{"id":7029,"date":"2009-10-07T20:09:11","date_gmt":"2009-10-08T00:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=7029"},"modified":"2009-10-07T20:09:11","modified_gmt":"2009-10-08T00:09:11","slug":"stick-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=7029","title":{"rendered":"Stick It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Von is sad about the slow demise of <a href=\"http:\/\/obsidianwings.blogs.com\/obsidian_wings\/2009\/10\/we-only-play-the-hits.html\">manual transmissions<\/a>. I am, too. But only a little.<\/p>\n<p>My first car was a manual. My father bought it for me when i came home from college on a t-giving break. He picked me up at the Albany train station, and said \"This [this beetle-green Hyundai Excel] is your car! I'll drive to the Northway (aka I87), and then you can take it from there\". I'd driven motorcycles before, so I knew what I had to do, but I'd never driven a stick-shift car. Still, here's no better teacher than necessity, so, I learned how to drive manual in 70mph traffic - to make it even more challenging, I wasn't allowed to go more than 55mph because this was the car's first day out, and we Had To Obey The Manual which explicitly said we shouldn't exceed 55mph for the first 500 miles.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/steve.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>While I was there, I took my brother for a drive and, embarrassingly, stalled many times at stop signs and such. Ugh. But after a week of driving around my home town, it was time to go back to school.<\/p>\n<p>It was on the way, so I stopped in Syracuse to see my mother and sisters. She was living up near S.U., at the time. S.U. is on a hill. Because it's Syracuse, there was snow the night before, which melted, and then refroze by the time I got into town. And when I started up the hill to her place, I caught a red light on a steep, black-icy, side street. Of course there was a car behind me. And of course the ice was so slick I was sliding backwards just waiting for the light. And when that light changed. I stepped on the gas, popped the clutch, and that little Hyundai screamed it's skinny little tires on the ice - and the car in back of me eased back away from me - until they dug through and caught pavement and we went rocketing up the hill like a cheap teal demon - bug-eyed and white-knuckled, screaming and trembling. <\/p>\n<p>Good times!<\/p>\n<p>Also, Animals is better than The Final Cut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Von is sad about the slow demise of manual transmissions. I am, too. But only a little. My first car was a manual. My father bought it for me when i came home from college on a t-giving break. He picked me up at the Albany train station, and said \"This [this beetle-green Hyundai Excel] [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}