Even though I’m going to miss some of the luxuries of the hotel life (high speed internet! Free breakfasts!), it’s good to sleep in my own house again. Or at least to doze for a few minutes until the cats decide that it’s time to charge across the bed in a stampede of feline feet.
How many cats do you need for an actual stampede, anyway? Two? Eight? A dozen? I don’t know… I suspect it changes as an inverse ratio to how dark the room is. You need a lot of cats in full daylight, but late at night two cats can stampede like a full herd.
I stretched my competitive sleeping muscles yesterday after the drive home from Columbus. I was in pretty decent form, not quite championship level, but still quite good. I don’t know if there is actually a competitive sleeping league, but if there isn’t there should be. I’d excel at that sport.
The drive north was pretty uneventful. For us at least. There were two places that we saw people having a much more eventful drive. At one point, traffic was narrowed down to one lane through a construction area because of a flipped over truck in one lane. It looked to me as though they had swerved, perhaps to avoid someone coming onto the highway off of one of those abbreviated entrance ramps that you get in construction zones. They probably swerved and hit the brakes like normal, forgetting that they were towing a small house behind them… It looked like it had flailed around, swinging to the side behind them and flipping them over as it snapped around to the front. There weren’t any ambulances or anything, so in all likelihood, nobody was hurt.
The other incident was just north of the Michigan / Ohio border. A big camper about half a mile ahead of us started trailing smoke. Someone managed to flag them over to the side of the road, and as we passed them a bunch of people poured out of the back door and the cab. Once they weren’t moving forward, the smoke must have started filling the camper pretty quickly… Anyway, they were being helped by a guy with a fire extinguisher. I think it was the driver of the truck that had flagged them down… He’d stopped too and was heading back. It looked like he was doing a pretty good job of hosing down the engine compartment.
Which reminds me, I’ve got to get a new fire extinguisher for my car… I used the little one that I’d been carrying around a couple of months ago to put out the engine of a car in the parking lot of the Farmer Jack’s just south of my sister’s house. It was very strange…
Cue wavy flashback effect…
My Fiancee and I had gone over to have dinner and I was sent on a quick errand to grab an ingredient that we’d forgotten. When I pulled into the lot, there was this car there with the hood up and a man and a woman inside. The man was behind the wheel and the car was making “Grrn-grrn-grrn-grrn” sounds while he turned the key. As I was getting out of my car there was a “Whump” sound and their engine was hidden by a gout of flames. The woman began repeating “Omigawd-omigawd-omigawd-omigawd!” with pretty much the same inflection as the engine noise earlier. I ducked back into my car, grabbed the fire extinguisher, pulled the pin, walked over, and dumped the whole thing under their hood… After checking to see if the folks in the car were ok, I closed my car up and headed in to the store to get dinner…