Spousal Unit, reading a piece of paper he’d found on the table: “What’s this, a list of books you want to read?”
“Yup.”
“Why is the Army Field Manual on here?”
“There’s some stuff in there I thought I’d like to read about.”
“You have wide-ranging interests.”
“Yup.”
Flaming Kamikaze Squirrel Torches Car
Best Quote: “Ms Millar is apparently fully insured for incendiary squirrel strike.”
Halfway home from school yesterday, I noticed a black-and-yellow insect batting itself against the rear window of my car.
When I got home, my youngest son came out to greet me as I was opening the hatchback. “Whatcha looking for?” he asked, as I peered into the back of the car.
“Looking for the bee,” I said, carefully moving grocery bags. “It was trying to get out on the way home—maybe it flew out when I opened the door.”
I moved another grocery bag, and there she was on my school binder: not a wasp or a yellowjacket as I had feared, but a honeybee. “Oh, there you are,” I greeted her. I put my finger down in her path, and she obligingly walked up onto it.
“Careful, he’ll sting you!” exclaimed my son in alarm.
“Only if I scare her,” I replied, lifting her out of the car. I’d hoped the feel of fresh air would encourage her to fly, but she only walked up the back of my hand.
“She doesn’t want to leave,” observed my son.
“She’s exhausted.” I carried the dazed bee over to a bush and let her walk off onto a leaf. We left her there to recover from her ordeal and took the groceries in.
Later I was wondering how far a bee typically flies away from its hive. It seems quite likely that she was too far away from home to find her way back. Poor little lost bee.
The fair is in town this week. My eldest is just crazy about the fair. Specifically, the rides. He loves the rides that sling him around, that go up and down, that flip upside down.
I like the rides too, up to a point. I like the ones that go up and down, and the ones that sling me around. But I do not—repeat, not—like the ones that flip upside down.
The spousal unit didn’t want to go (“Didn’t we just do that last year?”) and the youngest wasn’t feeling well, so Monday after school it was just me and him. He was jumping with excitement, until I asked him to stop because my little car was bouncing like a midget lowrider. And he was laughing all the way there. Not from the excitement, but just because he finds me so terribly amusing these days. Apparently if you have a teenage son, everything you say is either eye-rolling idiocy or bust-a-gut hilarity.
Several miles away from the fairgrounds, I saw a sign that offered parking for $7: “Seven bucks to park this far out? Are you shitting me?” He nearly ruptured himself over that one.
The Zipper
We parked the car and made our way in, and the kid headed straight for the midway and hopped on a giant swinging boat. Next I joined him on one of those rides that slings you around (making sure to put my giant son on the outside). He got on a contraption called “The Twister” that flipped upside down. And then he wanted to go on “The Zipper.”
“The Zipper” is a Ferris wheel designed by the Marquis de Sade. The cars don’t just revolve around the center, they also rotate freely front-to-back. So a person inside the cage gets flipped over frontways, and backways, and frontways again.
Oh, hell no. I gave the boy some ride tickets and told him to have fun.
He went through the line, all excited. The ticket-taker talked to him for a minute, and he came back again, disappointed. “There have to be two people in the car,” he explained.
With a heavy sigh, I turned him around and led him back into the line. “All right, I’ll go on it,” I told him. “Make the most of this, because I am never doing it again.”
He did. He thought it was the Greatest. Ride. Evar! My bloodcurdling shrieks added an excellent sound effect.
I didn’t quite kiss the ground when we got off. He was bouncing all over the place. “I think that’s my favorite ride!” he informed me. “Boy, you were screaming!”
“One advantage of being female is that I don’t have to be macho and silent,” I told him. “I’m allowed to scream like a little girl, because I are one.”
He laughed for five minutes about that. I gave him the rest of the ride tickets and retreated to the boring world of the crafts display and the animal barn.
Every year I go to the poultry tent and put chickens to sleep. They have an area with baby ducks and chickens that you can hold and pet; as soon as I pick up a chick or duckling, it settles down and dozes off. I don’t know why.
