Do you ever look back on some small, seemingly insignificant, choice that you made and think: “man, if I’d chosen differently, things would have worked out MUCH better”?

I had a LOT of those thoughts last night.

After work, I stopped quickly at home, changed out of my snow boots and into some more stylish thin leather boots, took my heavy book out of my purse, and headed out to meet an old friend for a drink.

We had a drink, then met up with her sister and had dinner. After dinner, her sister dropped me back off at my car, I made a funny joke about how I’d never be able to get out of my parking place in all that snow, and she drove away.

You think you know where this is going, right? Well, you’re almost right. I got into my car, started it, and eased gently forward until the wheels started to spin. Then I eased gently backwards until the wheels started to spin. I was actually making progress to get out of the spot, and had almost crested the (huge! And frozen solid!) snowbank in front of my car when suddenly, the car freaked out, all the indicator lights came on at once, and then…nothing. I tried restarting, but all I got was the telltale “click click click” of a dead battery.

So I took out my phone, only to discover a “battery low” warning. Regretting my laziness at not charging my phone last night, I used the last of my battery to call AAA, (the second time I’ve had to call them for a dead battery in THREE DAYS, I might add,) and the cheerful AAA lady said “great, someone will be there anytime between now [9:17] and 11:17 p.m.”

This was the weather last night in Chicago:

Mostly Cloudy 2°F Feels like: -9°F

So! As my feet slowly turned to icicles in my non-warm boots, I sat, shivering, with nothing to read, waiting for two hours for a jump. I was left alone with my thoughts, and my thoughts were pretty much a constant rotation of the following:

(1) “feet COLD. Why am I such an idiot? Why did I not wear my warm boots?”

(2) “dude, I’m bored. This would suck a lot less if I hadn’t taken my book out of my bag,” and

(3) “if I hadn’t been too lazy to charge my phone last night, I could be texting/calling people/passing the time by playing reMovem right now.”

The AAA guy finally arrived and successfully jumped the car.  Then, I had to drive around aimlessly for 25 minutes to make sure the charge would hold overnight so I could get the car to the shop this morning.  

I am not ashamed to say that I spent part of that 25 minutes in a McDonald’s drive through. By that point, I had definitely shivered off enough calories to justify those fries.