Driving home for New Year's

Damn is it ever snowing up in heah'! Twice today we've had to shovel our driveway, and I'm not exaggerating a bit if I estimate that more than 50 cm have fallen since last night. Move to the East Side of Trondheim, they said. Milder climate, way less snow, they said.

Motherfu*ker; as I type this, having just come in from the shovelling, the fu*kin' snow plow just pimp-cruised by, leaving a gigantic heap of dense, packed snow all across the entrance to our driveway. Our tax dollars hard at work.

Fuckin'...........

Oh well. It's been snowing hardcore since New Year's anyway. We spent New Year's at my dad's, about an hour and a half away north-east of here. Usually, we really dread driving there this time of year owing to the roads up there being icy, narrow and rarely plowed, but with our new spiked snow tires, this was gonna be a relaxing drive for once. And going there, it really was - our tires did their work, and the ride to was peachy.

However, when we arrived, my dad commented that one of our head lights was out. At the time, I didn't think about it much. As we were fixin' to leave for home, I still didn't think too much about it, owing to the fact that I nearly went offroad backing our car out of my dad's driveway. Pure amateur hour, but it went well in the end. As we started to drive for real and came out past the street lights, it became pretty damn obvious that the other headlight had decided to call it a day as well, leaving us with two options as far as lighting on our journey back home: highbeams or parking lights. Seeing as how there was a blizzard goin' on at the time and it was in the middle of the night, neither choice provided us with nything even close to optimal driving conditions. For obvious reasons, the parking light option was no go; a firefly would've provided us with more light and visibility. And with high-speed oncoming traffic - including heavy trucks - visibility ranks near the very top of the list of priorities. Which left us with the option of having to drive home with the high-beams blaring. That didn't really do anything for our popularity among the oncoming traffic though, resulting in many angry high-beam flashes. Including from the heavy trucks previously mentioned, and lemme' tell you; them suckers are decked out with some intense wattage. Occasionally I'd switch to parking lights when other traffic approached - if the lighting conditions were decent. Sadly, that prompted the oncoming motherfu*kers to flash their high-beams at us in an attempt to warn us that our light were out. You're damned if you do, and you're mos def damned if you don't. We were quite pleased to have made it home, lemme' assure y'all of that.

Rather optimistically, we figured that changing the light bulbs wouldn't be such a big deal - how difficult can it be, right? After consulting the owner's manual, our optimism grew. There was even a section on how to change the liht bulbs in three easy steps in case of a roadside emergency. As we moved on from theory to practice and actually popped the hood open, it became rather obvious that the steps depicted in the owner's manual - in this case technically the ownee's manual - were only applicable to one of the headlights. Consequently, we rode out to the friendly neighborhood garage as soon as we'd shoveled our driveway AND daylight had come today. Quite frankly, there was some shame associated with having to go to the garage in order to have such a thing taken care of, but this feeling subsided the moment the mechanic started working on the situation. It took a trained mechanic one hour to change the light bulbs, of which 55 minutes or so were spent working with the left side of the car. The grill had to come out. The headlight casing had to be loosened, and the battery cradle had to be moved in order to change that one freakin' bulb. Not to mention an array of tools we sure enough never carry in the car on either long or short trips. Three simple steps to be used in case of a roadside emergency my ass.

Happy New Year, y'all