so many parentheses

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. The tulips and daffodils are up (even fading by now, some of them). The trees are blossoming everywhere you look, with riotous heavy bunches of pink petals hanging off the branches. They are all in bloom: dogwoods, magnolias, camellias, azaleas, rhododendrons, even the wisteria and lilacs are starting to show white and lavender and purple. 

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. Almost every day I take a walk in the afternoon, W. in the stroller, to soak in some sunshine and get away from my desk for a few minutes. I chat with someone on the phone, or J. and the pup come along, or sometimes I just walk to the sounds of nature - more nature than you usually get in the city. Without the sound or smell of cars, the air feels clear and clean. 

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. 

Isn't that strange?

It's not strange. It's spring. Every spring, some days are classic Gone West changeable spring days: raining one moment, sunny the next, rainbows like I've never seen anywhere else. Some days are classic Gone West bright sunny spring days, the kind that give you hope for summer. Some days are classic Gone West rainy gloomy days, the kind that remind you of winter.

But somehow it feels like the weather should mirror the tension in the world, the fear and grief that is going on in overloaded hospitals and overwhelmed cities. 

...

If it were not for the worry, if it were not for the work I'm still trying to get done with a wiggly baby around, this would be a lovely time. W. is in such a cute phase, and I'm happy to get to spend more time with him. He crawls and climbs and explores. He's learning to go down the stairs (although he will only do this for J. For me, he cries and holds out his arms). He loves bottles and cups of any sort (watch your coffee or beer). He can reach way higher than a not-even-1-year-old should be able to reach (don't leave things on the edge of the table). He pulls the leaves off my monstera and jasmine plants (I moved them to the front step. The sun burned them. Now they are on the back step). He tries desperately to get to my keyboard when I'm working. 

He is a lot of work, don't get me wrong, but in some ways this time is what I envisioned my parental leave would be: walks while he naps in the stroller, dinner out on the patio as the day cools, sitting in the porch swing with him while the world goes by (such as the world is right now, but we live on a bike route, so there are bikes and pedestrians most of the time). 

(Clearly I pictured newborns as much more tractable than they turn out to be. I imagined that he would cheerfully nap wherever we were. Not so. He was cranky wherever we went, and I felt sick with exhaustion all the time. Last summer is a blur.)

...

We talked about the five stages of grief early on in this. I still see a lot of denial and anger out in the world, and I'll probably cycle back to that, but for now I'm in acceptance. We know that diseases can jump from animals to humans. We know that we are vulnerable bodies in the world. For me, it's very helpful to think, "Why not now?"

[Baby contribution -> ';;./.-LA]

Why now? Well, why not now? 

For so many centuries, people died of infectious diseases. They still do, in so many parts of the world. The siblings of my Oma died as babies of things that antibiotics would have cured. We've been mostly liberated from that misery and grief here in the US, thanks to vaccines and medication. Now we are learning that our control is not complete. It's hard to give up control. 

When I lived in Rwanda, one of the staff who worked for my organization once came and said that he didn't feel well. I offered him some ibuprofen, and he stared at it and asked me what to do with it. I explained that he should to take two tablets three times a day - morning, midday, and before bed. It had never before occurred to me that I just medicate myself, most of the time, when I don't feel well. (Did you read that article about how average temperatures are going down, thanks to pain relievers? We just spend less time sick than people did for millennia.) 

So I'm here, hunkering down with my loves, trying to spare the world more contagion. 

happenings

Things that happened:

