Inane Chatter

Car trouble.  Not the big kind.  The annoying kind.  I drove my car last Friday.  Then I left it in the driveway over the weekend, and the temperature dropped Monday night.  Tuesday morning, I went out to start the car.  Nothing.  Not even engine sputters or clicking.  Completely dead battery.  John jumped the car, we checked for the culprit and found nothing (no lights were on, no doors were ajar, the radio was off) and I drove to work (about 20 minutes).  That afternoon, around 2:15, I tried to start the car again.  (I needed to get home so I could give Roxy her medicine around 2:30.  More on that later.)  Nothing.  Completely dead battery.  I got the woman who was parked next to me to help me jump the car again.  I crawled all over the damn thing once it was running, looking for any doors not shut all the way or lights on that shouldn’t be – still nothing.  I drove home, taking the long way.  John did a ton of googling.  Turns out this car often has battery drain problems.  Something is draining power even when everything is off.  The problem is that everyone’s solution is different.  And we don’t have one yet.  For now, we have a workaround (it helped that I was going to Baltimore today and didn’t need a car).  Last night, after I got home, John unplugged this power connector thing that’s inside the dash on the far left (facing the driver’s side door).  This morning, he plugged it back in and the car started right up.  He drove it to work today, unplugged it again, and was able to start the car to get home.  So something in the group of…things that the power connector controls is what’s draining the battery.  The next step is to figure out which thing it is so we can fix it.  Or replace it.  Or…something.  Now that I know I can start the car, it’s not an emergency.  It’s just super annoying.  And it turns out that this is why my power locks don’t work half the time.  There’s not enough power left in the car to trip the locks, and I have to actual open the door with the KEY.  How barbaric.

I have no segue for this next thing.  I was going to go with “You know what else is barbaric?”, but it doesn’t make any sense.  So I’m skipping the segue.  Sue me.  Also, I keep trying to spell segue “seque”.  I’m not sure that’s a word in any language.  What do I know?  Maybe it is.  Maybe it’s what a sequin becomes when it grows up.

My point is that I want to talk about Roxy now, but I can’t get there from power locks that don’t work.

I don’t even have a whole lot to say about Roxy, except that she’s doing okay.  She had a seizure this morning, and she’s still having them every week to week and a half, but she’s recovered pretty quickly from her last few.  The biggest headache has been the change in medication.  We added a new one (the third) that we had to give her three times a day, 8 hours apart.  That is HARD.  No matter how we schedule it, we either end up having to give her a pill in the middle of the night or be home in the middle of the afternoon (2-ish – like yesterday), which is difficult when we have to be at work.  And it’s so new (and so different from her regular medication schedule – twice a day, 12 hours apart) that even I’m working from home, I can’t remember to give her the pill on time, so we either end up giving it to her really late and skipping the next one or we skip the one I forgot and give her the late one.  Thankfully, the drug company just started making an extended release version.  We picked it up yesterday and started this morning.  Twice a day, 12 hours apart.  That we can do.

And here’s a video of my adorable puppy.

Roxy doesn’t want to play my games from Susannah Brewer on Vimeo.

Have I told you the story about getting pulled over by the police right after getting my first car?  Some of you know this already.  Here’s the short version:

I was 16 years old, it was summer, and Mom and Dad had just bought me my first car (a 1988 black hatchback Toyota Corolla named Cricket).  They immediately went on vacation near the Finger Lakes in New York.  Far far away from home in Lexington, KY.  Corey was I-don’t-know-where, but not living at home anymore, so it doesn’t really matter, and Mel and I were staying by ourselves.  One day, I went to pick her up, and on our way home, we got pulled over.  I was freaking out, Mel was trying to get me to breathe, and I noticed the police officer look at the back of my car as he came to the window.  I knew I hadn’t been speeding (I was a paranoid beginner driver), so I thought maybe I had a tail light out or something.  Short version, right.  My sticker (the one that has the year on it) looked to the police officer like it had been torn off somehow.  I didn’t have the registration in the car (too new, I guess), and he gave me a citation and told me to take care of it.  This was before cell phones, so I couldn’t call Mom and Dad, and when they eventually called us (it must have been that night, but in my memory it took them three days), they told me to check the mail for the registration and sticker.  Nothing yet.  The next morning, I was on my way to pick Mel up again, and as I made a left turn out of our neighborhood, I got pulled over again.  As the police officer got out of her car, I saw her check the license plate just like the last guy, so I had the citation from the day before in my hand when she got to my window.  I explained everything, showed her the citation, told her I was taking care of it, and she let me go.  But this was traumatizing.  Pulled over twice in two days, for something that I maintain was not my fault.  John wants to know why I was driving the car without the registration and I can only claim ignorance.  Registration?  Stickers?  My parents gave me the keys.  I didn’t ask any questions.  End of story: the registration came in the mail, I put the sticker on the plate, and took care of the citation downtown.  I’ve never gotten a ticket (that one I thought I’d get from the red light camera in DC never came), and I’ve only been pulled over once (for rolling through a stop sign in my neighborhood), and the deputy sheriff let me off with a warning.