The Waterfall
After sedating poultry for a while I wandered through the craft exhibit, bought some fudge and caramel apples, wandered back out and got some fried dough, and eventually retired to the waterfall where we had arranged to rendezvous. The waterfall didn’t look like much, it was turned off because of the drought.
At one point the kid appeared out of the crowd, declaring himself ravenous; I bought him some pizza, he wolfed it down and disappeared in the direction of the midway. Eventually he turned up again to watch the fireworks with me, and then we headed home. He said he’d ridden every ride at the fair. I believe it.
Hi, BerthaSpouse here. I just saw Bertha’s post about “Care and Maintenance of Your New Car 101.” I think there may be a detail or two that Bertha has overlooked.
So when Bertha inexplicably pulls the van into the mud flats from hell (and I elect not to repeat here my utterance when I saw what she’d done), I pop the hood on the van and take a look. The dipstick shows some sticky black gunk I hesitate to call oil, and the radiator is entirely empty. Bertha notes that she has been seeing green puddles whenever she parks the thing.
This is, of course, hardly the first time we’ve had maintenance problems with the van. Changing the oil was a novel concept when we first did it after 50,000 miles or so. Also, I once pulled an entire uneaten order of french fries from under the passenger seat. They were solid green. I didn’t mention it to Bertha, I just got some tongs and relocated the nasty things to the trash bin.
So when I discover that once again we have been running the van without oil or coolant, do I react by screaming “you crazy fool, why did you tank the engine?” No I do not. I react by saying, mildly, “okay, well then let’s go find a gas station and get some water and antifreeze, because you know, maybe it will help the engine run better.” So we drive around and find some coolant. It doesn’t exactly match the type called for in the owner’s manual, but what the hell, how much more damage can we do at this point.
On the way home I’m kind of hoping that the overheating problem might just go away now that we have coolant again, but no such luck. So we finally get the thing home and go to bed. The next day, one might imagine me coming home from work and ranting and raving about the financial loss from the blown engine, blaming Bertha for it, etc, etc. (That’s what a control freak would do.) Do I do that? No I do not. Instead, I take time off work to come home, pick up Bertha, drive way the hell from RTP over to Capital Blvd, and buy her a brand new $18,000 car.
For the record, I am a saint.
Sincerely,
-BerthaSpouse
So.
Last Wednesday (the last day before our week-long break from classes), the Business Law professor went over our most recent test. He mentioned, by name, several students who had gotten outstanding scores on the test. One of those students was me.
At last I get a second of recognition for working hard and getting good grades. And I missed it. I was at home calling a $*#! tow truck to haul my $*#! van to the $#*! repair shop.
Dammit.
Last night my spousal unit went over Care and Maintenance of Your New Car 101. I should brake and accelerate gently for the first thousand miles or so. Check the fluids when I fill it up. Monitor the dashboard warning lights. Take care of the paint job, and it would be preferable not to have bumper stickers on the vehicle.
Now, understand: he knows as well as I do that it’s my car now, I’ll do as I damn well please with it, and I’m perfectly capable of taking care of it. He went through the lecture mostly to make himself feel better, because he is a guy and a bit of a control freak. I’m being just as overprotective of my new car as he was of his—when I got out of class today, I actually did a walkaround before getting in to make sure she was as I’d left her. And I’ve never had a bumper sticker on any car of mine, even the crappiest.
So I just listened and nodded and agreed with him, because I know it’s difficult for him to turn the whole thing over to someone else. If the occasional lecture on proper car care helps him feel better about this sizable new investment we’ve acquired, I can put up with that.
But I do have my ornery streak, and now I’m so very, very tempted to hang some big purple fuzzy dice from the rear view just to see if he has a stroke.
Last night my mate and I went to retrieve the van. I wanted him along in case the thing crapped out entirely, so I wouldn’t be stuck out in the great nothing between Fuquay and Raleigh.
