Americanuck

So I decided to go outside during my “lunch break” and searched high and low for some sunglasses because thank you Jebus it was a gorgeous warm sunny day. I realized that all my good pairs were down in my car so I looked for the next best thing, a pair of the sort of mildly coloured glasses I bought on a whim because I thought they looked cool. These glasses mind you do little better than cut the glare. I have a couple of pairs in different colours.

I realized that they were pretty dusty (ooops) so I brought out the cleaning cloth and scrubbed those suckers down so I could y’know actually SEE through them. Tom was in the middle of booking our flights down to Georgia for the conference I’m going to attend again this year (and that he’s tagging along for) and he asked me a question so I popped over then was on my way outside and damn if I couldn’t figure out where I had put the glasses. I walking aimlessly around the room, Tom went looking around on the table, floor etc where I had just been and nadda, pfff, nothing, they were gone. So weird!

I pulled down another pair and repeated the whole scrubbing process and held these ones in my hot little hand and headed outside popping my glasses on my nose on my way through the lobby. A older couple had a moving van pulled right up to the door and they and I guess a friend were in the middle of unloading it. I passed them and smiled a hello and they kind of just looked at me. Gawd, I’m thinking to myself, here we go another cranky, unfriendly old couple who just stare when you say hi. Whatever.

I walk out into the courtyard and breathed in the fresh air. Man it was so nice and mild I really didn’t need my light jacket but I sure did need those sunglasses. I walked along wishing they were darker but I feeling too incredibly lazy to go down to the parking garage and just kept walking . I got to the end of the block and I felt this really uncomfortable feeling and reached up and touched the top of my head. Yup. There were the missing glasses. Heh.

So I suddenly start to smile, hide the smile, smile, hide the sm… oh then I just burst out laughing. Unfortunately at the time this older Sikh gentleman happened to be walking up behind me and when he saw this strange woman suddenly for no apparent reason burst into laughter he CROSSED THE ROAD. I’m serious. He got a safe distance from me and then turned back to look. By then I had whipped the glasses off my head and stuffed them into my coat pocket.

Later when I got back to the front door the couple was gone, though their truck still in the process of being unloaded so I was spared that humiliation. I realized that they HAD to have noticed the extra pair of glasses on my head and were dumbstruck by my obliviousness or something. Or maybe they were just assholes. Whatever.

I get back inside and shout to Tom who was getting ready for work,

“Hey I found the glasses guess where they were?”

He shouts back “On top of your head?”

“Yes!!” I said

“REALLY??!?!?!” says Tom

By then I’m a laughing again and told him of the people who had stared at me.

Tom says.. “They must have thought now there goes a lady that really believes in UV protection!”

Wow, I’m only 42 and I’m already pulling stuff like this? What’s next? I park my car and lose it in the parking lot? Oh wait n/m ummmm I do that already too.

Cars scare me. Better put cars breaking down scare me. I go into complete and total panic mode when I hear, smell or see anything wrong. Heaven forbid the car actually stops working, I melt down. Seriously melt down.

When my old car roadrunner’s (Geo Metro.. yeah I know, shut up!) battery died I was doing the single Mom thing and I was heading out to get food. When the key turned and the engine didn’t turn over I sat there for a second in complete denial and then popped the hood and stood in the complete downpour staring at the engine compartment like I knew the hell what I was doing. Why does it always pour rain at times like these? I decided to knock at my Landlords door, I figured hey the husband was a guy maybe he will know more than me, I was holding the panic in until he came to the door and saw me standing there soaked to the skin and I’m sure with a tragic expression on my face.

He asked me what was wrong and I started blubbering, squeaking incoherently and pointing with great sweeping motions towards my car. He managed to ascertain that I was having some sort of mechanical issue and ran out in the rain with me to look.

I finally managed to breathe enough to say I think it had something to do with the battery and he said yeah.Duh. He ran back into the house and brought his truck around and gave my car a jump. He gave me his cell number, said if my car died again on the other end to give him a call and he would come and start my car again. Man! Talk about a sweetie. This was the same guy who I though was the grumpiest person in the world the first time I met him, I hadn’t long since moved in when this happened.

Turns out he used to be a mechanic by trade and he offered to pick me up an new battery and install it for me, no charge on the install. He also asked me what kind of retard in this day and age had a battery in their car that wasn’t maintenance free? Yeah, that was how he spoke, bless him. I told him my ex had bought it for me when my first battery died. He made a dismissive noise and dropped it. From that day on I loved that man and from that day on he teased me about my hysterical fit over a battery.

So today I drove home from the train station in Freddy, my awesome 3 yearish old car and parked it briefly between Tom’s and my spot (he wasn’t home) to run up and get Sean and the crap he wanted to take over to his Father’s and ran back downstairs to the garage only to see a small liquid trail under my car poking out from behind. I stuck my finger it the liquid and squished it between two fingers and sniffed. It smelled like garage floor (eww) and water.

I quashed the panic, telling myself that perhaps Tom had washed his car today and it was leftover water that hadn’t dried yet and drove Sean over. I stopped briefly for some groceries and kept saying to myself “don’t worry there will be nothing under your car”. When I pulled out there was a small puddle. EEP!

