Rainy Day Adventures

When a person goes to the DMV around here, s/he knows it is not likely to be a pleasant experience. But I have been putting off returning the handicapped plates on my car, once needed for ferrying around my parents, since their deaths in June of 2010. At first, I tried calling, but couldn't get through. Finally, last Friday, I simply decided to make an appointment and go in to take care of this. In all this time, I have never parked in a handicapped spot because I really dislike people who are not handicapped who take advantage of those spaces. There were too many times when my parents were with me and I needed such a spot and some able-bodied person took it up; I would never be that kind of person. But I didn't reckon it would be such a difficult job to give the plates back and put new ones on.
It doesn't rain that often in this part of the country, but when it does, it often rains hard and fast. Sometimes I have known flash floods to come up and overwhelm people, animals, cars, sweeping them away in a matter of a minute. It's raining almost that hard out there today, and it is cold and windy too, as it hasn't been most of the winter.
I took an umbrella, but that broke with the first hard gusts, and I was left wet and cold, without a screw driver (why didn't I think of that?), squatting in the dirty DMV parking lot trying to get the plate off and put the new ones back on with a coin while my shoes filled up with cold rainwater.
I had to laugh. Any other day, it would have been a breeze to put the plate back on, the warm sunshine on my back. Being a wimp, I thought about driving home without putting them back on, instead propping one of the plates up in the back windshield. But I didn't want to add to the day's problems by getting pulled over and ticketed by the cops. So I looked around me.
Luckily, there was a discount store in this center, Big Lots, where things like umbrellas and screwdrivers and the like are sold.
I walked into the store, my hands blackened with grime from the old plates, and asked a person shopping in a likely looking aisle whether this was where I could find the screwdrivers.
He looked me up and down. I am a woman of a "certain age," so I am not used to being looked at in that way anymore. So when he tried to pick me up in the hardware aisle, I laughed out loud. "You're so cute," he said. "Thanks," I replied, all business. "So what kind of screwdriver should I get to put a license plate on my car?"
I made it home, only to find that my books had arrived, as the publisher had promised. It's been an okay day after all!