My luck, it is a’changing

By now, we all know that bad luck follows me around like a sea sponge. Insistent, unyielding, determined. This is particularly true when it comes to anything auto-related, judging by the fact that I don’t even commute for work, hardly drive at all, yet in the last 3-4 years, I’ve been rear-ended twice (once on my birthday!), had my car completely totaled by an assclown (and convicted felon with no driver’s license and no insurance) on I-290, and have had my share of flat tires. Three, to be exact, though none of those have left me stranded in remote places leaving me wondering how to use that weird jack they include with the car.

That is, until yesterday. Kind of. It wasn’t remote per se, but getting a flat while driving on I-90 out in the general area of Bumblefuck ain’t so great either.

Aha, but here’s where the luck comes in! Because somehow once I heard the thunk-thunk-thunk and realized I in all likelihood had a flat, I did not pull over willy-nilly and decide to check out said flat on the side of the highway, where I in all likelihood would have been flattened. Mayhap even by the classic predatory yet ironic bus? Hey, a girl can dream.

But no! Instead, I calmly and wisely figured (hoped/prayed) that I could make it on Bad Tire to the next exit, my mom’s exit which is where I was heading, since it was less than a mile away. So I bumped along slowly on the shoulder – and did NOT get squashed by a semi! I know, shocking!

But wait, there’s more!

So I get off and manage to make it to the first turn, and pull in behind the restaurant that’s there on the left. And call my mom to see if she has any kindly neighbors who know how to change a flat. Yes, yes, I theoretically know how this is done, but given that it probably would have been dark out by the time I figured out where to place the jack and how it actually works, this seemed the more prudent course of action.

She finds a neighbor who can help, and as they’re headed over, I find the tools, get the spare off the back, etc., all in between taking Kona for walks in the field behind the restaurant. Oh yes, he’s insisting on “helping,” of course.

Needless to say, the fiasco that ensued was very much in keeping with the style to which Miss Tasha is accustomed. And as always, because I am all about helping my alert readers, aka “the little people,” I’ve gleaned some keen observations regarding the whole process that should be heeded by those to whom they apply. To wit:

To manufacturers of those flimsy tire changing kits: M’kay, do you think you might be able to have those jacks go up just a tiny bit higher, say an inch or so, just in case the person trying to get the tire changed managed to park the car on a slight tilt, such that the jack won’t lift the car high enough to get the new tire on? Thanks.

To the brain trust people who design the cars: Your helpful note in the manual that “the exact tiny divot where the jack should be placed – or major catastrophe will ensue when the jack slips and the car comes

crashing down on you – is noted by a small white arrow underneath the car” – is in fact not at all helpful.

To wonderful good Samaritans: I thank you so so much for stopping to help us after stopping for drinks at the restaurant, mother and son, living in Sun City (the retirement community cough resort that my mom also lives in) – truly I do – but the next time you do so after having more than a few cocktails, please be a bit more careful? Because I think if we hadn’t noticed that you were turning things the wrong way, you might have wound up decapitated.

To The Kone: Momma loves you dearly, HRH, to pieces! Forever and ever! But I want to assure you that when I disappear into the restaurant to get bandaids (for good Samaritan) or ice water (for tire changing helpers), I will come back. I will always come back to you. A 2-minute absence does not necessitate yanking the leash out of my mom’s hand and running insanely to the front of the restaurant looking for me, almost running in front of a car in the process.

Things got progressively more absurd, of course, from the realization that the car was on that teeny-weeny slant and we had to reverse the whole process and move the car….to The Kone running wild and free! Looking for his momma. Sigh. To my having the following conversation with Lita, the mom, while her son was still working at changing the tire.

“Say….do you like tomatoes?” I ask, out of the blue. Somehow she didn’t think this was an odd question.

“Oh yes,” replied Lita. “I love them!”

“Great! Expect to get a bushel of them on your doorstep in August,” I said, beaming. “Mom! Write down her information!”

