smack!

The other day, I got in my car to go run an errand when I heard a loud, SMACK! It sounded like something had hit my car. My immediate response was that a squirrel had fallen onto my car. You see, we have a lot of big trees in our neighborhood that squirrels like to use as their jungle gym, hopping from one branch to another, and sometimes they aren’t very graceful. Presently, there is a dead squirrel laying on the ground, well, its remains are smushed into the asphalt. I know, sad. I have also seen others on the streets with tails frozen sticking up. Yeah, gross.

Anyway, it’s obviously not that abnormal for me to have thought a squirrel had hit my car. So, I got out of my car, and scoured the roof of my car for a dead squirrel. No squirrel. So, then I thought, “Hmm, maybe a tire popped!” I circled my car. All tires were still intact and unpunctured. I knew I had heard something, but I was too cold to stay outside my car, searching for the cause of the loud noise. I got back in my car and began considering other possibilities. As I was sitting there, waiting for my car to get warm, I remembered how the neighbors get angry if we park on “their side of the street.”

I thought to myself, “Oh my gosh, I really pissed them off. They are shooting at me… Maybe that was a pellet gun!” I was weirded out, and sort of scared, so I drove off. I was less than a few miles away when I realized that I had a case of Diet Coke in the back. I pulled over, lifted the back-hatch to find that each of the cans had expanded to the point where the tops had blown off, and a mess of brown slushy ice covered the back of my car.

Moral of the story: don’t leave canned drinks in your car in the winter in Minnesota; you might mistake it for dead squirrels or angry neighbors.