A little excitement

It's never fun to have a dead battery.  It's even worse when you realize that it's dead with all the kids in the car, buckled, and everyone else has left for the day.  Luckily, my dad has an extra car and I found the keys to it.  I thought, "no biggie.  I can do a jump all by myself.  Worse comes to worst I can pull out the owner's manual."  (It was a cool morning, and the doors on the van were open for the kids.)

I put the key in the ignition, start it up, and, since the truck is on a hill, I pull the brake release.  As soon as I do that, I realize the brake is not on, and the brake pedal goes all the way to the floor.  Throw it in reverse, and down the hill it rolls.  Without stopping.  No amount of pushing on the  brake pedal works.  I (thankfully) missed the trees, and got to a point on the driveway that was a bit level.  I knew I couldn't leave the truck there, so I try the gears, trying to see if maybe one of the gears will help me stop.  Maybe Park?  So, let's try to get this thing down and get going.

Not too bad, right?  Looks like a good parking spot.

Nope.  Not so much.  Can you see where the driveway ends?  Yeah, the truck wouldn't stop.  I kept trying brakes, gears, park....you name it.  All I could see was me hitting the garage, the concrete.  Or just hitting anything at all.  The thing I did hit was a tree.  Can you see it?  I turned the wheel hard, went past the house and into the tree.  Thankfully, I barely bumped it at all.  It was enough to stop the truck, and not do any harm.  Guardian angels were working overtime guiding and slowing the truck.

Needless to say, I was pretty freaked out.  I was shaking and crying, and called Tommy in tears, and said "I HIT A TREE!"  But as I told him the story, he started laughing.  He said I had better take photos and blog about it.  My kids (who were in the car the whole time) never really noticed anything, except when I came out crying and to to answer the phone call from my mom.  She came home so fast, and was picturing everything much worse than it was.  I was just thinking to myself that I feel a little like a teenager again living in my parents' house, and almost wrecking my dad's car just validated all those feelings!

Oh, and if you were wondering, I didn't get the car jumped.  I was a bit shaken up, and Mom wasn't feeling to confident in the process so we got help from the neighbor who is a firefighter.