As many of you may know, the East Coast has been swamped by rains and flooding. And what do people want most when it rains or floods? You guessed it, ice cream.
I was having a craving for a local restaurants faux ice cream. I’m not really sure what it is, except for yummy, but I think it’s actually ice milk. All that aside, my favorite ice cream-ish treat is a Heath Bar Freezee with extra Heath and no chocolate squirt. On Tuesday, my son was visiting and I thought that after all the rain we had been getting, it would be nice for him, his father and I to go get some ice cream. We piled into his car and headed over to the Tastee Diner. Just as we pulled up, a cloudburst was dumping torrential amounts of rain so we waited a moment in the car before we were going to go in. While we were sitting there, another car pulled up, apparently with the same thought of frozen confections.
Oddly, a light caught my eye and I glanced into the restaurant to see a 60’s era heat lamp swinging wildly and a hand reaching up to steady it and then OOPS!!, the lamp fell off leaving a heavy metal cable without it’s light. My first thought was “free meat” since this heat lamp typically sits over the hunk of roast beef.
The rain was beginning to let up enough that we could get out of our car and as my husband and son were climbing out, I watched in horror as the employee came into view (he must have been on a stepstool) and began to try and re-attach the light to the cable… while it was still a LIVE cable.
I’m sure you can see where this is going…..
While this tableau was unfolding, an eldery handicapped couple started to get out of their car. This was no easy feat as both of them seemed somehow incapacitated. I’m now having visions of the place bursting into flames and this couple getting cremated before they were ready! I began to tell them that maybe they didn’t want to go into the restaurant…
Moments after the employee began to fiddle with the cable, all the lights began to flicker and sparks and smoke started shooting out of the end of the cable. Shocked (get it) by this, the employee dropped the lamp again. By this time, the cable began to shoot high powered jets of flame out of it’s broken end, and yet the elderly couple are still trundling towards the door as if nothing were happening. Again, I called out my alarm while I began to back up into the parking lot, my brave husband practically pressing his nose to the glass for a better look and my son laughing and edging away as well.
So how do you put out a dangling cable shooting high powered electrical jets of flame? Well of course you get your fire extinguisher and begin to try and spray it from a distance. Being a dangling cable however, this is kind of hit or miss. At this point the cable begins to burn in earnest and flames are beginning to lick up towards the ceiling. Thankfully, either someone thought to throw the breaker or the breaker went off by itself and the lights shut off……just as the elderly couple were reaching for the handle of the door. What was their comment?
“Huh, the light’s went out. Guess they are closed.”
The guy with the fire extinguisher was still shooting his propellant at the dangling wire and all was coming under control, but you would think that these people might have noticed the flame, the smoke, the haze of propellant in the restaurant, the very nervous woman calling to them in the parking lot (not even 10 feet away) or the two laughing men staring in through the glass.
Needless to say, we piled back into the car and headed down the street to Coldstone Creamery. We went in, stood in a line that never moved for about 10 minutes and decided to try the SuperFresh that was just across the parking lot for our ice cream. After pacing the ice cream aisle for 15 minutes (to which my husband commented that we could have been done over at Coldstone within that time) I decided to buy some little ice cream novelty called “Popables”. Let me warn you that these are the most heinous little excuses for ice cream you could ever create, so of course my husband ate all remaining 58 from a container of 60.
By this time, I’m thinking that some higher power is warning me that I really DON’T want ice cream, but never being one to listen, my son took me to the grocery store right up the street from where I live, the whole time joking about how he was carting around his parents during flash flooding with gas at 3.00 a gallon just to get ice cream from a store I could have walked to!
By now I know you are all in great suspense and concern over whether or not I got my dairy fix. Fear not! For I did, in fact, get my yummies… after buying a container of coffee ice cream, a baggie of dark chocolate chips, a baggie of Heath crumbles AND some caramel topping…. my lactose intolerant self had a grand old time!
Snippets and Tidbits 