Why, we were having so much fun chatting that the whole thing would have been downright festive had there not been that danger of my teetering car drunkenly decapitating someone. Ech, but what is a lost head between friends, really?

In the end, the tire got changed, no one was decapitated, my mom made a new friend, the helpful neighbor got wine and T-bones as a thank you, and The Kone had yet another adventure. And then there was the next day, when I went to the Costco tire center where I had gotten all new tires a year before. My mom’s neighbor had warned us that unless I had specifically purchased a Road Hazard Warranty, I’d be stuck buying a new tire unless there was a defect.

Young Costco Guy: Okay, the tire wasn’t repairable, there was a gash in the sidewall.

Me, sighing: Of course there was. What would have caused that? I was on the highway! Are you saying a rabid nail went leaping off the road to its death in the side of my tire?

YCG: Umm, maybe? Sometimes these things happen.

Me: Okay, so how much do I owe you for the new tire?

YCG: Eleventwentyfour.

I look at him and tilt my head. Eleventwentyfour? Is this some kind of New Costco Math? It doesn’t compute.

Me: What was that again?

YCG: Eleventwentyfour.

Me: Eleventytwentyforty?

YCG: No, just eleventwentyfour.

I think to myself, hmm, this must be what they’re teaching kids in school these days. They’re so used to texting and shortening words, that now they’re shortening numbers too. Could it be $1124? No, of course not. $110.24? That makes more sense. I try to coax him out a bit, using my excellent communication skills, to mayhap get him to use non-texting language.

“So,” I say craftily, “if you were me and you were going to write this out on a check which you probably wouldn’t do because you kids do everything online these days but let’s just pretend, and say there were no mobile devices anywhere in existence so that you couldn’t send a text, what would this figure look like?”

I for one think I’m being very astute in picking up on these younger kids’ hep lingo and all that, but for some reason, he looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

YCG: Umm……..eleven dollars and twenty-four cents?

Now, I’m not saying I wrote out and slapped that check down and bolted out of there before he could figure out they had made a mistake……but hell yes, that’s exactly what I did. Okay, so I did discover that Costco has some insanely amazing service plan in place whereby all tires come with a 5-year Road Hazard Warranty, which is prorated based on how many miles you’ve driven on the tires. But still! Yet another reason to love this place. Costco, aka Mecca, will you hire me? Please?? Now?

And yes, this is what passes for really good luck around these parts. Car got a flat tire on the highway but close enough to an exit? Sweet! Par-tay time!

Clearly there should be a picture of me in the dictionary next to the word “super easy to make happy.” It’s a gift.

My adoring public

I realize that to a certain extent, people come here to my little blog for the train wreck aspect of it. Ooh, what kind of craptastic day will Miss Tasha have now? Will THIS be the day the swarms of locusts show up? The barn fire? What next?

Be that as it may, there comes a point when even the most despairing of bloggers needs to throw in something a bit more chipper. For me, that day tends to come when I get an alarmed phone call early in the morning.

Mom: I read your blog!
Me: Huh….wha? Mom, what time is it….?
Mom: You sound terrible! How much money do you need?
Me: Mom, that’s not the point, I’m just tired of dealing with the same old…
Mom: How much money?? I have money like a drunken sailor!

Sigh. I finally convince my mom that I’ll have enough money to pay my bills if and when my Ukrainian-American Bank Samopomich (aka “Bank HelpYourself”) ever decides to put the money from the cashed-in savings bond into my account. Which hasn’t happened yet. Hmm.

But in any case, this kind of alarm made me realize that I’ve been a bit all about the gloom and doom here lately. And not even funny gloom and doom, dammit! If my life’s going to suck, it should at least do so in amusing and entertaining fashion. But until that happens, I decided I should go with happy sunshiney stuff. Like….puppies! Bunnies? Ah, I know, baby goats.

