So, Kenny and I went to Moscow yesterday. It was an all-day trip. I had fallen asleep in my recliner at about 9PM Wednesday night, and went to bed at about 11:30-ish or so. I then woke up at 4:15 AM. I tried to go back to sleep, but nothing worked. So, at 5AM, I got up and printed off a practice exam for the test I was to take.
The test is called the "Miller Analogies Test," and, as the title will lead you to believe, the entire test is made up of analogies. The subject matter covers everything from pop culture to history; from literature to word games; from math to sciences. You really have to have a wide knowledge base (and a love for trivia, I think) to do well on this test. Just as a yardstick, the average test taker of the MAT gets 30 questions right out of 120.
Anyway, so I took the practice test, and missed 21 questions. But, it didn't make me feel any more confident, as the test was a simulated one concocted by Harvard and was rather old. But it got my brain pull-started. I got ready, and we left here at 9:30AM. We took Highway 41 to Post Falls and got on the freeway and then headed south toward Pullman.
And that's where things got seriously FUBAR'd. We knew that the LTD has the ability to have one of those window washer things (the liquid squirter part), but it didn't work. We assumed that it was out of fluid, even though Kenny had glanced at the engine compartment once to see if there was a reservoir, but he was unable to locate it then... but he really wasn't looking. Before we reached Post Falls, the windshield was COVERED in road grime. We stopped at a gas station in Spirit Lake and really looked for the windshield cleaner reservoir. All the plumbing for it is there, but the tank itself was missing. So, we cleaned the windshield there.
So, we're heading south, and we encounter a very dense fog. It was so thick that we couldn't see 25 feet around us in any direction. We passed Steptoe Butte, but we couldn't see it. Couldn't even see the wheat fields around us. What with the fog and the road grime being thrown up by the semi in front of us and coating our windshield, Kenny was, essentially, driving blind. So, I took to throwing bottled water (left in the car from this past football season, as the kids tended to leave full bottles of water in the car where they got pushed under the seats) on the windshield. I accomplished this by rolling down my window, holding the bottle by the very bottom, and flinging the water catapult style across the windshield. This worked quite well.
However, at about the halfway mark, we went to turn on the wipers, and this horrible electric burning smell came out from the dashboard and the wipers stopped working. We were convinced that the wiper motor had burned up on us, in a dense fog, behind a truck, on sloppy roads, with a snow storm coming... and we weren't yet even to Pullman, much less Moscow, and we had a return trip to make.
About 10 miles down the road, Kenny decides to try the wipers again, and, lo and behold, they WORK! Heh. We finally find the place I need to take my test, and I go in and get signed in and pay for the test. I expected the test to be hard. It wasn't. Well, not really. Having gone over the practice test helped me a lot, I think, as I got a raw score of 437, which, as my advisor at Gonzaga put it, puts me in the 90th percentile of people who take the MAT.
Anyway, so, we headed back to Spokane. More fog. More water splashing. Went to Denny's for dinner. We got home at about 7:30PM or so, so the whole trip took almost 12 hours.
