Happy Birthday llminnowpea

Happy birthday @limminowpea! I hope you have the very sexy dreams of Ben every night for a week! 😉👍🏼

Happy Birthday!

OK, so I forgot about the stray animal story. Which animal should I choose today? Cow? Pig? Dog? Moose? Flock of wild turkeys? The fox and the dogs? OK, maybe moose & turkeys aren't technically strays, but let's go with that one today. It is actually two separate stories.

Moose 1: I was driving home from a late work meeting (like, really late - I was two hours from home in the middle of moose & snowmobile country). A coworker was driving behind me and I was listening to Enya (of all things) in my little red VW Golf (omg, but I loved that car). ANYWAY, there I was, driving along, thinking "I wonder if Steve (a flatlander) knows to be careful when driving at night up here because you can't see moose eyes shine when car lights hit them."

Suddenly, out runs a moose right in front of me. I lay on the brakes, ducked, and, I am sorry to say, take the legs right out from under the poor thing. We did a perfect vector - I was going south, it was going east, and we ended up on the opposite side of the road going directly SE. Enya was still playing. 

I opened my eyes and looked around for the moose, realized I was on the wrong side of the road, popped the cluth, and pushed the car out of the driving lane and into the breakdown lane.

People started stopping at that point. The sheriff was called and we all stood around waiting. A local nurse who stopped checked me all over. When the sheriff got there, he looked around as I walked up, shined a light in my eyes and said: "you should be dead." Then we all look back at the Golf, which had the windshield and roof crushed right down to the headrest. I respond with "I ducked" and we go sit in the car and fill out various reports. The sheriff asked me if I wanted the moose and I said no, so it was taken by one of the people who stopped (It was a yearling, so it was taller than my car, but not at its stud weight, which is what saved me). My coworker dropped me off at home and I went to bed.

Moose 2: This one was closer to home and has a happier ending. It was after dark in the spring and we had had a new snow the day before, but it was warm enough that we got a heavy snow fog (which is gorgeous, btw, and I highly recommend googling it). ANYWAY, I was driving a Toyota Rav4 this time and because cars were coming towards me, I saw what looked like a large, stray horse. Nope, it was the silhouette of a moose. A big one - fully adult, just standing in the road.

Now, you can't just honk at a moose or drive by. You gotta be real careful, because you never know if it is going to lose its temper and charge the car. I stopped and put on my hazards and turned off my headlights (to stop blinding it). The cars approaching were not good people and they were honking, flashing their lights, and yelling and the moose has decided to cross the road right where one of the local cemeteries is located, so it was stuck. It didn't want to go back and started to get scared and was trapped by the fence. So, I had to yell at the idiots and tell them to turn off the high beams and shut their mouths to it could have a chance to figure it out. We sat there in the dark, with no noise but our engines idling and hazards blinking waiting for that damn moose to move. Finally, since I was on a timeframe, I said "fuck it", slid to the passenger side, got out that door, and walked down the road a bit. The moose saw me and decided to hightail it around the cemetery and into the woods beyond.

Those are fantastic stories! Thanks for sharing them! My raccoon, bird and deer stories would pale in comparison!