One of Those Days

Some days just don't go as planned.  Today was one of those days for me.

Today, I was going to go down the mountain to help with the delivery of our son-in-law's new mustang.  He was to leave the Canon City BLM holding facility at about 9:am, and we expected his arrival at his new home about four hours later.

I finished most of my chores at the lodge and pulled out a little before 11:am.  An hour and a half drive time, and I would be there with time to spare.  Only some trips down the mountain are... not as fast as usual.  They may or may not involve a HUGE land yacht pulling an equally oversized SUV.  And may or may not be going FAR below the posted speed limit.  With perhaps a dozen or so drivers putting along behind, trying to go faster by shaking their fists out the windows.  Not too sure how well that works.  Strikes me as being as ineffective as rocking front to back like you are on a swing while going up a steep hill.  Just gives you something to do, I guess.  So I took that time to pull over and make sure the burning smell that was assaulting my nose wasn't MY vehicle.  It wasn't.

I made it down the mountain in record time (and not in a good way) and dropped some stuff off at our youngest daughter's house. As I walked out of the house, I got a text from the oldest daughter.

"He's here"

Oops.  Hard to help unload when you are still 30 minutes away. 

I texted back "k". 

I mention this only because it is the first time I have successfully sent a text to another person on purpose.  I am afraid I am something of a troglodyte.

I continued my journey down the road and got onto the freeway, got up to speed, and immediately slammed on the breaks and started a five mile long, five mile per hour crawl up the interstate.

I passed a number of odd pieces of debris, damaged vehicles and a large tractor-trailer flatbed with no load backing very slowly up the interstate. 


Low bridge.

Not so low a tank, no longer on its' trailer.

You might be surprised how slowly traffic passes by a sight like that.  From both directions.  Lots of emergency vehicles were just showing up.  LOTS of them.

Traffic sped up after that, and I arrived at my destination about 10 minutes later than I had originally expected.  But the horse had arrived an hour earlier than expected, so I was still way to late to help unload.

Copper the horse was already in his new digs.

Meeting his new room mate.  Er,  corral mate.

Copper, Skeeter.  Skeeter, Copper.

And learning the joys of being brushed.

Having your very own human can be a good thing.


So I spent some time torturing  teasing training skeeter.

 

At one point, I lay myself across Skeeter's back, but she walked off.  Since I only had a loop of bailing twine around her neck for control,  I went ahead and just slid off.  Seemed like the thing to do.

It was while splashing water on her from the kiddie pool that I had another first with my cell phone.  It fell in the pool.  I quickly removed the battery and blotted most of the water off.

Not long after, I headed home.  I stopped at a grocery store that I knew had a pay-phone and called Juanita to ask her if she needed any thing from the store before I came up the mountain.  She said no, and asked why I was calling from a pay-phone.  I told her I had taken the batteries out of my cell phone.  She knew what that meant.

She laughed.

I guess in the greater scheme of things, my day might not have gone the way I expected.  But it still went a lot better than at least one truck drivers day...

Bill