Saturday, November 27, 2004

Trucks Have Feelings, Too

My husband drives a Ford F-150 pickup truck as his primary vehicle. It's a nice truck; it's dark red with gold trim (San Francisco 49er's colors) and has the smaller 4.6L Triton V-8 engine, 4 wheel drive and a decent stereo. We use it to pull our camper and to haul large loads in. It's affectionately known as Big Red. Affectionately, that is, until today.

You see, today I needed to run down to the Tanger Outlet Mall in Williamsburg to do some shopping. I took Candy and the girls, and had quite a successful run. Carl also went shopping; he got a really good deal on a portable DVD player (at Sears) and also picked up some lumber for a project in our shed. But when he went back outside from Menard's and started the truck, the engine went CRASH-CLANK-GRIND and two cylinders went out. Carl managed to limp the truck home and get it in the garage. This afternoon he'll dig into the engine and see if its a sticky valve or a clogged fuel injector or something worse. (I hope its nothing worse.) He called me on the cell phone to tell me what happened (I was between Amana and Cedar Rapids) and on the way home I figured out why the truck went down: he's angry, and jealous. Poor ol' Red. For the past two years he's shared a garage with Moby and was the top dog. Suddenly his friend is gone and replaced with a shiny new SUV (which is getting all the attention, and has a larger engine) so he blew a gasket. Literally. I mean, Red's only human. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have a name.

So now Red's in the garage with his hood up, cackling evilly at me because I have to share my brand new vehicle with Carl, and Red knows that if Carl can't get him fixed I'll be stranded at home without a car because Carl will have to drive Candy to work. This is intensely frustrating. I HATE being without a vehicle. What's next, all the bicycles will get flat tires? I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

I wonder if Judah's strong enough to pull the wagon...

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home