If I wrote this in a story…

…you’d swear it was unbelievable.

It’s the late afternoon. Kevin’s already called to say he’s on his way home from work. I’m finishing up a few things at my computer and have started making dinner.

The phone rings. It isn’t We Wish You A Merry Christmas this time. That’s what plays when he called from the office. Instead, it’s wop-wop-wop, wop-wop-wop - the asinine tune auto-programmed when he calls from his cell phone. Okay, so what if the phone’s being playing We Wish You A Merry Christmas since last November? I can’t find the programming book and forgot how to change it. I’m technologically ungifted, and I admit it.

So, Kevin’s calling. And this is odd, because he already called to say he’s on his way home. I answer.

The car has died.

Lovely.

I turn off the oven, bring the dogs in etc. etc. and drive 40+ kilometers to where he’s stuck on the side of the road. We boost the car. And it starts. I begin the process of following Kevin home, although the car is straining to do 80 in a 100 km/hour zone.

The car died again. We boosted it. Drove. Guess what?

This time, it won’t even hold a charge.

At some point, we decide to go home in the truck. One of the things that attaches to the battery was lose, so Kevin thought if he tightened it, it would work, assuming that was the problem. He needs tools.

We come home. Eat. Drive back to the car. This time, I’m guessing about 30 km away.

And guess what? The loose cable wasn’t the problem.

We’re running out of options, stuck on a pitch-black road that is outside the city, no street lights, no services. And it’s down to a few options. The alternator or the battery.

Kevin takes the battery out and we drive home so that he can try trickle-charging it for an hour.

Which we do. Then we drive back. Bear in mind, the objective is to get the car home, which means Kevin just can’t go off and fix the car. Nope. I have to go along for the ride, in case it starts working.

As we’re driving back it starts to rain. Not a soft mist. The world hasn’t seen this kind of rain since the days of Noah. It’s the thick, torrential kind, coming down in buckets, and the wind is picking up.

Lovely. Bloody fucking lovely. That’s what I’m thinking, and I got to stay in the truck as Kevin got out to put the battery back in the car. Well, for most of the time, anyway.

But the car still wouldn’t start.

He tried… everything. And in the process, realized that a fuse had gone in the car.

There was no way it was moving.

At this point, the car break-down fiasco has eaten up about four hours of time. And I’m looking at the gas gauge on my Rodeo. When Kevin finally gives up on the car and pushes it as far off the road as he can get it, I tell him we have to go to Airdrie for gas.

Which is about 15 kilometers, mostly in the wrong direction. We were soaked. We were tired and grumpy. And we were annoyed.

But the drive had us feeling a tiny bit better by the time we got to the gas station. Fill up and another 20 minutes and we’d be home. At least we could go to bed, right?

Ha. That’s funny.

My keys had been in the ignition, because Kevin needed his to try to start the car, remember?

I took them out for the easy pay, to fill up with the gas. Kevin topped up the windshield washer fluid and returned to the truck, reached for his keys….

I bet you can guess. No, they weren’t inside the station, from when he bought a pop. They weren’t in any of his pockets, or on the floor of the truck or outside. He hadn’t dropped them, because he hadn’t brought them with him.

Now, from Airdrie, it was 20 minutes until we’d get home. From the car, about the same amount of time. Except now we had to turn around, and drive back to the car.

And I don’t think I’ve told you that Airdrie has been going through road construction hell for a looooooonnnnnnnng time. We were on the wrong side of town – east – needing to head south on the Number 2.

Which meant braving the overpass from hell.

We survived that, although there are about 20,000 lights set up along there, just to congest traffic deliberately. Remember how the rain was coming down in Aberdeen in the first chapter of Stuart MacBride’s Cold Granite? It was pissing down rain.

Now, in a book, it would have been necessary for me to preface this, so it didn’t come as a complete surprise. But this is life. So, occasionally our one windshield wiper has been known to fall off. It just falls down and sits between the hood and the windshield and sooner or later we have to stop and put it back on. No biggie, doesn’t happen often. Just one of those things. I mean, it wasn’t like it went flying off the truck or anything.

Until now.

So, here we are, on the Number 2, Deerfoot Trail, tearing along at 120 km per hour (or more if you aren’t a cop), driving through a wall of rain alongside semis and the usual idiots on the road, and we’ve lost a windshield wiper.

I think it was at this point that I suggested if Kevin was nicer to me, maybe his karma wouldn’t be so bad.

Seriously, sometimes you just have to laugh. What else can you do? We got to the car, despite the best efforts of the complete fuckhead in front of us hugging the shoulder (so we couldn’t see where we’d left the car) going 75. Asshole. I mean, your time might not be valuable but some of us just wanted to get home.

The keys were inside, and Kevin took a windshield wiper for the truck. And I was scanning the skies for signs of a meteor about to land on us or something, just hoping that when we got back to the village we live in, that the house would still be standing.


If I wrote it in a book, people would say it was too much, unreal. I had someone say that about part of my first Canadian book, actually. It involved a natural disaster that would be common for the area, and a resulting encounter with an agitated bear. The reader said, “I know animals act strangely when there have been disasters, but it’s too much.”

Something nobody else has commented on, though I’ll have to think it over in edits. Truth is, personally I think it would be unrealistic not to have something like that happen. I’ve spent a lot of time living in bear country in my life, not to mention areas populated by cougars. And nothing pisses me off more than people who disregard the necessary safety protocols when entering the wilderness.

Of course, I’ve also been ten feet from a wild bear and I’ve done a lot of wilderness research on bear attacks because of traveling in the north. Maybe I’m just a bit prejudiced.

Anyway, that’s a side note. The moral of the story is, no matter how much you try to plan out your time efficiently, you never know when life is going to completely screw you over.

So, I’m a bit behind on some things. Oh well.

*sarcasm alert*

The good news for Canadian crime writers is that Ontario’s homicide rate is up. Edmonton Alberta still holds top spot for offing people in our lovely nation, but folks in Ontario are killing each other more often.

And this one is a lot of fun, in a disturbing sort of way. What are we becoming, a northern LA? A 23-year-old man was shot at on a Mississauga highway in a "scary" case of road rage that started with an unsafe lane change, the OPP says. Uh, the OPP is Ontario Provincial Police.

But, in keeping with a recent discussion here about how the media can twist things new facts are emerging about the American sex offender allegedly exiled to Canada to serve his sentence. I’m not even going to comment. The notion that even a minor sex offense is brushed off so lightly is a bit disturbing, because I’m used to the authorities regulating the location of people on parole, etc. And I don’t really see how the US can do that when he’s not in the country. But it’s another one of those hot topics. Main point here is, what the newspapers in this country reported was slanted.

Allegedly slanted.

Tune in tomorrow for more on the war of the words between Canada and the US over this one.