Macho Chef: Total ice

The other day I was driving to the grocery store on one of those freakishly cold mornings and I was grateful my car's engine managed to start, instead of giving me a single "errr" followed by clicking sounds.  When I slid into the driver's seat, all the warmth from my body slurped  right into the vinyl seat leaving me numb from the waist down.

With the onset of the real winter, the ice in the potholes has smoothed roads for the next few months, but that semi-permanent layer of ice and the constant snow showers makes it difficult to figure out where the center stripe is running.

As I drove to the grocery store, there were two tracks through the ice-covered road wide enough for my wheels. I was happily cruising along, staying on that cleared part of the road like a chilly little choo choo train, trying to get my radio to work, when I looked up and saw a little sports car shooting straight at me, also zipping along those ice-cleared tracks.

I nudged the wheel.

The other driver and I looked at each other as our vehicles slipped past with less room than a moose's tail between us, and I saw that his whiskered expression was a mirror image of my own with both of us pale-faced and screaming, "Yaaaaaaaaah!"

For some reason that probably has to do with the physics of friction, thermodynamics and the plain old cussedness of the universe, only the left track of people's wheels had managed to clear the ice to expose the asphalt.

The rest of the trip was much slower and much bumpier with my car's left wheels driving in the cleared ridge and my other wheels bumping along the still ice-covered part of my lane.

When I finally pulled into the grocery store, I discovered some rude schmuck had managed to park his SUV smack in the middle of nowhere, forcing everyone to maneuver around his vehicle as they found a spot. I cursed the rudeness of that person who parked his SUV in the middle of nowhere messing up everyone else who needed to park, and I vowed that if I ever met that driver I would let him know that everyone thinks he is a jerk.

After shopping, I went back out in the cold.

I stopped in that freezing weather because, strangely, I couldn't find my car. The whole parking lot had shifted a little, as if the vehicles had become a herd of sheep huddled for warmth in a field and had scuttled to the left or right.

A familiar scratch on the paint of a door caught my attention. There it was. When I arrived at my vehicle, the cars that once surrounded me had left, and now it was my car that sat in the middle of the driving lane.

I stood for a second, looking at it quizzically. A guy stopped his truck and rolled down his window. He said, "Hey you jerk. Why don't you learn to park your car?"