Stuck!

Yes, I seem to be stuck -- in a rut and can't get up.

Don't ask me why, cause I haven't a clue. Just feeling that way today and I'll probably just wait it out, hoping for some unknown light-hearted thing to blow into my life -soon -and take this feeling away then.

I'm not going to pontificate on the various types of feelings of stuck that sometimes wrap around me mainly because I still don't understand, at my ripe old age, what brings these feelings on. Why somedays I may wake up with that feeling and other days, it appears suddenly, out of the blue, at various times of day too. Just very unpredictable is the only thing about it that is true.

But I am going to tell you a bit about some other folks who are stuck today or have been recently.

Mandy and Ken were out and about for about two hours and when they came home, Mandy was in a rush to make a phone call to Pastor Carrie -our minister -with an offer of assistance to her.

Seems as they came down the hill, past the parsonage, there was Pastor Carrie's car, stuck in the driveway there. So Ken had told Mandy to try to get in touch with her and tell her he'd be happy to come up and pull her car out for her. However, Mandy was unable to reach her at that time and thus far, she hasn't called back either. We have, of course, no idea when she got stuck there but our concern was that if it was this morning some time, it may have interfered with her getting to the funeral home on time as she was to officiate at a funeral today.

Now, for yet another little story of someone getting stuck.

Sunday evening, when my son had to leave to go to work, it was decided that his girlfriend would go along with him to where he gets his truck and by doing that, she would then be able to bring my jeep back and that way, all week while he's on the road, my jeep isn't just sitting up at the yard where he parks his big truck over the weekends. This way, if his girlfriend needed to go someplace, she would have a means of transportation and also, if I wanted to go somewhere, I wouldn't have to rely on Mandy to ferry me about either.

We thought it was a darned good plan.

Well, Sunday night -around 11 p.m. -I got a phone call from my son, telling me he needed to get in touch with his girlfriend because he had inadvertently left his cell phone in my jeep. He was calling me from one of the little convenience stores around here somewhere and had to borrow a cell phone to use from some nice young lady who he didn't even know! He couldn't call his girlfriend though because he couldn't remember her cellphone number so instead, called me because she was supposed to be coming back here to our house after having dropped him off.

She hadn't yet arrived here when he called though but said he would call back in a while to check in with her, let her know where he would be and where to meet him then to bring his cellphone to him as he needs to have it with him in his job, ya know.

At no time though did he mention to me where, exactly, he was then nor where she could come to meet him.

So, when she did arrive back here a short time later, she and I ended up sitting up till after 2 a.m. waiting for him to call us back.

When he did finally call back, he said he'd been over in Clearfield all that time, just waiting for her to show up. Pretty hard for her to have done that when he didn't give me any specifics though ya know. But then, that's also pretty much typical behavior for my son to expect mind-reading, ya know.

So she left then about 2:15 a.m. or so to make the run over to Clearfield and get his phone to him.

All seemed to be working out fine and dandy.

I waited for her to return, staying awake till about 4 a.m. or shortly thereafter when I finally gave up the ghost then and went to bed. I thought perhaps she had decided not to come back down here after all and instead, to just go to my son's house and stay there.

Boy, was I ever wrong on that theory!

When I got up later that morning about 9:30 or so, I asked Mandy if the girlfriend had ever got back here and she said "NO! That poor girl!"

That's when I learned what had happened to her.

Seems that on the way back down the interstate, the old jeep had run out of gas about two miles from our exit. She had tried to call here but unfortunately, once I go to sleep in my room, I can not hear the phone ringing in the living room unless I have just begun to doze off and am not in a sound sleep.

So, I hadn't heard the phone ringing with her calling to tell me of her plight then.

So, she got out of the jeep and disconnected a few things -things one has to do with my old buggy in order for it to start at a later time, ya know -and had begun walking the two miles between where the jeep was to the exit off the interstate. A trucker came along and gave her a ride from the exit up to the truckstop where she again tried to reach someone here at the house to no avail.

Finally, she made her way home to my son's place -a nice long walk at 5 a.m. in the cold and dark of about 4 miles!

She later told us as soon as she got home, she began filling up the tub with water as hot as she could stand it and then, she soaked in the warmth of that hot water for a good long while to thaw her feet, hands and of course, the rest of her body out.

What an ordeal for that poor kid to have to contend with! Lucky for my son, for us here at home too, she's a pretty good-natured individual and by the time she came down here then later in the day, she was seeing things in a very humorous light.

Mandy and Ken took her up to the truckstop where they got a new gas can, got about two gallon of gas in it and then, the three of them drove to where the jeep was parked and managed then to get it running again and back to the truckstop where they got about 10 gallons of gas then so she won't run out again hopefully, anyway!

The problem with the running out of gas is that the gas gauge on my jeep doesn't work. Or if it does, it doesn't always register correctly as it does seem to have a mind of its own. And, in the past, we have been trying to rely on the tripmeter on the dash to judge how much gas may still be in the tank but for the past 2-3 weeks now, you can't even do that because there's some other kind of problem with the jeep -my son says its something somewhere in the wiring I think he said that is causing the battery to drain when the jeep is shut off but once it is running, it's fine and charging okay. So, when you shut the jeep off now, to keep the battery from draining, you have to disconnect the battery and then, reconnect it when you need to start the vehicle and each time that is done, it disconnects the tripmeter so it doesn't register then how many miles you have gone on whatever amount of gas you just put in the tank.

So there was really no way that she had of knowing how many miles had burnt off how much of the gas in the olde tank, you see.

Anyway though, as the old saying goes, "All's well that ends well" and in this instance, thankfully it all did end well. She got back home safely. The jeep got rescued. My son got his cellphone delivered to him and once she got completely thawed out, everyone was then happy!