Driving On Empty & Other Harsh Metaphors In My Life

So today I was reading Gwendomama's post about her really awesome outing with her two children to a local, organic strawberry field where you frolic about with the ocean right freaking across the street, while your children create beautiful memories of picking gigantic, ripe, red, juicy strawberries for which to make a be-yoo-tiful cake with later on. It sounded incredible, so I thought I'd copy her and take my two children today for a similar experience.

Uh...not so much.

When I got to the farm--which isn't close to much of anything--I realized that my yellow, you're-about-to-run-out-of-gas-you-moron light was on. I looked at my handy dandy trip computer that you only get if you're cool and have a minivan like me and saw that I had 14 miles to go. I hooked up the handy dandy GPS to find the nearest station and saw one that was 7.2 miles away through the very windy streets of Bonny Doon (I probably went right by your house while cursing, G!) only to find that about four miles into this journey the GPS suddenly switched to saying that I still had 11 miles to go to the station, which was now a big problem since I was down to 9 miles left on the handy dandy trip computer. Shit, right?
What was even cooler was that these windy roads have no shoulders for one to pull over onto in case of one running out of gas. So my curses turned to little prayers, and I guess God read my post from the other day because lo and behold I made it. I haven't played the see-how-far-on-empty game like that since high school. And let me tell you it's a hell of a lot less fun when you have your two children in the car. But yeah, I couldn't help but thinking that this was just a teensy tiny bit ironic a situation to find myself in given my recent state of zero motivation or energy to do much of anything. There's more to it, but I won't bore you with that here.

So to make a long post longer, here are the other 'harsh' metaphors I have come to realize plague me multiple times a day:

1. My antique cuckoo clock. My Dad bought this for his parents when he was in the navy and visiting Germany in the 1950s. I got it when my Grandma died. I'm totally sentimental and really enjoy having it in working condition, hanging in my office. But damn if it doesn't validate my feeling of partial craziness these days every 15 minutes. Which leads me to the last thing...

2. My cell phone. For some odd reason I programmed the Gnarls Barkley song 'Crazy' as my ringtone. Today I decided I need to change that. Immediately. Any suggestions?

P.S. I'd show you photos of my lovely strawberry outing, but it is 1990 in my world and I only had a disposable camera with me. Check out Gwendomama for what I'd hoped for :)