There I was, despairing over my inability to find humor or even cuteness in despair, when I suddenly realized that I could write about the bounty of gifts that have been showered on me by you all, the little people. Well, or a stalker. But I guess that’s kind of the same thing.

By gifts, of course, I mean random towers of treats:

….which arrived courtesy of Amazon, with no gift card or other note signifying who this was from. I of course posted something on Facebook, because this same thing happened when dear friend Melindy sent the boys a toy – also no note attached as there should have been.

This time, however, no one fessed up. Of course, there’s a good possibility that I got all dizzy with teledrinking success and ordered it for myself, after a night of one too many amaretto stone sours. But barring that, if anyone would like to confess so that I can properly thank you, please do. Otherwise I’ll just continue to be proud of having my own stalker, kind of like Diane who has the guy who’s been giving her stalker salt for years now. Stalker salt as in these 5-gallon buckets of winter salt, left on her porch at regular intervals. Having been one of the recipients of said 5-gallon buckets thanks to Diane – I don’t see how this is a bad thing.

Then there was the Christmas package I got from dear friend Stacey the other day, chock full o’ goodies from the Old Country, aka the UK, like Christmas pudding and Curly Wurlys and Bath biscuits and – best of all – my very own Kate and William teaspoons. Jealousy, thy name is everyone who’s not me.

But wait, there’s more! In my Ronco-esque life, where nothing ever comes slumping along by itself, my dear friend Stan, aka an anonymized Keith, stops by today with a lovely bouquet of flowers. Just to cheer me up. I know, the mind reels!

What was perhaps the final coup de grace in this litany of adoration being sent my way was the friend request I received on Facebook. From a dapper gentleman called Love Knockingdoor. Swoon! Right there, I was already smitten. But then when he told me - in an obvious attempt to win me over - that “I love to go out dancing, to nice romatic dinners and shopping at large malls like the Mall of America..... I like women who find value in self help books"…….well, if he doesn’t have “keeper” written all over him, then quite frankly, I don’t know who would. Please note how he cleverly honed in on my love of all things platitudinal and hokey, what with his reference to self-help books. Why, it’s like he knows me better than I know myself!

For you menfolk out there in BlogLand enamored of Miss Tasha but too shy to make a move, well, clearly you’re too late. As we say in the Old Country - поезд ушёл.

A primer on towns

Of course, this will only be useful to those people who follow my same bike routes – in other words, twos of you – but still, you never know when you might find yourself in the hinterlands of IL or WI and say to yourself, “self, now where can I find the best donuts in the world?” and here I am, with just that kind of useful information.

But first, a PSA for those people who like to admonish me for wearing an iPod when I’m cycling. Umm, really, I don’t care, okay? I like listening to music when I’m riding, and belting out the tunes on those barren country roads, serenading the corn. As for the argument that “you need to be able to hear when trucks are coming up behind you” – well, that might be helpful for you folks who ride 2 or 3 abreast in the middle of the road. But me and my ilk, we already ride as far to the right as possible, so whether or not there’s a truck coming up is irrelevant, since there’s still nowhere for me to go, unless you’re suggesting I ride off the road every time I hear a truck. No? I didn’t think so. The music makes me happy, and I’ll take happy anywhere I can get it these days, thank you very much.

Besides, I find it ironic that the same people who give me a hard time about the iPod are doing things that are far more dangerous, particularly to others, like texting while driving (Deanna).

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, towns that are evil, vs. towns that are not. Let’s start with the evil ones.

Capron, IL

When I was a wee tot, I saw a movie on tv that scared the bejeesus out of me and gave me nightmares for years. It was called Race With the Devil, and it was about a bunch of hippie-type kids on some kind of road trip in a van, who stumble upon a human sacrifice ritual in the middle of the woods, then wind up fleeing across the country from the devil people chasing them, until they realize they’ve somehow gone in a big circle and wind up in the exact same place with the devil people closing in on them.

You can see how this would be terrifying.

