Getting Back On The Horse

After the traumatic morning I had on Sunday, I waited as long as I could to get gas in my car. In other words, I waited until I was thisclose to empty. I figured that it probably wouldn’t be smart to drive by the gas station on the way home without stopping, so I took a deep breath and turned in, parking myself at the pump on the far end.

Seriously, I was nervous. The funny thing is, I’ve been pumping gas since I was sixteen: nearly twenty-seven A LOT of years now. It took that one moment…

that one HORRIFYING, SCARY, EMBARRASSING moment

…to screw it all up. It wasn’t like I was going to ask my husband to pump the gas into my car for the rest of my life: in fact, Jim was the one who started pumping the gas on Sunday to begin with, and yet I still made the mistake!

(Side note to those of you who implied that what happened might have been Jim’s fault: YOU PEOPLE ARE CRAZY. And I mean that in the nicest way. It was totally my fault that I, albeit temporarily, broke that gas pump. Jim let me know that he was heading into the store, which means “YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF THE GAS PUMP NOW.” I appreciate your attempts to make me feel better by blaming him, but my wonderful hubby was innocent. Just sayin’.)

Anyway, I was freaking out a little bit as I put the nozzle in the gas tank and started it up. I stood there the whole time, watching the numbers on the pump as they rose–though I can’t complain because it wasn’t too long ago that gas cost a dollar more per gallon!–and then when the pump clicked off, I took a deep breath. I put the nozzle back into its holder on the pump, twisted my gas cap back on, and checked not once, not twice, but three times to make sure that the nozzle was indeed back where it belonged before I walked away. I tweeted a picture of it…

…and then got back into the car, buckled up, and started the ignition.

Believe it or not, I STILL looked back at the pump a couple of times from the driver’s seat, and as I drove away–slowly–I even cringed as if I expected the nightmare to happen all over again.

I guess it’s going to take a while.