NOT According to Plan!

It was supposed to be a nice evening out on the town, starting off with dinner at the Blue Nile and followed by the Chanticleer concert. I drove to my friend P's house nearby after work to pick her up so she could accompany me to dinner; I was going to attend the concert by myself. (You may ask: Why didn't' your husband go with you? Well...the phrase "men's a cappella ensemble singing American folk and jazz songs" should be a tiny indication of why I was by myself.)

Things went awry almost immediately. I had to pause in my backward trajectory out of P's driveway because of a stream of oncoming traffic and when I began to move again...I didn't. My useless POS tires bumped up against that berm of accumulated ice and snow that is deposited at the foot of every driveway from passing snowplows (don't you just love how you can spend 2 hours clearing your driveway only to have a plow push a two-foot-high wall of snow across it in about two seconds?) and I could go no further.

Much swearing, shoveling, spinning of tires, spreading of cat litter, driving over floor mats, sliding, getting stuck perpendicular to the driveway, and having the ass end of my car hanging out into one of Ann Arbor's busier roads later, I called for a tow truck. That sucker wasn't going anywhere. Oh, and, have you ever tried to do something like this in a stick shift car? Yeah, that significantly increases the annoyance and difficulty factor. I'm surprised I didn't set my clutch on fire.

My poor little car, mired in snow; this position was an improvement over the wedged-crossways-between-snow-piles predicament in which I found myself earlier.

After tow truck-enabled extraction. Sometimes I miss my four-wheel-drive Jeep Grand Cherokee with the giant burly tires.

By the time P and I were back in the car and pointed in the right direction, it was almost 7:30. The concert started at 8:00. Neither one of us had eaten dinner; we were both starving. I was so mad I could hardly see straight, my left calf muscle was throbbing from working the clutch so hard, and my head was pounding due to a nasty cold that flared up over the course of the past two days (putting my plan to run the Frozen Blueberry race tomorrow in jepoardy). I said, "Let's just go eat. I don't care about going to the concert anymore." The tickets were good for 20% off our meal at the restaurant and I didn't want to pass up that bargain. We went and stuffed ourselves with delicious Ethiopian food and then retired to the Arbor Brewing Company across the street for a beer.

My consolation prize for the botched evening: a pint of ABC's Big Ben.

There are worse things than spending an evening with a good friend and having said evening involve good beer, I suppose.