So I drive home again park and run upstairs to put the cold stuff away and grab Tom’s big flashlight. I go back down and crouch down and look under the car and there is liquid DRIPPING from something near the front wheels. So of course I panic. This would be a BAD time for this to happen as I was to be taking my Mom to the airport on Sunday. I ran upstairs and call my Mother to tell her and to see if she can rally someone as a back up in case something was really wrong to drive her there. Clearly this was a mistake as my already emotionally unstable Mother burst into tears and started saying how she hates to depend on people, how hard it is blah blah. I’m saying OK! I hear you but my CAR IS BROKEN!!!! PANIC!!! PANIC!!

Now normally I’m a very stable person but I like to be in control, of everything. I mean I like it A LOT. Generally when things go wrong I’m the person with the cool head. Seriously. But not with cars. Whatever calm, collected, organized, problem solving goddess I am in pretty much every other part of my life is completely fucked up by cars.

It was too late to call the garage so I called up the internets instead. Thank goodness for the internets. They told me to put a piece of white cardboard under the car to get a good look at what was dripping. Was it oily? Was it coloured? Was it water? Oh yes? Water is it? Well then it is condensation on the FUCKING AIR CONDITIONER (pardon my french, I’m still suffering from the effects). All that for condensation?!!! Colour me embarrassed. Oh and dirty cos of all that crawling around on the garage floor (did I say ew?)

It’s party dry by this point….trust me it was a lot drippier!

In my defence this is the first car that I’ve had for longer than five minutes with an air conditioner so I didn’t know they did that.

Me recreating my panic face in the garage for illustrative purposes

I called my Mother back and said all was well, no need to rally the troops. When Tom called me I babbled on to him about my experience and he said to me “Well, you could have driven me into work and dropped me off and then taken her to the airport yanno, you aren’t alone anymore remember? We have two cars!” (awww my hero!)
In my defence, did I mention cars scare me? Rational thoughts? About cars? Moi?

On a lighter note at least for me cos I didn’t need to clean it up (Sorry Honey!) Sean captured Cinny doing another one of her butt scootin’ boogies across the floor in between pre-sorted laundry to attempt to knock off a stuck butt nugget. I only wish he had managed to capture her from the side. It is seriously one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen when she does this cos she looks so freaked out, juts her head forward and throws her legs up in the air and paddles forward with her front paws.

Hee hee

Now I would consider myself a very techno-savvy person. In fact I have trouble shot many a computer in my day breathing life where there t’wern’t none before, patiently even, when other people may have given up. I rarely read an instruction manual when I get an electronic gadget (ooohh gadgety goodness!) preferring to poke about and figure things out myself. Granted this at times can have me discovering a feature (see digital camera) a year or so later than I should have, but hey, it’s kinda cool getting those kind of surprises! The weird part is I read the instructions for something like a hair dryer. Go figure.

But alas, I too have my “Achilles Heel” and they generally involve audio/visual equipment. Show me a stereo, TV, VCR etc that requires any kind of hook up, I can and will eff it up. Once Tom had to long-distance talk me through hooking up an old camcorder/ TV/VCR combo so I could transfer old small cassette videos of the kids when they were small. Yeah I’m lame.

So, a couple of days ago I decided to crack out the MP3 transmitter that Tom gave me for Christmas so I could listen to all those tunes I have on it now while driving around. I had tried using it once or twice right after I got of course after reading the instructions (remember this is an audio product, I know my weakness) and after having some difficulties finding a range where there wasn’t a strong radio signal I gave up on it.

Like I said, I just decided to give in another whack. I kept trying it over several days but I was having all kinds of problems. At first it didn’t seem to turn on properly even using the cigarette lighter in the car. I brought it to Tom and using the battery power managed to turn it on with no problems and tune it to our home stereo. Cool! He told me he had preset a good station on the tuner and for me to just tune my car stereo to the same channel and I should have no problems. I mentioned that I didn’t know if my car stereo was getting all the channels that were on the transmitter. He looked puzzled and said well this one should be ok. So I’m all like, yay!

So I took it out on Saturday when I was driving around and it wouldn’t work. I tried practically every station I could and it just wouldn’t pick up the signal. I was pretty frustrated. My theory was that maybe it needed the cigarette plug thingie as some kind of boost so on Sunday I took the player/transmitter down to the car once again and plugged in the power and this time it got juice and started up. Once again I ran through every station in the range and NOTHING, BUPKIS.

When I told Tom yesterday he suggested that when we take the young Boy over to his Father’s I could drive and he would fiddle and see if he could get it to work. I had been listening to news radio and he reached out and changed the frequency to FM. I said “Oh it was already on AM”. Pause.

“Um, this is an FM transmitter, AM is garbage why would anyone want that?”

“…Oh” *blush*

So Tom says “Maybe I should of thought to ask you if you had it on FM, but the fact that the back of the thing says….”

OK as they say a picture speaks a thousand words. I will let this one speak for me.