly sure where we–or at least where our Volvo and U-Haul trailer would be–if not for you.

People are awesome.

I always forget that, and then humanity always sneaks into remind me.

Anyway, that was my crazy weekend and why I have nothing of value to discuss today.

So again, I open the comments to your questions! If there’s something you’d like to hear about–be it writing tools, writing advice, publishing stuff, how I feel about the Veronica Mars movie (ECSTATIC), or whatever, just ask!!

Oh, and since I am on a music-sharing-kick, here’s another EPIC PIECE I can’t stop listening to lately…

♥