Furious George

I am convinced that George, the owner of the scooter-rental place, hates us. He has a pained expression on his face everytime he sees Anna and me. After seeing Anna try out the scooter for the first time, he was reluctant to even rent them to us. Then, there was the incident where the brake on my scooter was locked into place because somebody must have hit it. George suspected that I was the one who crashed it, even though Grandpa assured him that it wasn't me. Yesterday, we went to get Anna a scooter. Since she had been practicing on mine, she took mine because it was more comfortable and easy for her, and I rented a new one with smaller tires. That same day, we left our scooters parked by the grocery store. When we came out, the license plate on Anna's scooter was laying on the ground, bent and twisted. We had to take it to George to re-attach it.

And today yet another scooter incident happened to me. Last night, Anna tripped and hurt her foot. She didn't want to go out at all today, so I decided to drive along the countryside with my camera and try to get some good photos. Things were going great, I was getting some really beautiful pictures of houses and other things along the road. Then I saw a peach tree with ripe peaches on it, down in a ditch. I parked my scooter on the side of the road and waded down through the weeds to get to the peaches. The peaches were hanging off the tree, over a huge pile of big rocks. So I climbed up onto the pile of rocks to get a better shot. I was so absorbed in looking at the peaches, that I heard a small *clink* but didn't even think about at the moment. Then I realized that my key to my scooter was no longer in my hand. It had dropped down into the pile of rocks. I spent about 30 minutes digging a hole in the rock pile. There were strange things down in those rocks. There were snails, many eggs of different varieties, a huge white worm with black polkadots inside a crysalis, red bugs shaped like small dried rose petals, and even a yellow skeleton of a scorpion. After 30 minutes, I was exhausted. People were driving along the road, staring down at me, probably wondering what a girl in a sundress was doing hauling rocks around. Then I saw Grandpa drive by. I screamed at him to stop, and luckily he somehow heard me. He and I spent another 20 minutes digging through the rocks. Finally, we realized that it was hopeless and decided to go to George to see if he had an extra key for my scooter. As we were climbing back up to the road, George drove by. We flagged him down. He and Grandpa spent another 10 minutes digging through the rocks. We never found the key. George seemed to be quite unhappy about it. Luckily, he had an extra key though, so I took that one and promised to make a copy.

George doesn't know yet... but on the way home from the rock pile, I was so exhausted and stressed that when I took a sharp turn down a hill, the scooter slid on the gravel and I fell right over. I wasn't really hurt at all - just a few bumps and bruises. However, the scooter got scratched and one of the reflectors cracked and fell off. Oops.