My "best" story is my hell week in the summer of 2005.
My youngest was a little over a year old and had recently been diagnosed with asthma. Infant asthma or whatever. Most kids outgrow it, and mine did. Anyway, the kid gets diagnosed and so the treatment is steroids. I remember specifically asking the doctor, in a half-kidding kind of way, if 'roid rage was a thing with kids. He looked me straight in the eye and said no, the lying sonuvabitch.
The prescription is given and the doses start a few days before we are going to leave on vacation. The plan is to rent a van and drive from Boston, to Niagara Falls, up to Toronto, and back. It's for a week. Perfectly good trip. I've done that trip a couple times before. So why are we going? Well, with new people, of course.
One is my wife. That's great. Hell, I married her.
Next, my two kids. Son, aged 4, and the youngest, newly 'roided up one, age 1'ish.
Oh, and did I mention my wife's two parents? They're great. Calm and friendly. They are up for everything. As long as you don't mind them walking slow, it's fine.
Then there's my my wife's younger sister, and her husband. She's great. He's an asshole and I hope he spends eternity in the seventh circle of hell being the personal love slave of a monstrous, many tentacled demon.
Oh, and my wife's older sister. And her husband. And their (then) only child, who is a little under one. And her husband's mother.
12 people. One big van. Many hours in the van together. Many, many, MANY hours in the van together. Hint: This is not a good idea. DON'T do this.
A few days before we are supposed to leave (summer, 2005), my driveway springs a leak. My wife calls me at work and says the driveway is leaking. What?! "The driveway. There's water running down it". What??! Where is it coming from? No clue. Sure enough, get home, and it's like Jed Clampett put a hole in my driveway and discovered oil, but instead of oil, it's ****ing water. Bubbling up and running down my driveway. Like at a gallons per minute rate.
This leads to spending frantic days trying to figure out the problem, get it fixed, and speaking with homeowners insurance trying to get it fixed just before I'm going to leave on this too-complicated-by-half family fun time.
**** it, time's up. We're leaving with water streaming down the driveway. Surprised the Sierra Club didn't come and burn my house down for wasting so much water.
And away we go. My youngest is crying. CONSTANTLY crying. Screaming, really. Nothing settles him down. A van with like 28 women who love holding babies can't calm him down. A van with a handful of guys who want to murder the little bastard also can't calm him down, not that we tried much. Mostly we planned highly illegal acts to shut him up. But on and on he cries.
Mile
after
mile.
My wife and I are dying a slow death here. "He's never been like this before". "I can't imagine what's wrong". 11 other people are having their vacation wrecked by this bastard and there is nothing we can do.
This continues for the entire ****ing week. We knew, of course. I told my wife it was the steroids. She agreed, but if a doctor tells her to do something, IT IS ****ING WELL GOING TO HAPPEN. I say let's take him off the meds and restart when we get back. I might as well have asked to launch him to the moon (one of my less practical but preferred alternatives). NO WAY. HE NEEDS THE MEDICINE SO HE GETS THE MEDICINE. Well, alrighty then.
Finally, the week is coming to a merciful close. It is Friday, August 19, 2005. It's our last full day there, and we are driving home the next day. I didn't know that date off the top of my head, but it's easy to find. I just need to look up "Toronto Rain 2005" on Google, but that part comes later.
FIRST....
We are driving through a mall parking lot, returning to a restaurant we had visited earlier in the week that we lliked. Last dinner together of the trip. As we are going through the lot, I'm sitting in the second row on the edge, and suddenly WHAM! and I'm sitting on the floor, having been knocked off my seat. WTF? Turns out, an idiot woman driving a car somehow accelerated instead of braking, and crashed into the side of the van. She couldn't have been going all that fast, but she gunned it and hit us. We're a big van and she's driving a little ****ing Celica or something, so no biggie right? Right.
Except for teh broken axle.
Right. Of course.
So we get out of the van and start calling around. Cops come, and so do the tow trucks come. Like MANY tow trucks. Apparently, in Canada, it's open season for tow trucks and first come first served, so they all zoom to an accident scene to try to scoop the vehicles and hold them hostage for payment. But I digress. Toronto's finest are there, witness statements. We're all fine, but the idiot driver of the car KO'ed herself briefly. So ambulance.
And 10 other people, one screaming ****head (of course), and me, wondering WTF I am doing stuck in Toronto with my wife, one good child, one child I want ot murder, and 8 other people who hate our guts.
Oh, and how are we getting home?
Drip. Drip, drip, drop.
Rain.
Call around, get a rental car company to send a car to pick us up. WTF is going to happen to the rental van we are supposed to return tomorrow? Who knows.
The rain is getting pretty ****ing serious so we go into a bank, and explain our tale of woe.
Suddenly rain went from rain, to Rain, to RAIN, to
RAIN OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS!!
Surely he jests. Surely he exaggerates. Rain is rain.
Yeah, well, there is a Wikipedia entry for my ****ing rain buster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souther...tbreak_of_2005
And here's an article from 2009 about how all that rain is still affecting the city 4 years later.
http://www.torontosun.com/news/toron...09381-sun.html
Quote:
It's been four years to the day since a storm of near-biblical proportions almost sank Toronto.
On Aug. 19, 2005, upwards of 150 mm of rain fell in a three-hour afternoon deluge, an amount eclipsed only by 1954's Hurricane Hazel.
Toronto's Emergency Services handled 1,700 calls to 911 in just four hours. More than 10,000 Torontonians were left without power, and City Hall received more than 1,200 calls for flooded basements.
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And where was I during the middle of that? Engaged in an epic, THREE HOUR, four (yes, four) mile rountrip to the rental car company, to rent a car, and get back to the mall. Traffic was at a standstill, streets were flooding, my family was stuck at a bank that was closing any minute now (they stayed open late to give shelter to my family and some others that had few options).
Finally we get back and the rain stops and we all go back to the hotels. The drama is over.
A few post-scripts.
1. Now it's the drive home, and it's just my 4. We rented 3 separate cars to get everyone home. My youngest is still acting like a little psychopath. He had spent his entire life addicted to pacifiers, but they barely worked on this trip. He kept htem in his mouth and used them, but kind of cried around them. But he had always been very attached. We had known we needed to break him of the habit, but had been afraid to before.
Now. NOW. MWAHAHAHA REVENGE!! We're driving along, not even out of Canada yet, and my wife is trying to settle him and using the pacifier which doesn't really work. I tell her that TODAY is the day to break him of th epacifier addiction, rip the thing out of his mouth and fling it out the window. The crying ramps up to epic proportions, and my wife and I just sort of smile at each other, sit back in the car, and give up all effort at settling him. I'm basically cackling like Renfield. CRY IF YOU WANT, I DON'T CARE!!
And that was the last time he ever had a pacifier.
2. I won't even go into the insurance nightmare around the van. The rental company filed a lawsuit for like $10,000 and didn't get their van back for months. Multiple conference calls with the company, our insurance. Ugh.
3. the driveway water issue was caused by a break in the water line bringing water to the house. We had to replace it twice, ultimately, with the last replacing the whole line (it was PVC or somethign) with copper. And my driveway/lawn looked like it had a lightning streak through it for two years.