Mike says I should explain...

We have had a lot of questions about the Tacoma incident after my brief reference in the last post. I was trying to gloss over it a bit for Mike's sake (he was pretty disgusted for about 24 hours). But now that we're a few days out, and Mike has had a few good laughs, we decided a public retelling was OK.

Actually, no one actually witnessed what happened (except Jupiter, and he's not talking) - so this is our best guess at how events transpired.

Jupiter the Space Donkey - lone attestant to the destruction -

 looking down the rock wall at the aftermath.

He's thinking, "What in the...?"

Mike had helped me off with the kids for the first day of school before pulling out of the garage to go to work. He noticed that pen ink had leaked on his sunglasses case. So he decided to run in and rinse it off, leaving the truck in neutral. (Mike traces the whole ordeal back to leaving the lid of his pen at work the day before. How narrow is the knife's edge upon which the events of our lives sometimes balance. ha ha ha.) He was standing there at the kitchen sink rinsing, when he heard the dog going nuts outside, which began, of course, to irritate him. So he walked out yelling for the dog to be quiet, & noticed that his truck was NOT where he left it.

First reaction, "Someone has stolen my truck!"

Next instinct: look at what the dog is barking at in the back yard -----------truck wedged in the back fence. Now start putting the pieces together: truck in neutral, large rock retaining wall, smashed shrubbery, tire tracks in the grass, demolished fence.

A few moments of stunned immobility.

He said his first thought was a sinking, "I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS! What am I going to do?" He said his next thought was, "I hope none of the neighbors saw that." (I think it's hilarious that he thought that...because I KNOW I would have thought the same thing - even though it's silly. *digression* When I was like 8 I drove my family van in neutral down the hill of the church parking lot and hit another car. And even at that young age, I distinctly remember trying to distance myself from the disaster - and act as if I was totally uninvolved. I kept trying to shush my sister who was yelling for help out the window, because I was embarrassed that she was drawing attention to us. Oh my goodness, that is a funny memory...)

At this point he called me (and freaked me out because it took him FOREVER to spit  out what had happened - I  thought it must be something awful) - and started trying to figure out how to get the truck out of the backyard. In case you've never been to our house, the backyard slopes down & there's basically a boulder retaining wall all the way around it. It's hard even to get the lawn mower back there and out again...much less an automobile. 

When I got home he tried rock-crawling up the most gradual & shallowest spot on the wall. No good. The only other thing to do was to go and ask the neighbor if we could drive through her yard. Mike sheepishly rang the doorbell at 8:30 AM and asked if he could drive over her lawn. She responded, "I would rather you didn't." And then he explained that thing was, his truck was stuck in the back yard unless he did. She started to laugh and said she'd let him drive through their yard if she could come see the carnage.

We were sure we'd have to make a claim on our home owners insurance in addition to a claim on our auto insurance to fix the fence & the dent in the truck.

But it turns out PVC is an incredibly forgiving material. All of the downed fence panels were intact, even the posts were relatively unscathed. It took Mike an hour on Saturday to fix the fence. Then he was able to buff out all of the scuffing on his truck. In disbelief, he kept repeating to me yesterday that he was just as shocked about how easily he was able to fix the damage as he was at discovering the accident in the first place.

We still have a dent to repair...and honestly, it's pretty minor. I also have a bunch of broken limbs on a bush in the back yard.

But I'm not complaining. 

It's another good story for Mike to tuck away for telling at parties.

Like the time he got stuck at the mushroom convention, wearing just his boxer shorts. Only this time he doesn't have a cool t-shirt to show for it.