Fast forward to today.  Right after I left work, I mean right after I left – it was after the very first turn I made – I heard the whoop of the siren and saw flashing lights.  I pulled over.  The very nice Deputy Sheriff Diaz came up to my window and told me my registration is expired.  I said something clever like, “Oh?”  He asked me what I thought he was pulling me over for, and I said, “I thought maybe I” stop talking stop talking stop talking “ran that stop sign.”  Damn.  I’m incapable of shutting up.  Thankfully, he said “No, you were fine there.”  And then I remembered that I had to wait for traffic to clear before making that right, so I must have stopped.  Anyway, he asked for my registration, and I went rummaging for it even though at this point I knew damn well I hadn’t renewed it.  John and I had just talked about it a few days ago.  Why didn’t I do it then?  Whatever.  I played dumb a little and discovered last year’s registration.  It expired in May.  Ouch.  He took my license and sat in his car looking up whatever they look up that takes so freaking long.  I was watching him in the rearview mirror and after a while, I saw an unmarked car with lights going pull up behind him.  What the hell?  Did he call in for back-up?  What’s going on?  Since I was staring at the flashing lights behind me, I didn’t see him come back, so when he appeared at my window again, I jumped a mile.  He apologized for startling me, and I gestured to the unmarked car.  “Do we need back-up for this?”  He laughed (thank God – I really should just shut up) and said there was an accident a little ways back.  Doesn’t explain why that guy showed up here, but whatever.  It wasn’t for me.  Anyway, he gave me the citation, told me I could either pay early or go to court, show my renewed registration, and there’s a 90% chance the judge would drop the charges.  I’ll see how much the fine is and then decide.  Then he told me to drive carefully and he sent me on my way.

About 4 miles closer to home, I looked in my rearview mirror to see another county sheriff’s car change from the left lane into my lane.  There went the whoop of the siren and the lights.  I pulled over.  Guess what?  He looked at my license plate.  He got to my window, asked for license and registration, and before I could reach for them, he said he was pulling me over because of my expired sticker.  Big surprise, although this time I was speeding a little.  (Maybe 7 over the speed limit.  People in the left lane were going faster than me.)  I picked up the citation that was still sitting on my passenger seat and handed it to him.  “Sir, I was pulled over for that not five minutes ago.”  He checked the time on the citation, checked his watch, smiled a little, and told me he wouldn’t give me another ticket.  Damn right he won’t.  Can they even do that?  I told him I’d take care of it as soon as I got home and spent the rest of the drive home half-convinced he was going to radio one of his buddies to keep an eye out for my car and pull me over again.

No more incidents.  And my registration has been renewed.  How crazy is it that, with one exception, the only times I’ve been pulled over have been for that tiny little sticker AND that I got pulled over twice in a very short period of time in both instances?  Totally crazy.  Loony bin crazy.  Spiders in roller skates crazy.

