Upside Down...For A Bit Anyway

The past week has been fairly crazy. We bought my wife a Volvo from a guy her parents know in Southern Mass. Nice guy, trustable and reliable according to her parents and he was. Is. So with the new car we go and gather a bunch of plants to transfer to the house we'll be moving to in January. The plan was to get some brush cleared off and plant some rasberry bushes and some blueberries.

All that goes fairly well except for me falling on my ass and nearly sliding into the woodshed.

But on the drive back, the house is in Vermont. The Volvo starts to sputter. Not good. After two minutes of sputtering, the car dies in the middle of New Hampshire 101 in Peterborough. We push the car off into the shoulder and pull out the two totes we had used to transfer the plants to Vermont and sit down. We go through the motions of calling the inlaws to tell them the car died. Mandy's mother in a stroke of sheer genious (no sarcasm, really) signs us up for AAA on the spot and gives us the activation number and all that.

We end up waiting about an hour for a tow truck to come pick us up. Three people stop and ask if we are okay, well one drove by and just yelled "YouguysokayorshouldIstop." At 70 miles an hour. The ambulance I used to work for in Manchester goes flying by and I assume the crew is headed to Monadnock for some sort of an "emergent" transfer.

Eventually the tow truck guy shows up, stinking of weed with eyes as red as Christmas decorations. The two of us manage to get the Volvo onto his bed truck and secure it. He thanks me profusely, saying "Its hard to do this alone..." and stoned. Its getting dark when he drops us off at a closed auto body shop in Temple. We end up calling my wife's aunt, who lives an hour away in Brattleboro, actually the former owner of the house we will be living in, and asking if she can come pick us up.

She drives out as its getting dark. When she arrives its pitch black and I have taken to annoying my wife by pulling out my Zippo, firing it and saying "Look, I'm a politically correct lawn jockey."

We drive back out to Vermont and stay at her apartment, I fall asleep shortly after the Wendy's Baconator burger and fries with a shake that she was nice enough to buy me. Keep in mind by this point I am filthy from brushing clearing and planting, covered in grease from helping the tow guy and probably smell like something out of Satan's asshole because it was close to 80 degrees all day.

The next morning I get a hold of the guy who sold us the Volvo and he agrees to have one of his guys come up and tow it back to Mass and fix it, all at his expense. See, I told you he's a nice guy.

By this point my Jeep is still in the shop with a bad seal on the gas tank setting the engine light off so we rent a tiny Mazada or some Asian something or other and drive back to Manchester. Luck was on my side as my cell phone rang telling me the Jeep was ready. So we picked that up and ditched the rental.

Originally the point of this article was to show a few pictures of the house so as to document the progress of our renovations. But I figgured this story was just too good not to share.

O and by the way, the Volvo is fixed, it was just a bad spark plug. We are probably going to pick it up on Saturday. Just in time for me to go back to the firehouse......