Heh.
Funny story, that.
A couple of weeks ago, when all of the uproar about random acceleration in Toyotas was splashed throughout the news, Tom and I had the following conversation:
Tom (judgy and irritated tone of voice): I don't know why these morons whose cars accelerated out of control didn't just shift them into neutral.
Me (making list of pretty, pretty flowers I plan to put in my garden this spring): Hmm?
Tom: Well, instead of crashing, they could have just shifted into neutral and braked to stop the car.
Me (ooh, don't want to forget snapdragons!): Uhh, I dunno. Maybe they were panicking?
Tom: Still. Everyone knows that taking the car out of gear will stop the acceleration.
Me: (what's the name of those spiky purple flowers I had last year?): Right.
To my (very slight) credit, I did remember this conversation while I was trying to unstick the accelerator pedal. Problem was, I couldn't remember if he had said "shift into neutral" or "shift into park." I was leaning toward "park." Which I think we can all agree, probably wouldn't have ended well.
Once I made it to the stores that day and finally reached Tom on the phone, he first made sure I was safe. Then he launched into an endless lecture about what to do next time, why to do it, and oh, I don't know, how an internal combustion engine works? I admit to partially tuning him out once he'd moved on to sentences using words like "spark plugs", "combustion", and "rpms."
My brain reacts to car talk in much the same way it reacts to football. It shuts off. Then it makes its way to a happy place. In this particular case, that happy place was the candy aisle in Target.
Unrelated: Finally! A new look for my blog! What do you think?