We babied it carefully to the halfway point, and then pulled off to let it cool down a bit. I pulled into what looked like a functioning gas station, but what turned out to be a gas station that was still under construction. The building and the pumps were there and all lit up, but the parking lot was an unpaved mud flat. The van and the husband’s car now have a quarter inch of dried mud in the driver’s side. The side stairs of our house were covered in muddy footprints. The kitchen floor was a lunar landscape of dried mud ridges and craters.
We managed to get it the rest of the way home, although once I got off the freeway it was a bit nerve-wracking as the temperature gauge shot straight into the red and stayed there. I kept expecting the engine to seize up and wrench itself out of the chassis, or something.
My mom read my plaintive blog entry yesterday and offered to drive me around to some of the errands that have not gotten done over the school break. As we were buying some paper (so I can print out a report that’s due tomorrow), my spousal unit phoned and asked if I wanted to go vote for the city council and then look at some cars. He’d found a Honda dealership that had several new Fits on the lot.
We’ve actually been looking at cars for a while, as gas prices went up and feeding the van became more and more costly. But we’ve been spoiled by his Honda Fit. He bought that car, new, for around $16k, and now we just can’t see paying more for a used car than we would for a brand-new Fit with all the trimmings. Apparently a lot of people feel the same way, because Honda dealerships can’t keep the things on the lot for more than a week or so.
This dealership must’ve just gotten some in, because they had three or four of them on hand. We looked over the choices, picked one we liked, and got the paperwork all signed and ready to go. And just like that, I now own the first new car I’ve ever had—a storm-grey 2008 Honda Fit.
Amazing how fast my car situation went from a steaming pile of suck to a great big bucket of squee.
Last Wednesday, the van wouldn’t start. I’d turn the key, it would go “hng hng hng” but it wouldn’t actually start. Called a tow company and had it towed out to the repair shop that I always use. The tow driver tried starting it as well before we pushed it out of the driveway. Then I called mom to give me a ride to classes.
The downside of a really good repair shop is that they’re generally really busy. They were able to get to it Friday morning; it started just fine for them. Of course.
They kept it all day, trying it off and and on to see if they could reproduce the problem. No luck. So Friday night we went and fetched it home again.
This afternoon I went to give my friend Jade a ride to the doctor’s office. No problems all the way out to her house (she lives in a city just southeast of mine). But as soon as we pulled out of her driveway the “OMG SO HOT!!” light came on. The temperature gauge was in the red. It cooled down as long as I was moving, but as soon as I’d stop at a light it would swing over into the red again.
So we pulled over into a Wal-Mart parking lot and called Guardian to come to our rescue. Looks like one of the radiator fans has stopped working.
SIGH
I guess I should be glad that it decided to crap out during our break from classes. But I had kind of hoped to get a little more done in the way of errands while school was out. Dry cleaning to drop off and pick up. Checks to deposit. And I had a box of goodies to ship to my soldier.
My husband needs to hurry up and get his next car so I can take over his old one.
LawDog discusses the subject of those entitled officers who feel they should be allowed to break the law. In his usual eloquent way, he nails the point better than I could.
We — as peace officers — are not better than our fellow citizens, nor are we worse than our fellow citizens. We are not more equal, nor less equal, than our fellows, nor are we a better or lesser ‘class’ than they — and to consider otherwise does a great dis-service to our profession and to the citizens relying on us.
In order to do our jobs — to follow our calling — we must have the support of our fellow citizens. Those under our protection must know, in their blood and in their bones, that we are fair; they must know that the person entrusted with that badge is worthy of being entrusted with the rights of their fellow citizens, of being entrusted with the freedoms of their fellow citizens; that we can be trusted with the truth; and that we can be trusted with the awesome powers and responsibilities that our fellow citizens have given us.
We must hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Nobody trusts arrogance and hubris.
See his site for the rest–it’s worth a read. They should all be like you, ‘Dog.