Along with many strangers who happened to be passing by.  I left work early to get home before the weather got really bad, but my normal 20-minute commute took me almost an hour and a half.  What started out as sleet turned into heavy wet snow.  I finally got home and started shoveling the driveway so John (in his Mustang – terrible in this weather) would be able to pull in.  Twenty minutes later, I got a call.  John was stuck.  He was in the right turn lane about a mile and a half away, and he needed rescuing.  I threw the snow shovels in the my car (4-wheel drive – thanks, Dad!) and went to meet him.  We shoveled down to pavement so his tires could get a grip, and he was able to get in the left turn lane.  (A guy in a pickup truck stopped and offered to pull him out, but John had it under control by then.)  He needed to do a u-turn to get home (we were trying to avoid hills – his car wouldn’t make it up a slippery incline), but he got stuck in the left lane at the light.  I got back out of my car and tried to push him forward (the traffic was pretty light – we weren’t worried about pushing him into the middle of a busy intersection), his tires were spinning, and then I heard someone behind me yell, “No no no!  Slow down!  Stop!”  Some other guy had stopped in the turn lane behind me (we all had our flashers on) and was running up to help.  He said he was from Minnesota (there aren’t many credentials better than that in this kind of weather), and he coached John (with totally contradictory suggestions (“Easy now, easy, go go go, no, take it easy!”) through the u-turn while helping me push from behind.  We got John around the median and facing the other way (the right way to go home), and then I followed John up the road.  He made it about a mile and then got stuck (in the middle of the intersection) making a left turn.  This time a guy who was out walking his dogs (and his family) ran over to help me push.  We helped John rock the car out of the center and get across the road.  Our plan at this point was to get to the parking lot of the shopping center where the Bloom used to be and just leave the car there.  We live uphill from everywhere, and there was no way his car was going to make it.  He didn’t even make it all the way to the parking lot.  He got stuck on the road right next to it, but there are parking spaces along that road, so we shoveled one clear and kinda pushed and shoved his car into it.  We’ll retrieve it tomorrow.  That whole time (somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half) the snow was coming down like crazy.  My jeans were soaked through and I had snow falling down the back of my neck.  A warm dinner was called for (and wine for me and rum and coke for John).  Luckily, while the band was rehearsing last night, I made a pot of Dad’s beefy rice (dirty rice, kidney beans, onion, hamburger), and all we had to do was heat it up.  Turned out great.  (Thanks, Dad!)

We’ve gone through a lot of car-related trauma lately.  A month or so ago we had the issue with John’s car not starting sometimes (resolved), and then John had a run-in with a parking garage while leaving work on Thursday.  There was a concrete pillar at the front left corner of the spot, and he was paying close attention to it as he backed out.  He got clear of it, turned the wheel, and CRUNCHED his front left fender into the other concrete pillar, the one at the back left corner of the spot.  There’s a big dent just in front of the wheel well on the driver’s side.  We’re taking it in for an estimate tomorrow morning.

My car is mostly fine, but during my last safety inspection, the guy pointed out that my brakes were on their way out.  This was in May.  John is good with cars, likes working on them, and has replaced brake pads and rotors on several of our cars (among many other, more impressive things, like transmissions), so we finally set the date and decided to do it this weekend.  The front ones, anyway.  That’s what he’s been doing most of the day.  It’s never as easy as we think it’s going to be, but that aside, it’s always worth NOT paying nearly $1000 to have someone else do it.  This job cost us a little over $100 and an afternoon.  And while John worked on the car, I spend a few very pleasant hours on the front steps with my laptop.  I mowed the lawn, front and back, and then I stayed nearby to hand him a tool here, apply a little pressure there, here a rag, there a wrench, everywhere a breaker bar.  The first wheel gave him a little trouble (took over two hours), but, true to form, the second one took less than one hour.  John’s cleaning up, and I’m about to test the brakes.

You may ask why, if John’s so good with car stuff, he’s not fixing the rather large dent in his car himself.  My answer: that’s what insurance is for.

We have car drama, but I’ll save the details until we know what we’re going to do about it.  In the meantime, John gets to work from home (lucky dog!).

More amusingly, check this out (thanks, as usual, to The Bloggess for finding the funniest/weirdest/most awesome stuff on the internet).  My mind is blown.  I knew ducks were hiding something.  Sneaky bastards.

From the same website, here’s one for John.

Want to drool over kitchens?  Here – drool away.  I WANT them.  All of them.  I’ll settle for two or three.

I didn’t run this morning because I’m terribly lazy.  The alarm went off and I sat up and swung my legs over to the side.  Turned on my bedside lamp.  Then I dozed, upright, for nearly half an hour.  Tomorrow I need to take that extra step (standing up will help) and move in the direction of the front door.  Wish me luck.

I don’t think this is the right time of day for me.  I tend to post in the evenings, but exactly when varies from right after I get home to right before I go to sleep.  Right now, when I’m looking at the clock and calculating how many hours of sleep I can get and trying to decide if that’s going to be enough and will I be exhausted tomorrow or will I hear my alarm and reset it because I’m too tired to run – right now is when I shouldn’t be writing.  I get anxious about getting enough sleep, and feeling like I need to post something before I go to bed makes it worse.  It’s not a high level of anxiety or anything, nothing like when I was traveling, but there’s something left undone and I won’t feel better until it’s done and even when it’s done, if I did it late (like now), I won’t feel enough better because, well, now it’s late.  And later means less sleep.  And for some reason, I can’t be laid back about how much sleep I get.  Solution?  (I’m into solutions lately.)  Post earlier.  Before dinner.  Or get ready for bed and post from there.  That’s worked for me a couple of times.  Which leads me to…why am I not doing that now?