1. The dog got puppy mouth warts and we couldn't take her to play with other dogs for a month. She lives to play with other dogs - there is nothing she loves more, except maybe sleeping on a human bed with a human - and has more energy than can be dealt with at home, so things were difficult. We ended up doing things like wandering around parks in the dark after everyone else was gone, throwing a light-up ball. (Too bad she doesn't like balls that much.) We also tried standing at opposite ends of the house, calling her back and forth in exchange for handfuls of her meal. It kind of worked, but it was exhausting.
2. A pebble caught my windshield as I got on the highway, and by the time I got to work, there was a 12-16 inch crack across the driver's side. I need to get it replaced, but no time, people. No time.
3. A tree fell on J.'s car while he and the pup were hiking with a friend. The car turns out to be totaled, so he doesn't have a car right now. This means that we have to decide whether to get a new Subie or have him drive what was previously my car to work and buy something small and fuel-efficient to drive only in town (see #7, below). I'm not-very-secretly angling for a little scooter in addition to whatever else we get, and J. does not seem as anti-scooter as he was before. 
4. The water line to the ice maker on the fridge sprang a leak and leaked down between the wall and the wood floor, causing water damage that required tearing out flooring and drywall and all the lower cabinets and counters, and the insulation down in the crawl space, and then a weekend of fans and dehumidifiers that sounded like an airplane was landing in the kitchen. The pup despised it, to the point where we had to carry her past it, cringing, and she would run away when we tried to lure her back inside the house. The mitigation is done, but the repairs have not yet begun, so currently there is a table set up next to the sink on the plywood floor that currently constitutes the kitchen. Also, the fridge is in the dining room and the cabinets are outside. 
5. J. and I made a bid on a house that needed a lot of work, like $100K of work, and then the seller tried to get us into a bidding war, and we backed out.
6. I'm on my last week at my current job (today was my second to last commute) and of course it decided to snow. It snows once or twice a year, and this turned out to be the week. Fortunately, it didn't get down to 32 degrees on my commute home until I was just about to my exit. The side streets are slippery, but the highway was fine. I made it home in only 56 minutes, which may be a record, because everyone else stayed home or ditched work early.
7. A week from now, my commute home will be 2 miles instead of 52. That makes up for a lot. I can walk, even, or take the bus. That, my friends, is good news. I feel like I finally get to have Gone West back. I've missed it, these years of spending my days in State City. 

This life is a bit of a comedy of problems right now, but you can either laugh or cry. We are doing a lot of laughing in these parts. 

certified

I had lofty goals of blogging at least once a week this year. That was my plan. Not a resolution, exactly, just a plan. 

(My other plan for the year, signing up for and using digit, is thus far a success. I have finally begun to train digit on the fact that I want it to save more than $0.17 at a time by forcing it to save $10 or $100 at a time. If you want to try digit, by the way, let me know. I have a referral code. It is addicting.)

So anyway, blogging. I was going to do it. I was going to do it regularly.

Then I realized that if I want to scuba dive in Mexico at the end of February, I should get certified now. I figured this out the day before the first of five Tuesday night classes that culminated in open water dives last weekend. This means that I had class from 6:30 - 10:30 every Tuesday night, and also homework. 

I loved, loved, loved the scuba classes. I got all excited every week when I knew that I was going to get to go underwater that night. 

On the first pool night (which was actually the second class, because our first pool night got canceled due to the apocalypse snow), we had to swim 400 yards. I started off slow, because 8 laps is a lot of laps. By my return on the first lap, I had switched to the time-honored swim stroke of the women in my family: the side stroke. By the third lap, I was way out ahead of the other two students. Tortoise and hare, people. It pays to be the tortoise.

On the second pool night, we had to take off our masks and sit underwater without them for a minute, then put them back on. People panic over this, mostly because you just about have to keep your eyes closed lest the chlorine destroy them. It didn't bother me at all. I knelt sightless underwater for a minute, just enjoying the feeling of being underwater. I knew that the regulator wasn't going to fail me - I could breathe - and I knew that the surface was up there if I needed it. (I would worry if I were in 50 feet of water without my buddy, but this was not that situation.)

At the end of the class, we drove up to Other PNW State for the open water sessions. J. came along, because he's a diver, and the dive shop said there are usually other people up there diving.

To dive in 36 degree water, you need a serious wetsuit. Actually, you need more than just a wetsuit. You need a 7mm farmer john (a sleeveless wetsuit) covered by a 7 mm shorts/long-sleeve combo. You also need 5mm gloves, hood, and boots. And you will still be cold just about every second you aren't moving. (For comparison, in Honduras I dove in a 3mm shortie - shorts and short sleeves.) 

It's really pretty down there. The sea anemones stand a foot or two off the ground, orange and white, faces turned into the current. There are tiny jellyfish the size of a baby's cupped hand floating through the water, opening and closing slowly. Schools of fish swim between you and the sky.