And in their travels, they wound up in some small town where they realized while at the local swimming pool, as they looked up at the people around them, that they were amidst evil. That the people were all actually devil people and that the town was evil personified.

Capron, IL, is that town.

Oh sure, as an adult I used the power of the internets to track down this movie, and dragged “Stan” over to watch it with me because of course I couldn’t watch it alone. Well. Let’s just say that it was embarrassingly bad, ludicrously funny, not the least bit scary, and had Loretta Swit in it for god’s sake.

But, I digress. Back to Capron. Now, I’ve biked past this town many a time, and often wind up stopping into the pizza place to reload on water, perhaps get a soda. I’ve never liked the town – it has that seedy, rundown feel to it in a very Children of the Corn kind of way, that speaks not to a town down on its luck, but rather malevolence.

But Saturday while on my 84-mile ride, I passed through Capron at a point where I really needed some water, especially since it was about 90 degrees outside, and lo and behold, for some inexplicable reason, the pizza place wasn’t open at 9AM. Go figure that one out.

But what is this I see across the street? Yes, a café! Right next door to the “Stum’ble Inn” biker bar, which even I, the fearless of the fearless, wouldn’t venture into alone. Off I go to the café. As I’m going in, two cyclists are pulling up as well, so I give them a cheery hi, and get a curt “hey” from one and a sullen look from the other. Okay then. Walk into the café, say hi to the hostess person, she just gives me a sullen look. I walk back to the counter, see the waitress-type person, say hi to her, get a sullen “hi” in return.

You see the pattern here.

This is where I give them my usual request:

Me: “Can I buy some water and a soda?”

I always ask to buy water, because I don’t assume these places have nothing better to do than to pour water for any random cyclists who stop in. Usually the response is as follows:

Me: Can I buy some water and a soda?

Nice waitress at the Garden Prairie Café: Buy water? Pshaw, I’d be happy to give you some.

Not at the Capron Café. This was her – sullen – response:

Capron Café Children of the Corn Waitress: We don’t fill water bottles here. You can go across the street to the bike shop if they’re open, or down the street to the gas station.

I guess she missed the part where I asked if I could buy some water. Bitch. I clump out of there feeling the nastiness of the place pressing in on me like a shroud. Though in all fairness, there was one person who wasn’t the least bit sullen – that was the elderly farmer sitting at the counter, who smiled and waved at me both when I walked in and when I left.

Clearly he wasn’t from Capron.

My next step was in Wisconsin.

Sharon, WI, aka Bedford Falls

You know that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey goes running through Bedford Falls like a lunatic through the gently falling snow, yelling “Merry Christmas Bijou! Merry Christmas you crappy old Building and Loan!”? One day I’m going to do that in the town of Sharon, which even the crazy guy at the Lobster Boil last year admitted was NOT a bastion of Russian spydom. So it has that going for it as well.

I pull into Sharon, hoping that the place I discovered last year is still there. You never know, as the shops in these small towns seem to come and go like rainwater, and this town has its share of closed storefronts. Case in point, the small bakery/café that closed up, before the sweet shop moved in. Wait, let me get the name of that exactly right, so everyone knows how to find it: Sharon’s Sweet Shop, at 193 Baldwin Street. In Sharon, WI.

I walk in, say hi, and get a cheery hi in return. Of course.

Kelly, the owner: Can I help you?

Me: I need a donut. I was here last summer, when I discovered that you have the Best Donuts in the World.

Kelly: Oh, I remember you! What would you like?

Me: Hmm, decisions, decisions. How about one of those coconut sprinkled ones?

She gives me my precious donut, which I carefully carry over to a table.

Kelly: And there’s plenty of water there in the machine, so help yourself. Here, this is where you get it. And there’s the ice. Me, I’m going to have some of my mom’s special Southern tea. Would you like to try some?

And she pours me a big glass of icy cold tea, as I sit down with my donut.

Now, all this would be wonderful enough, this hospitality, but probably wouldn’t be enough to compel me to ride 42 miles in one direction just to stop there.

