Scott Adams has a theory that even smart people have the ability to make a complete fool of themselves, or as he puts it (in his own defense):
the odds are overwhelming that some reasonably smart person is eventually going to do something stupid.I always keep that in mind when I find myself doing something questionable. Like today.
I had just finished putting the garage door back together (my wife had a small incident with ice and an overachieving garage-door opener), and was headed out to run some errands when I took a look at the four feet of snow in my yard which had partially melted, and decided to cross the snow instead of meekly driving out the part that had been plowed previously. I mean that's what a AWD is for, right?
I actually got pretty far. All the way across the yard, around the bend and up the back side, into the area that hadn't melted quite as much because its shaded by a couple of really ugly trees along the fence. That's were I ran aground the first time. Yes, the first time, which is how I tell it apart from the second-time. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So after realizing that AWD translates into zero wheel drive when that's how many wheels are touching the ground, I had to trek back through the snow to the garage and get a shovel. I then started digging around the wheels, and when that didn't help enough, I started excavating under the car also. After about an hour I had shovelled clear a decent portion of the drive around the car and had some mobility again. With a little more prodding, I had the car moving several feet, and unstuck.
At this point I could have backed up, retracing my tracks back to the garage, and gone on about my business; but I was feeling lucky, so I decided to see if a running start would help any in getting out of there. Turns out it helped for about seven feet. My son came out at that point to see what I was doing (and help out), so we dug in the snow, went and brought out more shovels, made footprints up and down the driveway, and finally when he complained about getting cold, I got the car unstuck and backed it in the tracks to the garage so we could go run our errands.
I guess I'll have to wait for things to melt a few more days before trying that again. Could be worse I suppose. Some people go out and do this kind of thing for fun.