By Saturday night, after three dives and a lot of standing around in and out of the water, I was chilled through. There was no reprieve out of the water, with the wind blowing on the wet neoprene, except the few minutes when we could stand directly in front of the propane heater. Sitting in the hot tub and taking a hot shower in the evening did not raise my body temperature back to normal. I went to bed still cold. 

I guess it probably didn't help that I was in the worst days of a cold. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck - and that was before I doped myself up with Sudafed and Afrin and ibuprofen to get my congestion to the point where my ears would not explode with the underwater pressure, and then jumped into freezing water.

Sunday morning before the final dive, standing out in the 33 degree air in a still-wet wetsuit, my hands were so cold they burned. J. had to run inside and get a bottle of hot water to pour into my gloves before I could move them enough to get my gear on. My instructor's regulator was frozen, spewing air in free flow when he tested it. 

When we dove, I had an extra 3 lb weight on one side of my BCD (the diving vest) to make up for the different air tank I was using, so I kept tipping to one side. I couldn't get warm. The water was so murky that I just followed the orange fins of the instructor. All I could think was, "Is this over yet?" I'm usually pretty good with air, but I tore through it trying to stay warm and not give up. 

And then we were out of the water, and we were certified, and I took another hot shower and put on layers of clothes and slept in the car most of the way home. 

So I'm good to dive in Mexico next week. I'm guessing that will be a little more pleasant than the frigid waters of the sound.

another side of the road

The car overheated a few kilometers outside of Krka National Park. It was a little grey Peugeot 208, and we had quite liked it, initially. It had a transmission that could run as either an automatic or a manual, and it turned its engine off when you stopped with your foot on the brake. There were only 12,000 km on the odometer.

But then it overheated, and some warning words and red symbols came up on the navigation screen. They were in Croatian. Neither J. nor I can read Croatian. At all. And we had no internet to google the words. We knew that red symbols and exclamation points were probably bad, though, especially combined with the temperature gauge blazing past the top of the red zone, so we stopped and popped the hood.

The fluids all seemed fine. Nothing was visibly wrong. We resolved to turn the heat on to try to cool it off and limp back to Sibenik.

A kilometer later, the temperature gauge was back in the red and the symbols and words were back.

Bad.

It took another kilometer or so to find a place to pull off - there was a tunnel - and when we opened the hood again, the coolant was completely gone.

Very bad.

We sat on the side of a hill for a while trying to connect to a cell phone network to call the rental car company. J. barely got through once in several tries, and then lost the call immediately.

At length, we decided to walk down the road to see if we could get better cell reception. We moved the car to the end of the pull off, debated the merits of leaving the hazard lights on ("The engine may already be destroyed," I said. "Who cares if the battery dies?"), and set off walking. (Well, first we took turns visiting the bushes for a pee on the side of a hill looking over a Croatian lake. It was a pretty pee.)

After less than half a kilometer of walking, a car containing two middle-aged men stopped and asked if we needed a ride. Gut-check revealing nothing other than a horrible smell of cigarette smoke in the car, we hopped in. The language barrier was real. We didn't even try to explain where to drop us off in town, accepting the bus station as a central (and explainable) location.

We arrived back in Sibenik about an hour after we planned, with no car. Instead of climbing up to visit two fortresses as we'd intended, we ended up using J.'s computer and then our host's cell phone to call the rental car company. 

"Does the car start?" the rental guy asked. 

"Yes," J. said, "but you can't drive it."

They would send someone, they said. It would be a couple of hours.

We got a bottle of wine and sat on the roof deck, watching the sun set over the Adriatic. 

That didn't suck.

We got some bread and cheese from the bakery and grocery down the hill, and we ate that, watching the last of the daylight over the islands.

That didn't suck, either. 

It was nearly 9 pm by the time the new rental car got there with two employees, and we directed them in the dark, studying the GPS on J.'s phone in the back seat of the little Suzuki. (I like Suzukis. I had a good experience with one on Zanzibar.)

They didn't believe us when we told them where to turn, but we finally convinced them to turn anyway, even though the wheels of "silly Americans who don't know where they are going" were visibly turning in their minds. The reason they didn't believe us about the turn is because we had brought them by a different route than where the car was, and so it required backtracking, not going toward the park. Which is a legit concern, but still. The J. and M. engineer/attorney combo is pretty likely to be right about a map. 

