All the Rest Have 31

Aw, for cryin’ out loud-  isn’t it freakin’ September yet?

Stupid Summer.

You Want Games? I’ll Give You Games!

Son of a bitch!  How the heck did I miss hearing about THIS?

So There is Some Divergence

According to Jack, he doesn’t like Cheez-Its.

Let’s Motor

Picked up the new car this morning.

Oh yeah…  guess I should tell you what kind of car it is, shouldn’t I?

It’s a 2009 British Racing Green Mini Cooper-S.  172 horsepower 1.6 litre 4-cylinder inline;  does 0 to 60 in 6.7 seconds, and pulls a max speed of 139 mph.  Leaps off the line like a demon, handles like it can tell what you’re thinking, turns so tightly you can pull a U-ie between two rows of parked cars, and stops on a shaved dime.  The Empress and I ran it up to Eldritch in Charlottica to wring all the bugs out of it.  There weren’t any.  We were eating fried wholebelly clams and oysters at a roadside stand two states away from West of the Rivers within the space of hours, and still had more travel range left in the tank than Nightshade had when he was Full.

Speaking of Nightshade:  we thanked him for his long and faithful service, and left him in the care of the salesman-  but we forgot to leave the keys along with him.  He had to wait until we got back from Eldritch to take the long drive to his final reward.  We gave the salesman a bottle of Charlottica wine as an apology for the trouble;  he in return gave us a bumper sticker that he had apparently forgotten to give us that morning:

If that makes you laugh, take a look at the Terms and Conditions for registering with the MiniUSA web site.

Strongest contender for a name for the car so far is “Gloria”, after Laura Branigan’s song of the same title came blasting out of the car speakers at a particularly perfect moment of sun and speed and asphalt.  That, and a certain other “G” word commonly associated with my drawings…

Minor Disappointment

… seeing a partially obscured sign that read “Cheese Corner”, then drawing closer to discover that it wasn’t obscured, and actually read “Cheese Corn”.

No-Brainer

Yoko’s comment on While Angels Check the Treads:

Wow. What happened to your other car? (sorry if you’ve already explained this– I’ve been offline for a while.)

No worries;  it was the first time I’ve mentioned anything about it.  Nothing happened to it, if by “happened to it” you mean something calamitous like I got into an accident, or it threw a piston rod or the like.  But the venerable Nightshade is 16 years old and has over 91,000 miles on it;  the suspension goes kktung when you drive around corners, the horn is mute, the lock cylinder in the rear tailgate has fallen inside the door, sealing it closed, the tinting in the back windows is peeling off in sheets and the driver’s side door is staved in from the night I had one snort too many and ground it into an iron support pillar in a parking garage.  Plus it’s about 7,000 miles overdue for service-  and due for inspection in November.  Under the much discussed Cash for Clunkers program, I get $3500 for trading it in, which is far more than it would be worth were I able to sell it (which I can’t;  it was declared a Total Loss by my insurance company after that five-car accident I was involved in a couple years ago, at the top of Route 33.  How were they supposed to know my parents were life-long friends with an auto body repairman who would agree to reassemble it?)  In return for the trade (and an admittedly scary financial commitment), I get a cool, new vehicle with vastly improved gas mileage that’s safe, mechanically reliable, and doesn’t have to be re-registered or inspected for another 4 years.  Total no-brainer.

Gotta clean all the junk out of Nightshade this morning.

While Angels Check the Treads

It took me two plus weeks of hard, anguished deliberation and cost-benefit analysis before I could bring myself to commission and purchase Eve, plus over three weeks for her to be delivered.

In the space of a single Saturday morning, however, I have purchased a new car.  I pick it up from the dealer Tuesday morning.

Zeroed

This entry was originally intended to make the following series of observations:

1. The hospital I was born in no longer exists.
2. The college I got my Liberal Studies degree from stopped offering that degree several years after I graduated.
3. That same college then changed to a university, so in a sense, the college no longer exists.
4. The art school I went to no longer teaches the specialization I trained in.

