Yesterday was such a weird day on many levels, both good and bad. Finally, I got to see my youngest after her adventure working in a village in Costa Rica on her school trip. She told me she stopped being a vegetarian on this trip, and that the meat tasted so good down there.
She also taught kids in the village some English words, performed a bunch of physical labor, and explored the beautiful hilly tropics of one of the most amazing environments I've ever seen, personally, in Central America, or anywhere. (It rivals parts of Indonesia and Malaysia.)
But yesterday also brought a driving rainstorm and it was sooo cold in the morning.
When it came time to drive downtown to meet my oldest and pick up her two kids for a babysitting session, I was derailed by a woman asking for me help to jump-start her car. So I said yes and when we hooked up the starter cables, one or the other of us, probably me, made a bad choice.
As I tried to make the charge from my car go to her car, I saw smoke billowing out of both vehicles -- never a good sign.
When we both got out behind our drivers' seats we surveyed a sad sight -- the cables had totally melted.
Her battery was still dead and now mine was too. I texted my oldest that I might not be able to get downtown, and told my youngest, as I rushed inside to grab some pliers to remove the melted cables from our batteries, "Shit, something bad has happened to my car."
Maybe because she was with me two weeks ago when my clutch failed, maybe because she was just back from Costa Rica, maybe because the cat was on her lap asleep, or maybe because she knows me so well, she just shrugged.
As I rushed back outside with the pliers, also trying to call my auto insurance company for roadside assistance, the woman I had been trying to help, just smiled sympathetically: "Oh no! And all you were trying to do was help a woman in distress!"
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