Now that the first week of school is drawing to a close, I have completed most of the tasks I needed to accomplish and couldn't with a six-year-old attached to my leg, and I am now stuck at home because my car is finally being worked on at the You Don't Know What You're Talking About, Lady auto repair shop. I finally determined that my car was stalling because it is idling too low, and I discovered that if I turned the air on high, the RPMs went up enough to keep the car from stalling out in most situations. This is how I've been driving it for the last several weeks until we could scrape up enough cash to get it repaired. I drove the car to the repair shop today and tested it again in the parking lot, just to be sure. Yep, put the car in neutral, shut off the A/C and the car stalled. So I tell Mr. Whooziewhatsit at the front desk all this, and he says the blower motor doesn't have anything to do with how fast the engine idles. Then looks at me like, Well? What do you have to say to that? And of course what I want to say is, You wanna come out and see it for yourself, bitch? But I don't, because I'm a pussy.
So now I wait for the phone call that either says, "We figured it out and it will cost you more than you have," or "We can't figure it out because the computer says everything is fine and we don't know how to diagnose a car problem without a computer," or "We fixed something, but something else is going to break even worse next week." This is now paying me back for all those years when I would take the car in and the phone call was always, "We fixed it and it wasn't bad and we're not even going to charge you that much for it because it was so easy we'd be embarrassed to take money for that kind of thing."*
My husband is working from home today so that I could use his car while mine is being mishandled, so I can't do what I usually do when I need to be writing but I can't think of what to write - and that is put on my big headphones and crank the volume on iTunes to 11 and listen to music that makes me dance and laugh like crazy. There's obvious stuff like Flight of the Conchords and Tenacious D, but the real gems are pop and dance songs with some really stupid, yet earnest, lyrics. My current favorite is this:
I think that song is HILARIOUS. It's actually funnier when you don't watch the video. I now instruct my husband to call me "Shawty" and even the girls now run around the house singing, "Somebody call 911!"
But I digress. Because I should be trying to figure out what to write for my next Quilter's Home column, and nothing is coming to mind yet, and I'm sure they're going to tell me it's due, like, Monday, on the assumption that I've been working on it diligently and will turn it in even earlier, like I usually do. But no. I even have an idea list posted on my wall and any time I actually use one of them I get to cross it off, and I've only crossed off three and there's eight left, but none of them seem promising right now.
So, if I can't dance and I can't write, I guess all that's left is either cleaning or quilting. I'm guessing that bathtub is still gonna have a ring come dinnertime.
* HA! Repair guy just called and asked if it had really been 17,000 miles since I last changed the oil. And I wanted to say, YOU DON'T KNOW MY LIFE, BITCH but I didn't, because I'm a pussy. And, yes, it had been. And apparently that's all the poor car needed. I told you I was slacking off on the routine maintenance thing. Oil changes are one of those things I will always get around to tomorrow or next week, until suddenly, it's been a year and my car is choking to death and I'm putting it off even longer because I think it actually needs a new carburator implosion system or something. So, um, yay! Except for the part where I have to go pick it up and all the mechanics will gather to stare at the idiot who doesn't have the sense to change the oil more than once every 15 months.