The donut, on the other hand. Well.

Me: Omg, these are still the best donuts I’ve ever had in my life. What do you do to them? I know they’re baked, but honestly, they’re insanely good.

Kelly, modestly: Why thank you, you’re too kind. I really don’t know, it’s my mother’s recipe, I guess I just bake them with a lot of care.

It’s a good thing I didn’t ask “What do you put in them – crack?”

The donut isn’t too puffy, not too dense, practically melts in your mouth in bite after bite of sweet doughy goodness. I can’t say that I’m a donut connoisseur – okay, maybe I can – so I know my donuts, and these are literally the best donuts I’ve ever had anywhere, ever. More than worth the bike ride up here.

We chat some more, as I remember that last time I was here Kelly was telling me about her plans to put in a fryer and start serving lunch. Whereupon I discover that soon she is in fact going to be serving lunch, including hamburgers from fresh meat, not frozen, with homemade buns, all made using her grandmother’s recipe.

Note: lunch will start happening in about 2 weeks. August 1^st. Yes, I’ve made a mental note of this.

I leave, and as I wave goodbye to Kelly, it’s like leaving an old friend. On my way back, I have one more stop, this time in Garden Prairie, not at the café since that’s just open for breakfast, but at the Prairie Pub. Which is also a bar that looks kind of like a shack, but is a good example of why not to judge a book by its cover. Unlike the Stum’ble Inn, this place just looks a bit shack-like, not evil, and sure enough, as I’m going in, a woman walks out who looks like she works there, and gives me a big cheery smile and a hello.

Then I walk in, and another cheery bartender is more than happy to give me water and soda and to fill my water bottles with ice, all with a chipper smile. So this is another town that is not evil.

To sum: Sharon, WI and Garden Prairie, IL = not evil. Capron, IL = evil. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

My reader(s), funnier than me....

As evidenced by the comment made by my dear friend George from Canada, in response to my last post:

"And the irony is that Helen probably has a legitimate laminated drivers license with photo."


I have absolutely nothing to add that could make that any more perfect than it already is.

I have the best friends...

Okay, so now that the Bat Girl contest is over, all except the announcement of who won, I have to say that even though I really want to fucking win…….there’s a lot to be said for all the warm fuzzies I’ve gotten out of the process itself. And while I’ll write more about this later, I have to highlight here a sweet post by a Wharton classmate and former hockey teammate on the Wharton Wildmen, who wrote the following for our LinkedIn Wharton Wildmen Group. Thanks Craig H., love you!! Now I just need to dig up some of those Mardi Gras pictures to post here……

Wildmen - It's time to help one our own, Tasha Huebner, achieve a sporting honor she well deserves. For anyone who went to Wharton back in 96-98, you could not forget Tasha for her flagrant disregard for her own (or others) safety on the ice, her snarky write-ups in the Wharton Journal, or for a lucky few of us, her *ahem* presence at Mardi Gras. Well Tasha, or as she made some of us call her - "Mistress" - was diagnosed with pretty serious breast cancer a few years ago and got a very bad diagnosis right after leaving a White Sox game....and she hasn't been able to handle going back to one since. The good news is she's recovering well - has new boobs (if you know Tasha, you know how imp. they are) - and actually training for the IronMan in Kona, HI - but before she does that, she needs a fresh start with the White Sox, and one of the finalists to be an honorary Bat Girl on Going to Bat for Breast Cancer day with the White Sox. For some silly reason, they've made voting open on the internet here: http://tinyurl.com/Tasha-H . Voting closes April 13th - this Tuesday -- So please, go to http://tinyurl.com/Tasha-H , and vote for Tasha (often) and let's show Tasha that Wildmen don't just care about Hockey....we also care about boobs :-). To find out more about how Tasha's doing, and her quest to compete in Kona, read her blog at: http://thethighmasterroutetokona.blogspot.com/
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Next up: traveling with the Boobages of Death.....