Ever get the feeling there is some sort of diabolical Wizard of Oz chuckling quietly to himself as he says “watch this!” and presses a button to make your day much worse than it has to be?
I’m pretty certain this is how it works – and when I find the guy pushing my buttons there is gonna be such a reckoning. 🙂
There are patterns to this button pressing though, you just have to watch for them and make note when they occur so you can avoid them and thumb your nose at your personal tormenter on occasion… And yesterday I discovered a new pattern.
See, my daily driver is a collector’s item – the literal last of the big Detroit V8 sedans – so I’m extremely careful with what the weather looks like when I leave the garage, what traffic looks like where I’m going, and where I park when I get there.
And thanks to this level of caution I’ve only been narrowly caught in some of Colorado’s routine hail once…
What happened was that my roommate needed a ride to pick up his truck from the dealership where he had some work done. The weather looked bad, but he was insistent – and on the way back from dropping him off it started hailing… I managed to duck into a gas station just as it started and sloooowly filled my tank until the storm passed.
So one near miss with the hail… Well, that was until yesterday…
Yesterday afternoon my roommate once again needed a ride because his truck was out of commission… He needed to swap out the tensioner pulley he’d purchased earlier in the day for one that actually fit his truck, and I’m more than happy to help out – even if it did look a bit like rain. But the weather app on my phone said everything was fine – so off we went to Parker.
And here’s what happened halfway between Centennial and Parker…
I turned off the car to wait it out, and that’s when the video stops – it got a bit worse before it let up, and some of the hail got to pingpong ball size…
Right as I ducked into the parking spot is also about the time the severe weather alert appeared on my phone… It’s called a forecast guys, not an after the factcast…
Anyway, I once again got lucky and found a spot to hide out from the worst of it, but this time I managed to pick up a few very minor dents… I can fix those though, easy enough – but the hail happened exactly as if someone pressed a button. It went from windows down and enjoying the drive to Hail-Apocalypse in seconds.
And back to those patterns I mentioned: the pattern here seems to be that if my roommate’s truck is out of commission for any reason and he needs a ride to deal with it – say no. 😀
Listening to "Modern Love" by KRISTINE