batteries not included...
Sometimes it seems that it pays to be a little paranoid. You never have any idea when your day is going to turn from perfect - to perfectly frustrating. For example, your friends might tell you that you are crazy for wanting to leave for your four PM flight with more than two hours of spare time, but you know you need it - just in case of 'emergencies'. Little things. Like your car's battery suddenly, spontaneously, and mysteriously failing to start some two hours and twenty minutes before your flight. While you are in downtown Houston, instead of at home, and can therefore not afford to abandon your car all on its own for half a week. So you have to call your insurance to get the numbers for a towing service to have your car hauled home - all while you are trying to board a plane.
So you call on your friends.
Who thankfully have not left Houston yet, and who curtail their afternoon plans to try and help jump your car. You don't care if it starts again after you stop it next - right now you just need to get to the airport. Of course, the car proved unjumpable. The battery has either had its charge boiled off by the hot and humid Houston afternoon, or it is completely and spontaneously dead. Or maybe the starter is having issues. Or the alternator, or the distributor, or any of a dozen other things that could go wrong. The problem is that one of those things has gone wrong, and now you only have two hours to resolve it and drive half an hour down the road to the airport.
And now it is raining.
So your friends not only take your sorry backside to the airport - but some of them also sit around and try to deal with whatever minion the towing company sends their way. Having learned that it will be frighteningly expensive to have your car towed all the way back up to Conroe, they elect to hunt down a new battery in a city that is not their own, and replace yours and then drive your car home for you where it will be waiting for you in the parking lot.
Which is more than amazingly cool of them, and you are now eternally in their debt.
I still don't know how this story ends (and probably won't until Wednesday when I return), but Kate, Lowell, Karmin, Rick?
Thanks, guys.
You ever need anything?
You have but to call.
Thanks.