Friday, March 27, 2009

A Bug and The Point

Well folks, finally grabbing a moment to post!

We were jogging a few weeks ago in the Orting park system, and it was a great time. We were doing an hour, and we were about 50 minutes into it and were returning too soon to our minivan. Well, we turned around one time to get that last 10 minutes. Feeling fresh, I sprinted back alone the last 100 yards. While I was doing the Bruce Jenner (dating myself), I saw a strange sight....some idiot parked their van illegally. In the space of maybe one second I heard my wife scream, and I realized that the green van on the truck was mine, and I was the idiot.

We were towed. And so were a bunch of people who parked in the middle of NOWHERE. I mean seriously....this is Orting people, not New York City!! There were 80 LLS people jogging in this town, which probably doubled its population.

My van was long gone, not having enough juice in my legs to catch the tow truck. They had three tow trucks lined up grabbing cars off the lot like donuts off of a tray. It was outrageous. Here these fine folks are raising money for charity and this subhuman calls the towing company and orders them to remove all of our vehicles. The cost? $300 bucks per car if they made it back to the station.

We were lucky. We asked the guy to call the truck and bring it back, lowering our extortion to $100. But we as a team of sweaty, tired, spandex-clad do-gooders weren't going to watch one more vehicle depart the station. (go team!)


The tow guys (what is their official title? A few words come to mind...) really slowed down the process, but they were hooking up their next victim....a cute little VW Bug. Well, I think Don had the great idea to get a critical mass of people around this little guy and physically drag the car to safety (shown in action above) . The whole exercise was ridiculous. I mean, did we REALLY have to muscle this thing 50 feet while this burly tow-truck guy watched with his 5000 hp tow truck in idle?





Nevertheless, we all got around, found a hold, and moved that Bug with relative ease. Who knew? The same solution wouldn't have worked for my poor minivan ( almost 6000 lbs) but it was very satisfying to save this person money, and stick it to the greedy, heartless owner of that land. We've really lost our way in this culture...we've lost our humanity in so many ways. The owner of that land was there. He was on his little bike, and scurried away when the mass of LLS people got to high. Coward. He said there was a shipment coming on the rail system. Knowing that by the time that arrived the LLS people would be long gone, icing their sore body parts by then didn't change his soulless attack. Shame on him. But having done that little save made our wonderful team breakfast taste all the better, and thank you to the leaders who donate to Julie and i to offset the towing costs. You're all very cool people.



To end this post I want to show a picture of the little girl, Autumn, that Julie and I are running for. Autumn is a soccer player, an athlete and a charming girl. You can see her energy and strength in this picture, despite the tether to the life-giving machinery. She's getting better and that's the point of it all.

Autumn Fairall


Here's a link to a very nice story about her that was done last summer. The picture above is more recent, and shows us how far she's really come.



- Joe