welcome to camp telophase

So one of the tires on my car has a bit of debris in it that's caused it to go flat. And the last time the tires were put on, the shop used one of those machines and cranked the lug nuts on so tightly that we can't get them off manually. So we either have to get it towed or drive slowly on the tire to the closest place to get the tire taken off and patched. ARG.

It's been an eventful day. We set out to go test-drive cars, as we're looking at replacing my car before too long. And on the way, we got into a (minor! but scary!) car accident.

Toby was driving my car, as he's thinking of getting a smaller car when we replace his in a year or so, so I told him to drive mine and see if that,s the size he was thinking of. We were on a highway that's going through serious construction right now, so it's very winding, down to two lanes with no shoulders, and has concrete barricades lining the road.

Now, Toby's car has antilock brakes. Mine does not. So when a car merging onto the highway stomped on the gas and swerved into our lane, cutting us off, Toby responded in the proper way that you should when in a car with ABS, which was to hit the brakes hard and firm, with no pumping. Aaaaand the brakes lock up, Toby loses control, and the car goes into a swerve and the back left corner slams into the concrete median.

The car didn't stall, luckily, we hit nobody else, nobody hit us, and the only casualty was that I somehow managed to break a fingernail in the confusion. And we were both shaking from adrenalin. Toby got the car under control, exited at the next chance he got, and we pulled into a gas station parking lot to assess the damage.

Which turned out to be nothing major, it looks to our untutored eyes. The bumper performed the job it was designed to do and will have to be replaced, as it's off by a fraction of an inch and is somewhat scraped up. We reported it to the insurance company via USAA's app, after realizing we'd probably save money overall by paying just the deductible to fix it instead of paying it all ourselves or not fixing it and trying to trade it in when we get a new car. The agent will call Monday and we'll arrange for an inspection to make sure nothing structural is damaged. The car drove just like usual for the rest of the day, so I suspect there's nothing wrong.

Anyway, once the shaking wore off, we went ahead and test-drove five cars because we have plans for the next couple of weekends and wanted to get it the hell over with. I took over driving for the rest of the day as I am a terrible passenger, always stomping on invisible brakes and making snarky comments about the red light coming up ARE YOU BLIND and I knew I was so unnerved that I would be more of a distraction to Toby driving than anything else.

So we've got the cars narrowed down to, pretty much, two, and will be making a decision in the next few weeks.

Oh, and I found a weevil in the MASTER BATHROOM WHAT THE HELL YOU CAN'T GET FARTHER FROM THE KITCHEN. I guess it rode there on one of our shoes. And we've got two weevils in a plastic tub in the kitchen in what has turned into some sort of sick experiment n starving weevils to death, and they,re still not dead, so I guess they can live a loooong time on nothing. (They were in there for identification purposes, and we just haven't gotten them out and killed them yet.)

And I've got more therapy for the wrist, as the approval finally came through from the insurance and I am FREAKING TIRED OF IT.

We saw RED 2 on Thursday evening--enjoyable, although not fantastic--and we may be seeing RIPD on Sunday, as we reasoned that we liked the movie when it was about aliens, so we might like it when it was about dead people.

And that's life here at Camp Telophase.



Sent from my Apple ][+

This morning: get in car, turn key, lights on dash start, funny noise occurs, car doesn't start. Guess I'm working from home today. Toby's guess is battery or alternator. We'll try to jump it later today and if that works, replace the battery. If that doesn't work, we'll be towing it to the mechanic tomorrow.

Tuesday afternoon my car started making a weird rattling/putputputputputputting noise that was loud enough people in parking lots turned to watch my car as I drove by. Nothing under the car, as far as I could see. It did that every time I drove, so I made an appointment with the mechanic for this morning. It did that until I got on the highway and got over 45 mph, whereupon it stopped and refused to show up for the mechanic. I drove around with the mechanic for a while trying to get it to repeat, to no avail. They put it up on the rack and took a good look, but couldn't see anything broken or misaligned. They did spot a huge honkin' nail in one of my tires, which was good, and fixed the inner tube, and changed my oil. So: not expensive, at least. $45 to have peace of mind that the car wouldn't die a flaming death on the highway, plus a nagging sense of doubt OF MY OWN SANITY.

It's just like the Tech Aura that causes your computer to spontaneously fix itself when a tech looks at it, or the thing that causes you to stop having symptoms of something while in the doctor's office waiting to be seen.

Speculate away about what it might have been, but don't get offended if I don't answer you: I've had enough of that thrown at me today by the mechanics, my coworkers, and everyone else I've talked to, and I'm rather tired of repeating the same information over and over again, as well you might imagine, and I've probably heard your solution.

Finished Jack McDevitt's Odyssey in the waiting room, at least. I like his near-future better than his far-future books, because I'm expected to accept that in his far future people have the same sort of generic Mid-American culture they have today, with more-or-less the same social rules and fashions, which unfortunately drives me nuts because I've had too many anthropology classes. My favorite of all of his is still The Engines of God, because it hits many of my Cool Bits: deep time, ancient cities, lost civilizations and the poetry thereof, mysteries never fully explained.

I'm also partway through The Crystal Shard, which is the first book in which the melodiously-named Drizzt Do'Urden appears, with an eye to a writeup on my thoughts about it and RPG tie-in novels at some point in the future. What's really driving me nuts, though, is that "principal" is substituted by its cousin "principle" consistently throughout the book so far, and the repeated mentions of the "principle city of the region" is getting me close to book!wall time.

Also am hiding from ice-cream party at work, because do not want to explain lactose intolerance over and over and over again.

Back when I was in highschool, I drove a lemon. It was an Oldsmobile Omega, which had had many, many problems from the start. To the extent that they ended up rebuilding the engine before it got out of warranty. Of the many things on it - I learned to replace fuses on the thing, and also how to determine what of a certain set of things was currently going wrong by which smell was coming out of the AC vents - the most intriguing was the next-to-last thing that went wrong. The last thing that went wrong was the frame breaking, the same week we got this mysterious thing fixed, after which we sold it and got me a Honda CRX, because Dad swore never to buy anything other than Japanese again.

At any rate, after talking about it on another LJ today, I figured I'd throw the symptoms up here and see if any of you can guess anywhere near what the actual problem was. :D

Symptom: When I accelerated from a red light or a stop sign, the windshield wipers would wipe once.

Have at it! I'll post the solution ... eventually. :) (If you read about it on pzb's LJ, don't give it away. :D)