It's wintertime, there's a helluva lot of snow on the ground, and my 4WD car is in the shop.  So, when it comes time for groceries and the liquor store, we have no alternative but to take our big old Ford F150 pickup truck, with its snow plow attached, down off the mountain and go lurching into town.

It looks a lot like the picture, but decades older, with a much (much!) longer bed.

My husband has a hard time getting around, so I usually go with him to run in and out of the stores. He does the parking.

It's hard to turn off the writerly brain a lot of the time, and I'm usually yanked from a writing session to “go run errands”, so I'm typically still writing in my head as we hit the road.

There we were, trying to find parking along the streets of this small, narrow town (since there's no getting that vehicle into most Main Street parking lots). He began backing into a slot on the street, and I was impatient to hop out and let him finish that while I started the errand in the store. But, no, he didn't pause to let me do that — he concentrated on the mechanics of the parking and left me fuming in frustration until he stopped and I could get started.

And then it hit me. I wanted him to leave out the boring bits of the scene and go straight to the action. What a pity we can't do that in real life.