We had some mechanical difficulties today.  Woke up to find the A/C not working anymore, so I called the company who last serviced it and they sent out a technician.  We had an easy problem to fix, luckily, so the A/C was back on by early afternoon and I finished the day working from home.  Love doing that.  Then, I asked John to stop on the way home to pick up dinner (Subway), but I’d forgotten about his weird car issue.  He bought the sandwiches, but couldn’t get home because his car wouldn’t start.  I picked him up, we ate dinner and dodged anonymous phone calls (Iowa keeps calling, but they never leave a message.), and then we headed back to Subway to see if his car would start.  It did, I guess because it had been an hour or two.  John thinks (and I agree, whatever that’s worth) that it’s a temperature issue.  The car will start when it’s been sitting for a while (overnight or the whole work day for sure, and, like tonight, even just for a couple of hours), but if you drive it for 20 minutes or more and then stop just for a couple of minutes, it won’t start until it’s cooled down.  Sometimes it helps to top off the gas tank, but that doesn’t always work.  If he’s only driven it for a couple of minutes (like to the gas station or to Starbucks), it’ll start even after another quick stop.  It’s weird, and if I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have asked him to pick up dinner.  Maybe that’s the lesson: don’t ask John to pick up dinner.  He’ll like that one.  Even if it doesn’t actually solve the car problem.

Why does there have to be a lesson?  Why is Roxy incapable of backing up?  Why do birds suddenly appear?  Why ask why?  Drink Bud Dry.

I went outside today.  For about 10 seconds.  John is trying to figure out why the airbag light is coming on in his car, so I stepped out into the driveway to see how it was going.  John said, “Um…” and pointed to the layer of pollen on the hood of the mustang.  Point taken.  I went back inside.  I just finished the third Dresden Files book, and I’m probably going to pick up the 4th next.  Mostly because I’m too lazy to put much thought into what I really want to read next.  And because I don’t think I can concentrate very well on anything that isn’t brain candy.  If I had another Dean Koontz novel, I’d probably read that, too.  Instead.  Whatever.  I’m staying inside today, and maybe, if John loves me, he’ll bring me egg-drop soup.

Complete and utter failure.  Worst ponytail EVER.  I took the dogs for a short jog this afternoon, and for the first time in months, I put my hair into a normal ponytail instead of the double-decker thing I’ve been doing (which has been working just fine).  Because the ponytail wasn’t tight enough, it slid down the back of my head, freeing all the shorter hair in front to flop around in my face.  I couldn’t just tuck it behind my ears (over and over and over) like I usually would because I was wearing my ear grips to keep my wittle ears warm, so I didn’t have ears behind which to tuck the hair.  Behind which.

John has been in the driveway all morning replacing the rear brakes on the mustang.  It’s not supposed to be this hard.  That’s true of EVerything he does to this car.  Except when he replaced the drive belt a couple of weeks ago.  That one went pretty well.  He got the driver’s side done, but he’s having trouble compressing the piston back into the caliper on the passenger side.  I’ve been googling the problem, but he’s got the right tool and he seems to be doing all the right things.  He’s not ready to assume the caliper has seized yet, but if he can’t fit the new brake pad in, he may have to replace the caliper.  And that will mean he won’t be going to his cousin’s new baby’s christening.  Because it will take the rest of the weekend (bleeding brake lines, replacing parts, adding fluid, etc) and he won’t have a car to drive until it’s done.  So we’ll see.  But if he does go, he’ll leave for PA tonight to spend the evening with his family and then drive to Long Island with them Sunday morning for the christening.  He’ll stay with his parents in PA Sunday night and go to work from their house Monday morning.  So I won’t see him again until after work on Monday.  On the plus side, I’ll have Indian for dinner and watch movies he’s not interested in.  But that’s only fun for one night, not two.  Oh!  Speaking of movies, we watched 500 Days of Summer last night.  We both really liked it.  Joseph Gordan-Levitt was fantastic, and while we didn’t like Zooey Deschanel’s character as much, she was really good.  John couldn’t decide if he thought she was really attractive or not.  He said he wasn’t sure if he’d call her beautiful, or even pretty, but he wants to keep looking at her.  So at least he thinks she’s interesting.  I think she’s very pretty.  She’s got that blue eyes with dark hair thing I’ve always liked.  Like Liesl in The Sound of Music.    And I will watch the musical number (from 500 Days) at least three more times before I put the movie back in the mail.