Like I said yesterday, I could have tried getting home sooner, but it wasn’t a good day to drive fast. Hell, it wasn’t a good day to drive, period, but I had places to go, so I was going to be careful. I was going to take my time and make sure I got home in one piece. (One smashed-up car per year, that’s my limit.)
The day got started when I went up to Minneapolis for an IOGT meeting. If nothing else, we needed to do an audit for the fiscal year that ended on August 31st. Since I’m the treasurer, my presence was kinda necessary. It was starting to snow when we left, but things weren’t too bad heading north to the city. Once the meeting was over, though, things were no longer “weren’t too bad”. It was pretty nasty outside.
I was heading to a friend’s house for an Xbox party—he bought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 a couple weeks ago and invited a handful of people over so we could kill each other over and over and over. (Yeah, that’s basically the point of the game: blow up everyone else.) Normally, it would take me maybe half an hour to get there. Yesterday’s drive lasted a little over an hour.
What’s worse, I was tired. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this at some point before, but it may have been a few years ago: my eyes don’t focus in the same place, so when I start getting really tired, I get double vision. That was happening for about the last third of the trip. I cranked up the radio, turned off the heat, drove slowly, focused on the road and I managed pretty well.
Such was not the case with everyone out there. For some ungodly reason, people in Minnesota forget how to drive in snow over the summer, so when the first one of the winter hits… over the course of five miles or so on a major highway, one van had spun out and hit the barrier so it was on the left side of the highway facing traffic. Another car went right instead, so it headed down the slope of a hill. Not very steep, but not flat by any means, so I imagine the driver had lots of fun spinning around in circles, bouncing around in his seat thinking “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit…” He didn’t hit anything except the ground, but I didn’t want to be either of those guys, so slow and steady seemed like the better option.
I got to my friend’s place, played Xbox with the others for a while, then demonstrated just how tired I was. He’s got a setup down in his basement that’s really good for watching movies: a projector on the ceiling that turns the wall into a giant screen, awesome stereo sound system… it’s pretty sweet. When there’s lots of gunfire, exploding grenades and people yelling at each other into their headsets because they keep killing each other… pretty loud. And I fell asleep. Then I woke up because I was cold. After my friend gave me a blanket, I fell asleep again.
Thankfully, all that rest made it a lot easier to get home. (So did the fact that it was a little after 11:00pm and it had stopped snowing, but the sleep helped, too.) I got back on the road and drove home, but I still wanted to be careful because of my one-vehicle limit. Thus, by taking my time, I got home with just a couple minutes left, talked to my mom for a bit, then got to my laptop and cranked this baby up right about midnight. I probably would have been fine driving home a little faster, but I’m still okay with my decision. Because I’m okay. Had I driven faster and ended up not okay, backdating last night’s entry by five minutes would be the least of my worries.
