Ignorant Historian

Snippets from posts about the summer I moved from Oklahoma to North Carolina:

Saturday, July 16, 2005

I went to the mall today and actually ran into people I know.  I wasn’t expecting to do that this quickly!

Tuesday, July 25, 2005

I need to lay off the Pepper. I don’t feel good after drinking it…but it tastes so good!

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

I’m excited for classes to get started. Can I start this Thursday instead of next Thursday?

[And now, the story you want to hear:]

Friday, August 12, 2005

Sorry I’ve been posting so much recently, but this story I really can’t pass up. I don’t want to draw attention away from the more serious elements of my blog (wherever they exist) but I really got a kick out of this. One fact that might help you understand the story is that I really don’t like being around animals of any kind, though in high school I did do nature events where we had to identify different species and stuff.

Yesterday, as I was going out to my car (I park in a parking garage) from a glance at a distance I saw something in front of my car. I thought, “great, a cat. I don’t like cats.” Well, it wasn’t a cat. Guess what it was? When I asked that to a couple of friends, I got various responses including a beaver and a dead body, both wrong. A turtle! Okay, so that’s not that exciting necessarily, but this was a particularly clever turtle, and rather large too, about 10 inches in diameter.

So, as I contemplated this turtle, I thought about what turtles are known for: their cowardice. Okay, so if I start backing out, the turtle is just going to go inside his shell, so if I can just stradle him with my tires, I’ll be okay. Not that big of a problem, since he was about halfway between the tires. So I back up just enough to where he would almost be under my car, and got out to look to make sure that he didn’t move to where I would run over him. Like a turtle, he hadn’t moved. Well, I just didn’t feel comfortable with trying not to hit that little sucker, so I decided to try to move him. “Be brave, Ronnica!” I thought. So I tried to grab the turtle to move him to safer spot with my bare hand. I wasn’t about to touch him anywhere except on his shell, but with one hand I couldn’t lift him like that because he was too big. However, I did scare him so he started running away (pretty fast for a turtle)…right under my car. He’s smart too, he went right in the middle where I couldn’t get him and couldn’t scare him out the front (which I can only assume he thought I planned on eating him: turtle soup anyone?). So, knowing that he now was deathly afraid of me I got in my car quickly (in case my moves turned him into a fighter) and drove out of the parking space successfully without the slightest crunch.