One thing that I can say about my life is that I am never bored. There's always something interesting going on around here. Sometimes it's aggravating, but aggravating is not boring. For example, the other day it was Saturday and it snowed here. It snowed a LOT. It snowed too much for my husband to ride his bike. Frequently, on Saturdays he leaves early in the morning, while it is still dark, rides his bike with a bunch of guys to another town where they have a huge 'he-man' breakfast. Then they ride their bikes back. In our case, my husband leaves a stinky pile of bike clothes, which I wash. He's not allowed in the laundry room. But, that's another story for another time. The breakfast guys have turned out to be a bunch of fair weather bike riders. This means that now that there is a foot or more of snow on the ground, they go to the gym and do spin class, like 'normal people' would do. But my husband is not one of those kind of people and he has continued to ride his bike. He just mainly rides by himself these days.
But on this particular Saturday, there was too much snow for even his studded bike tires (that's another story, too). But he was bound and determined to head to his office to fetch his computer to take it in for servicing. After all, the only reasons for driving a car would be to carry cargo (like a computer) and because there's too much snow on the ground for even studded bike tires - that and the fact that all the bike paths are impassible.
Because there was so much snow on the ground, and because my husband drives a car we call 'Decrepo' (because it never runs), he was driving my daughter's Jeep. This Jeep is made for weather where there's too much snow. It's a 1998 classic Jeep. In other words, it goes in the snow. Put it in four wheel drive and you could possibly drive it straight up the side of a building.
The thing is, my daughter's Jeep has been to college - where break ins occurred. It also was in Minneapolis - where it gets really cold and there's lots of snow. So this Jeep has a remote start and an alarm on it. This means that if one tries to open the locked door by brute force, the Jeep's alarm will go off. It also means that if one just jams the key in the door, without using the remote device to open the door, the Jeep's alarm will go off.
The Jeep apparently doesn't like my husband very much, or perhaps it feels snubbed because if he drives, he usually prefers 'Decrepo'. But, for whatever reason, my husband manages to set the Jeep's alarm off frequently. So frequently, that we've stopped locking the car with the remote device and we don't use the car alarm on the Jeep anymore.
This came after the Jeep sat quietly in our driveway for six weeks, quietly being the operative word. The very day that I started to work on a new movie, Boy Genius set off the alarm on the Jeep - and called me on the set. Then we stopped using and setting the alarm on the Jeep. And so, the Jeep sat quietly in the driveway - until this Saturday morning.
Until this Saturday, the people in our neighborhood had been used to getting up by 6 AM and going out to start snow blowers to clear their drives and sidewalks of our growing mountains of snow which occurred on several weekdays. But this was a weekend - and apparently no one had to go anywhere because there was just the sounds of silence as pretty white flakes of snow fell from the sky - a foot at a time.
But that silence was pierced when my husband wandered outside, somehow managed to activate the Jeep alarm and then set it off quite early in the morning. I ran outside in my pajamas and slippers waiving my arms. I was sure that waiving my arms would turn off the Jeep alarm. It didn't. But as the foot deep snow seeped into my slippers I did manage to pull the battery out of the remote device, put it back in, reactivate the alarm and turn it off. All of this in a mere 20 some minutes.
Then I stood in our driveway, snow still seeping in my slippers and still waiving my arms, I think, as my husband backed down the driveway and drove off in the Jeep. I think maybe the neighbors were waiving back from inside their warm toasty houses, all the while sipping hot coffee no doubt. Perhaps they were thinking that there must be simply too much snow outside even to run a snow blower because the crazy guy next door wasn't riding his bike that day. After all, he has studded bike tires, a Jeep that hates him, and a very friendly wife who waives a lot.
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