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2008-12-01 - 10:56 a.m. I haven't been able to connect my laptop to the internet, so can't post the saved stuff, but here is another story: It is always nice when somebody sends me a message or calls me saying, "Want to take a trip to ? For free?" A friend recently moved to Las Vegas to work on the air force base there, and his girlfriend was stuck in this town for a month before he found them a place. She's never driven a uhaul, and was a little scared to drive 900 miles in one alone, so all I have to do is make the trip, and I get a plane ticket back and a place to stay for a few nights, and fun times all around. Oh, and there's a car being towed on the back of the uhaul. She only hits one thing, the overhanging on her storage unit right as we're driving away. So she drives the first 70 miles, not daring to go faster than 45, and I'm doing the math in my head. We stop in the first big town to check the boxes and the straps and everything, and she says, "Do you want to drive?" It's about 10pm right now, and I know she's getting a little sleepy, and I don't want this drive to be 20+ hours, so I tell her I will. Fast forward a mere five minutes, to the ridiculous snowstorm that came out of nowhere. Late, dark, U-Haul, towing a car, winding mountain roads, and now very little visibility. She's freaking out a little bit, on her phone to the boyfriend asking him to check the weather reports to see how far this goes on, as I'm driving 20mph and still hitting the rumble strips every now and then. I try to calm her down, and she says the following words: "I know you don't want to die any more than I do." - She thinks I'm going to do my best job to drive well out of self-preservation. She doesn't know that for the two weeks before this I haven't been not wanting to die at all. We make it through the storm just fine, two hours later, and everybody is happy. This whole time, I haven't used the brakes once, because I have no clue what would happen with the towed car and the icy roads and the huge truck, but I'm sure it wouldn't be good. It's three in the morning and she's taking a nap, and all I'm thinking about is yanking the steering wheel hard to the right, and what this rig would do going at 73mph. And then I'm thinking, "What if I do it when we get to Salt Lake City? Right when there's morning traffic? How big of a mess could I make?" Then eventually we're there, and we unpack all the stuffs, and then we go shopping for a couch and find the most perfect one for their new place. I have never seen a couch more perfectly suited to a living space. Fucking awesome. And then I flew back to Missoula, some two hours away from my pillow, and the guy who I lent my car to under the condition that he comes and picks me up sends me a message saying, "I know it's late, but I can't get you." Really? Really??? So I'm scrambling for like four hours trying to find somebody else, and eventually I just leave the airport and start walking down the highway with my thumb out and my bag behind me. Well, I got back, so whatever, but somebody is getting punched in the face.

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