Thursday, August 14, 2008

Paticus' Past:Volume 14: I Guess We Gotta Get A New Car

That's right,Crimestoppers...Memory Lane again.Only this time we're DRIVING on Memory Lane, and we're only going back a few years. October of 2005.
My twin daughters had just been born six weeks earlier, and it was the day we were going to pick them up from the hospital. I know I should know the day exactly, and I am a bit ashamed to admit that I cannot remember the date. I think it was October 22nd, but I'm not exactly sure. I'm sorry.

I do remember that I went down to get something out of our car that morning, and as I crossed the alley to the car, I noticed a rather big rock just kinda hanging out on the ground next to the car, and I thought, "Funny, I don't remember putting a rock next to the car last night." As I reached the car, I realized that I had not put the rock there. Somebody else had put it there, I presume because it was the most convenient place to put it after he used it to break the window of our car. Yep, someone had broken into the car.

I surprised even myself by not getting particularly pissed. This will sound very corny, but nothing was gonna ruin that day. My girls were coming home. What the fuck did a little window matter ?(okay, insulin shots for everyone, on me)

I went back inside, got the dustbuster and some cardboard and my old trusty roll of duct tape, and I fixed that fucker right up. And we went to pickup the girls.(Little side story. A guy came out to the house to fix the window a few days later, and he saw the car seats in the back and asked me about them, and I told him we just had twins, and he congratulated me, and asked me what they were. I said two girls, and he said he was sorry, with a real look of sympathy, and then, based on how he said that his kids were boys, it was clear that I had lost the macho contest. My sperm had failed at producing boys(and man, if he read the Fertility Odyssey, he would know just how horribly my sperm had failed-and he probably would have checked to see if I had boobs), and for that, he was sorry. I just kinda smiled at him.)

Before we could pickup the girls, we had to stop elsewhere at the Hospital and meet with the Car Safety Lady. Normally, she would just inspect the car to make sure the car seats were in properly, but because I am a mechanical idiot and I could not figure out how to get the god-damned motherfucking things into the son of a bitching fuck of a car, she was going to help us install the car seats as well.

She was a very nice Car safety Lady, and she used some tricks of the trade(Some shelf paper and some of those foam tubes kids use in the pool) to get the car seats super snug in the car. Since they were for newborns, the car seats had to go in backwards, of course(that much I did know, though to this day,My Special lady is still in charge of putting the car seats in), and this caused a bit of a problem.

Our car was a Saturn SL1, which is a small four door sedan. I am six foot one or so. And I am not tiny either...Okay, I'm fat. Though to be fair, most of this problem was because of the length of my legs. That's right ladies, Paticus has got some stems on him, and when I tried to get in the car, I could not fit. I went to push the seat back, and the Car Safety Lady told me that I couldn't, because the front seat of the car could not be wedged against the baby seat. I looked at her for a second, half expecting her to bust out laughing, but she didn't. Well then, I guess My Special Lady will be driving the girls home from the hospital.

Which is exactly what happened(remind me, by the way, to tell you the tale of us checking out of the hospital-when I think of the poor nurse that had to push a wheelchair that contained my fat ass, one of the girls in a car seat, one of the heart/lung monitors that they had to have attached to them, and countless other items, I still have to laugh), and as we drove home from the hospital, me wedged into the passenger seat,knees in my face, it became apparent that we were not going to be able to drive this car to Tallahassee. We were gonna have to get a new car.

We still had a loan on the Saturn, so we pretty much had to buy another Saturn, since that was where we bought it used, and they would give us the best deal on the trade in. Man, that's a clunky sentence, if I have time, I should probably fix that. So, we went to the Saturn dealer, and it was apparent that we were not gonna be able to get away with another sedan, so we looked at the...sigh...Minivan. But here's the thing, it wasn't a mini van, it was a VAN. This fucking thing was ginormous! My Special Lady climbed into it, looked around and said, "I don't think I can drive this."

So we had to look at the Vue. The Vue is the Saturn SUV. Shit, I did not want to buy an SUV. I just didn't. But then we learned some stuff about the non- four wheel drive Vue-it basically has a car engine, so it's like a station wagon, no huge gas tank and all that. That eased my mind a little.

We test drove it, and it was nice. We sat down, "ran the numbers", and we drove out of there in a new Vue(Chicago Edition- I still don't know what that means), or as it is now called by my girls- "Daddy's Silver Car".



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