The car was still where we'd left it, blinking in the night. The coolant tank was still empty. 

"No problem," the English-speaker said. "We have water."

They poured a liter or two of water into the coolant tank. Employee #2, the non-English speaker, got behind the wheel and sat there for a minute, looking around the car. 

"He says that he can't drive this car," #1 told us. "It's an automatic."

Whaaaaaaaaaat? I still don't understand.

So #1 drove that car and J. drove the Suzuki. For about 500 meters before the Peugeot started having problems again. In the middle of the tunnel.

"They didn't believe me when I said it wasn't going to run," J. said. "They must have assumed the stupid Americans couldn't actually tell when something was wrong with the car."

Now the coolant tank was over-full, filled with a mixture of water and coolant. 

We left it on the side of the road, again, piled into the Suzuki, and drove back to Sibenik. The next morning, two different employees showed up at the guesthouse with two cars, the Suzuki for us and another for them. The company, they said, would send a truck for the Peugeot.

J. and I got into the Suzuki, which was a manual and had no fancy navigation contraptions, but ran like a dream, and we drove away along the scenic route down the coast, past emerald bays and steeple-topped hill towns, exclaiming all the way about how beautiful Croatia is. 

defeated by the children, again

Scenes from a trampoline park:

1. 

J. went running off to try something. The trampoline lifeguard dashed after him. 

"I think he forgot about the no running," I said. 

"First I thought he was running because a kid got hurt," the TL said. "Then I remembered that you two didn't come with any kids."

"You're making quite an assumption there, thinking he's not a kid," I said. 

"I kind of got that," the TL said. 

(J. found this hilarious. I am saying nothing here that I have not already said to him.)

2. 

J. fell into the air pit while trying to walk along a challenge tunnel, one foot on each wall. 

He crawled across the pit and managed to hoist himself out. 

Across the pit, a kid fell into it and stood up, walking effortlessly on the air. 

3. 

I dropped into the air pit just to see how it felt. (Weird.) 

When I clambered laboriously out, there was a girl with dark red-blonde hair staring at me. 

"You're supposed to wear closed-toe shoes to go in there," she said sternly, and pointed at the sign not three feet from me."

"Oh," I said. "You're right. You also have to be four feet tall. Do you do this one? Are you four feet tall?"

She gravely stood with her back to the sign. She was about 1/4 inch over 4 feet tall.

Then she showed me her caramel apple lollipop. 

"Those are my favorite, too," I told her.

4. 

I jumped off a ledge onto a trampoline, but my knees gave out and I fell. I rolled into a ball and stayed there.

I finally moved when I heard the TL coming over, expecting him to yell at me for lying down. 

"Oh, good," the TL said. "You aren't dead."

"She's just embarrassed," J. said.

5. 

J.'s list of injuries grew: 

1. He slammed into the ledge as he bounced back toward it (arm). 
2. He bounced on his head (neck).
3. He got rug burn all over his feet, knees, and elbows. 
4. That pulled muscle he already had in his thigh, from softball and all the other sports. 

"I'm so old," he said on one of the injury-recovery breaks. "Why would you want to date an old broken guy?"

(That's funny because he's younger than me.)

6. 

"You guys lasted a lot longer than most adults," the TL said. "Most people over the age of, like, 18, give up after an hour. It was a mistake, though. You'll regret it tomorrow. It was a mistake."

7. 

"Was that in the 1950s?" I asked J., today, when he told me the name of his first girlfriend. "That would be a good 50s name."

"The way I feel today, it might have been," he said.

...

(We actually both feel better than we expected. Trampolines are hard work.)

breaking all the things

The other day, I had one of those clumsy days. 

I woke up and pulled the spinach out of the fridge. It hit one of my Ball jars of chai, knocking it over and spilling chai all over the fridge and the floor. I cleaned it up as best I could in my hurry to get out the door, but our fridge is constructed strangely, and even when I've cleaned up all the visible liquid, it still drips out from somewhere for a while. I left that to deal with when I got home.

