The Unfortunate Events of Brenna: My winter college experience.

By Brenna Eller
Opinion Page Editor

The first week back from winter break, I was alone again, except I didn’t have as many stuff as I did the first week of college. I also didn’t get lost this time.

However, I did forget my keys a few times already. Luckily, my roommate leaves the door unlocked some mornings. I’m sure you want to know the unfortunate events that happened thus far.

Well, on Jan. 15, a week after school started, my best friend asked me if I could give her a ride to her house off campus. I got in my car, not waiting for it to heat up or anything. Who would do a silly thing like that?

Anyways, I should first explain that my 2001 Montero Sport Mitsubishi doesn’t have four-wheel drive. So you can imagine how it handles ice. Hint – not well.

My car was making these horrible cringe-worthy sounds and for some reason I didn’t turn earlier and had to go around on Plum Street. It wasn’t salted yet, and I had to turn onto it from 16th Avenue. As I was making a left-hand turn, I started to slide on the unsalted pavement.

To say I was startled is an understatement. I think I saw my life flash before my eyes because I swerved out of control and then somehow, by the grace of God, swerved back into control.

The bad thing was that there was a line of cars and all of those people saw what I did. I made the stupid decision to look at one guy who saw me and his mouth was hanging open like a cartoon character. I just waved as a sign that I was OK and took a deep breath.

Once I finally made it over to the Parker’s Student Union Parking Lot, I parked in the worst parking spot I could find, even though it was the nearest to the front door, and caught my breath.

When my friend got in my car, I told her everything and she laughed of course. Then, as I was trying to back out of the parking spot, I noticed that my tires were spinning and wouldn’t reverse.

So I tried gaining momentum by going forward a little bit and then back. After burning rubber a few times, I not-so-subtly backed out and drove to Rachel’s house.

The rest of the week, I made sure to turn extremely slow.

Another event I experienced was getting locked out of my family car. Here we go. So, two weekends ago, I went to a wedding of a family friend, and it was all very beautiful. My mom and sister came to pick me up because I didn’t have my car that week.

Before the wedding started, my family was fashionably late, as always, but somehow we pulled it off to where people didn’t really notice us. We got there right before the wedding party walked down the aisle. Yeah, we got there that close.

After the wedding, we went to Kohl’s because mom wanted to go shop before the reception.

We ended up getting a whole bunch of stuff, and once we left, there was still time to get to the wedding reception, but since we have bad luck with keys, mom forgot that she had left her keys in the car.

So, we had to call my dad, who wasn’t very pleased, to have to drive 45 miles to bring the spare key.

We waited inside the breezeway of Kohl’s and it freezing outside, of course. When my dad came finally, we ended up not going to the reception, because it was awkwardly late and we didn’t want to have to explain everything that happened.

On the bright side, my sister went home with my dad while my mom and I went to Olive Garden to catch up and just spend time together.

We ended up having a pretty great time despite missing a wedding reception and feeling awful about not telling the happy couple congratulations.

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