However:  on a whim today, I looked up the Web site of the UNIVERSITY (excuuuuuuuuuse me), and it turns out that as of this fall, they’re reinstating Liberal Studies degrees across the board.  And they’re not the academically free-spirited Liberal Studies degrees of my youth;  they’re pragmatic affairs, focusing on “the practical and intellectual connections” between disciplines.  Programs intended to have you tie all the stuff you’re learning about together into a research project or career prospectus, and then figure out a way to leverage that into a job.  While I happen to be a fan of learning just for learning’s sake, I have to admit, that’s pretty damn cool.

Overheard Between Two 8-Year Old Boys

Boy 1:  I’m going to Antarctica to hide.

Boy 2:  You’ll die.

Boy 1:  (thinks)  At least it’ll be a painless death.

Boy 2:  Not if a polar bear eats you.

Old Dan Tucker

Old Dan Tucker was a mountain man

Washed his face in a frying pan

Combed his hair with a wagon wheel

Died of a toothache in his heel

Get out th’way for Old Dan Tucker

He’s too late to get his supper

Supper’s over and breakfast cookin’

Old Dan Tucker just stands there lookin’.

–traditional folk song

Real Life Math Problems

Car A is travelling southwards on a gently curving suburban road, moving at an average speed of 40 miles per hour.  Car B is travelling northwards on the same road, moving at an average speed of 30 miles per hour.  If we consider a portion of the road that is three miles long, and assume for purposes of the problem that the cars are starting at either end of it, already travelling at full speed, at what point on the road will they pass each other?

Dancing on the Edge of Ruin

Landlady Flora and her son (who it turns out is co-owner) have put this house I live in up for sale.  They want $400,000 for it, which is paradoxically both a low price for West of the Rivers and more than the house is worth.  So has begun a new and steady process:  realtor-conducted tours of my apartment.  The realtors are polite to me, and work with me to make sure it isn’t too horribly inconvenient, and the people they bring through are friendly and inoffensive, but it’s distasteful regardless;  aside from the interruptions, it makes me feel as if I’m a serf or a slave waiting to see who his new master is going to be.   In the current economic climate, potential buyers are thrilled to find out that the upstairs apartment is already filled by a tenant who (as far as they know) has no plans to move out.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t planning on raising my rent, of course…

The neighbors, meanwhile, have flat out asked me if I’m moving or staying.  Since I don’t have any definite plans either way, and since any answer I give them will quickly make its way back to Flora, I just smile and say that apparently I’m staying because they haven’t told me they’re throwing me out yet, and leave it at that.

The yard sale of all the garbage that was in the house and the garage lasted three days and moved an amazing amount of the stuff off the premises.  (Rag-picking through each other’s crap is one of the favorite pastimes of all the fat old ladies around here, right behind cutting down trees.)  Not included in the merchandise moved was Nipper’s huge plastic cage, the one I bought at considerable expense from the local PetSmart back when she wouldn’t stop peeing on the carpet, and which was one of the only items that Faye didn’t take with her when she left.  Flora’s daughter, who was organizing and conducting the yard sale, was very interested in it…   until I told her that she was perfectly free to sell it as long as she gave me the money. Then it disappeared back into the garage, out of sight.  Later she asked me if I wanted to keep it, and told me that if I didn’t, they were going to put it out for the trash.  I told her that was OK.  It was on the curb with the rest of the trash for precisely the time it took me to leave the apartment and walk to the library;  by the time I came back, it was gone, and the rest of the trash was untouched.  I have no doubt that it’s sitting cozily in her house right now, or in the house of one of Flora’s other children, and they believe me none the wiser.

I have purchased a new air-conditioner, of the same BTU rating as the old air-conditioner.   It is plugged into one of the five hot/neutral reverse-wired outlets, which remain unaltered, despite three requests on my part to the landlady’s son to have the problem addressed.  Five years after it first occurred to me to do so, I have also cobbled together a plywood and fabric cover that sits over the opening of the stairwell, preventing all of the cold air from the ancient air-conditioning unit built into the wall above it from draining directly down the stairs.  We have dubbed it “the airlock”.  It’s ghetto, but it works.  With both air-conditioners running and the closet doors closed, the majority of the apartment is rendered livable:  a small, cool, Internet-connected oasis-fortress, hidden atop an empty shell laved by gathering waves…