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AUTOKNOWN BETTER
OhNo, Apolo - it's a pothole!	Rim Vining
March 2010 AUTOKNOWN BETTER By Rim Vining “OhNo, Apolo - it’s a pothole!” Always after me Lucky Charms... treasured deals at Pot ‘O Gold Motors! Of course, it could be Banshee Motors run by Darby O’Gill and the Little People. That’s scary. Yes, folks, it is March, i.e. Spring in Virginia, and a month with a host of fascinating automotive opportunities. We have St. Patrick’s Day, where we start all the green cars that have been sitting all winter. We have the Vernal Equinox (that fore-teller of Easter, which is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox), the time you can only drive cars with a 50/50 front-to-rear weight ratio. You can also balance an egg on the equinox. This spring the automotively burdened will feel the urge to drive stronger than usual, given the winter wonderland we have been living. Driving as a winter sport came into its own this year... almost Olympian. By the last storm, the powers-that-be had hired everyone who owned a 4-wheel drive with a plow, or a tractor with a blade, and after extensive training, turned them loose on our streets. Having barely seen a plow for the first few ‘dustings,” we had four plows in about 2 hours after the last storm. Each one would plow and spread sand and the next would come and scrape off the sand with their plow and sand some more until each one had gotten a turn to charge for their services. But it was the last and largest plow that, after two months of single lane roads, decided to widen them, creating solid ice jersey walls along the shoulders and driveways; a bob-sled track worthy of an Olympic event. No way out from the top of the hill to the bottom. Just a smooth ice-sluice… entertaining to say the least. This wouldn’t have been as memorable had I not spent hours swinging an axe and placing plastic explosives to clear the jersey wall from the end of my driveway, only to wake up at 3 to the sound of another conscientious sub-contractor pushing the sand, making the track smoother and faster, filling in gaps in the jersey walls. I know in more northern environments the clearing of the driveway is a ritual of biblical proportions. As a kid in Sudbury, MA, it was what we did between snowstorms, constantly. My father referred to the hard working guys out there [plowing by work lights on their roofs] as “pig-eyed bastards.” Funny how traditions are passed on. As I woke at 3, the first words out of my mouth were about “pig-eyed bastards.” Still, spring is in the air. It must be, right? We watched the 52^nd running of the Daytona 500 in Florida, where it was supposed to be warm but wasn’t. We watched the best drivers and organizers in NASCAR get stumped by a pothole. They need to train in the mid-Atlantic; on the DC Beltway up near the Temple, where they race three-wide through the turns, dodging potholes and jersey barriers that they move between laps. Can’t you see those guys stuck on the east side of the Chatham Bridge wondering how to cross? autoknown @aol.com Rim Vining is a gold medallionist. Someone should tell him that the 70’s are over. No one wears a gold medallion around their neck these days unless they won it in the snow in Vancouver.
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Rim Vining is a gold medallionist. Someone should tell him that the 70’s are over. No one wears a gold medallion around their neck these days unless they won it in the snow in Vancouver.