Snow Falling on Motorcycles and Lost, Broken Down Trucks...

Imagine here a picture of my bike under four inches of snow.  I'd go outside and shoot that picture, but it is too cold and depressing.  Last night when I was taking Elizabeth home from our singles group fhe, where they kindly made paper flowers for our wedding, it began to snow.  A lot.  Riding a bike in the rain is bad, because raindrops hitting your eyeballs at 35mph feels a lot like hypodermic needles hitting your eyeballs at 35mph.  Snowflakes hitting your eyeballs at 35mph are just kind of like getting hit in the eyes with feathers, but really really cold ones.  And they have the added affect of terrifying you because you can't see through them and they are turning the ground into an uncertain neverland.  It's... no fun.  Well, not unless perhaps you are a hockey player, and the idea of being cold and injured is a particular treat.

I woke up this morning to take Elizabeth to work and found said four inches of snow covering the only means of transportation (aside from shoes) between us.  Experimentally I brushed it off, started it up, and rode around the block.  It was frightening.  I went around the corners at about two miles an hour with both feet down, (tippy toes down anyway, as my bike's seat is taller than my bum).  While the bike didn't slide sideways from underneath me on any of those four icy corners, there was absolutely no guarantee that they would not on any of the other twenty-five or so we'd traverse if I did take Elizabeth to work.

She took the Trax.  And I feel blue.

I feel blue for several reasons.  I usually make Elizabeth breakfast and drive her to work, but couldn't today.  I'm realizing I'm several days back on my meds.  I realized yesterday that there are only 19 days to our wedding (that's not a sad thing, but it blows my mind a little and makes me reflective).  It's snowing, and I don't have a foundation in the ground out in Magna.  And not least, my truck may be well and truly dead.  It is broken down on the side of the road, about seven blocks from my place.  It came to be there when Elizabeth and I were going to Laura and Tim's for dinner on Sunday night.  Tim had a crazy urge for German food.  Go figure.  But like all Tim food, it was excellently executed, and fantastically tasty.

The truck had overheated the last time we drove it, a week before, and had died up across the street from the Capitol building.  We'd let it cool down and it had limped home to my garage.  But it was 37 degrees out, and falling, when we left for Laura's place Sunday night, and the idea of getting on the bike was just too much.  So I filled the coolant reservoir in the truck and hoped it wouldn't all leak out before we could get to Laura's and back.  But at the corner of 2nd and I st. it seems to have died an ignominious death.  What can be done?

Laura came and picked us up as we walked down 7th East, and took us home after dinner.  She was very sweet.

And I bought a tow cable yesterday morning at Harbor Freigh, after dropping Elizabeth off at work.  But I was unable to lay hands on someone to do the towing.  And so it sits.  Unless of course it's been towed by the city.  If so, I have half a mind to let it go.  Except that it's likely worth a few hundred in scrap metal.

But any way you look at it.  The purchase of that truck was... optimistic.  I'm about $1500 into it, and have only driven it about as many miles.  The 17 year old kid who I bought it from was about 25 facts short of honest with me about it's condition, and most of the miles I have gotten out of it have been driving up to Cache Valley and all around town in pursuit of repairs for the truck itself.  The guy who stole it for a couple of weeks right after I bought it might have gotten more use out of it than I have.  Frankly, I've put too much into it.  And it's paid me back with little more than derision.  

I do not love this truck.

But I don't love the prospect of buying a new used car any better.  I thought to myself a little while ago that I didn't want to buy another car unless I was buying something exciting enough that I'd want to drive it.  That doesn't really mean a sports car.  I just wanted something that didn't give me that slight feeling of malaise every time I turned the key.  Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear called my last car, an '01 Hyundai Accent, a "misery box".  He has generally less realistic standards than I do, and I was grateful for the car, and especially for my parent's grace and forbearance in letting me have it although they actually owned it.  But there was something dreary in it.  Perhaps that thing was just me.  I don't know.  

And the field of used cars I've so far perused hasn't been that encouraging.  In fact the top contenders have consistently been more Hyundai Accents, or their big brother, the Elantra.  They're just too damn sensible a choice.  So it might be back to the misery box for me, where I'll try to make believe it is more like "cheap and cheerful" than trudging around in a tar pit.  Groan.

In the mean time though, I must occupy myself with another uneviable task.  Trying to rescue files off the hard drive on my desktop.  It's crashed and burned too.  Much like the truck.