Today it’s flooding here.  We’re been under a flash flood warning for a few hours.  Some of the roads are completely covered with water.  This makes it fun to drive around.  (And I’m not being sarcastic.)  Since I have a truck, it can handle standing water well.  This morning I was creating waves about 5 feet high, splashing the windshield of some of the cars in the other lane.

If little childrens happen to be outside playing in the rain, I can create huge waves that envelope them, where it’s like they’re at Wild River Country for free.  And who doesn’t like going there?  So it’s a good deal all around.

Of course, it’s not always flooding, so this is a limited-time opportunity.  However, I have a friend named Lyn who used to have a hooptie (i.e., clunker) of a car — a 1981 Ford Mustang hatchback — and it had an interesting feature : the windshield washer fluid would shoot out the side, several feet past the car.  It barely even hit the windshield.  He used to drive around town and shoot water on unsuspecting kids that were walking or riding their bicycle on the side of the road.  One time a boy was so surprised by it that he drove his bicycle off in the ditch and wrecked.  He would also do this to friends in parking lots when they walked up to the window to talk to him.

Speaking of that car, it was truly unique and unusual.  You might think it was nice because it was a Mustang, but this wasn’t a nice one.  It was grey, not shiny, and it attracted bird poop like you wouldn’t believe.  We never knew whether it was because the car was grey or if it was just because of his bad luck (because he was left-handed), but it was like birds would come along and carpet-bomb the car with their droppings.

Perhaps the worst “feature” of the car was that it had no power whatsoever.  It would go from 0 to 25 in 8 seconds.  That’s flooring it.  Seriously.  The time to 60 was really bad.  I’m not sure our stopwatch would go that high, though, and I’m fairly certain he didn’t want us to time it.  It had an automatic transmission, and there had to be some engine problems for its performance to be that bad.  It also smoked some and idled really, really high.  1981 was arguably the worst year for Mustangs.

But there was another good feature of that car — the audio carried a long ways.  In fact, I think the bass was louder outside the vehicle than it was inside.  That’s not ideal, of course, but when you’re in high school and wanting to impress folks with your sound system from a distance, that’s a good quality.

I could tell a number of stories about that car, but I’ll save them for another time, before this post gets too long…

Site search tags: flooding, flood, Ford, Mustang, hatchback, sound system, bass, hooptie, washer fluid, 0 to 60, 0-60, 1981,