Back in my bedroom, I picked up my phone to put it in my purse. It slipped out of my hand and landed on a bottle of vitamins in a little crate next to my bed, somehow creating a volcano of vitamins. I think it hit the top of the bottle, broke it off, and jostled the bottle enough that it spewed vitamins out the top. There were little vitamin Ds everywhere. I picked up the ones I could find, stuffed them back into the bottle, tried unsuccessfully to get the top back on, and ran off to work.

The phone was fine. (This is why I buy cases.)

At work, I almost killed my delicate-looking little tea cup by dropping another dish on it in the dish rack (it's sturdier than it looks, fortunately). 

From then on, I just tried not to touch anything for the rest of the day.

hammock

I've been thinking lately that it would be nice to have a hammock. 

I own a hammock. I think. I just don't have it here. It is probably somewhere in my parents' basement, which is where everything is that I brought home from college/Rwanda/law school and dumped in the basement and then left there when I moved on to Rwanda/law school/Gone West. 

The only time I've ever hung that hammock was in Rwanda, which is funny because I bought it in 1999 in Nicaragua. It has traveled the world.

In Rwanda, I hung it (okay, my guards hung it) between two trees in front of my patio, just where the ground dropped off toward the lake. On Saturday afternoons, I would nap in it, in the shade and the bits of sunlight dappled through the leaves. Sometimes I would sit in it while I was on the phone or the computer.

One summer, I had an American college student stay with me (long story; I happened upon her at the Okapi minibus station while I was picking up a package that my office in Kigali had sent, the Okapi being both cheaper and more efficient than sending anything by mail, and offered her and the Rwandese guy with her a ride because they looked lost, and it turned out she needed a place to stay and stayed with me for most of the summer). 

I was sitting in the hammock doing something that I cannot remember at approximately lunch time. S. came out of the house with a plate of food for me, and I stood up to take it from her. Sitting back down, I forgot about the part where that type of hammock folds in on itself, and I sat down on nothing above a steep hill.

Somehow I tumbled over the folded hammock, upside down, somersaulting 180 degrees, and landed facing back up the hill, pasta and sauce splattered everywhere, the wind knocked out of me. 

That's a one time sort of mistake. One does not forget again.

spill

So, in the spirit, as previously mentioned, of occasionally Dressing Like a Professional, I now own a couple of shells to wear under suits. Specifically, I own two silk ones and one that I originally thought looked and acted like silk, but now I know better. (Polyester = static. NEVER AGAIN.)

I'm sure you can imagine exactly how much damage I can do to silk.

One of them is black, so that one is a little more indestructible.

The other one is a nice bright blue, and the first time I wore it, I went to an event after working hours. I got a glass of club soda, but the nice people behind the bar added some cranberry juice for flavor. I  also got a straw. Everything tastes better through a straw, especially when the glass has ice in it. (Because otherwise you have to try to sip around the ice when you tip the cup.)

Of course five minutes into making small talk with other lawyers, I flipped the straw out of my glass, spattering cranberry-soda onto my silk shell. My dry clean only silk shell. Lovely. 

Cue ridiculous amounts of googling regarding dry clean only silk and whether hand washing it would send it to instant doom. 

Googling suggested that there is only one kind of silk that truly cannot be hand-washed. The rest is just over-cautiousness on the part of the manufacturer, who does not want to be blamed when you ruin your clothes. 

I decided to risk it. This shell cost me $6. (I had rewards from b@n@n@ republic.) At $6, I could almost just buy another if I ruined this one. I did, however, go purchase Ivory dish soap for the gentleness factor. (Googling tells me that I should have bought the Ivory laundry detergent. Blame Target. They didn't have it. Or any other gentle detergent.)

Here is what I did (in case you ever have a similar dilemma): I put a light dusting of Borax into the bottom of a big metal bowl. I added cool water and a bit of Ivory dish soap. I dunked the silk shell a couple of times, then emptied the bowl and rinsed the shell a couple of times. I did not scrub it or ring it out. Instead, I laid it on a towel and rolled the towel up around it, squeezing the towel roll. Then I hung it up to dry.

It worked miraculously, until late that night after I had taken out my contacts and, to see if the spots were all gone, I leaned too close to the shell and touched my nose to it. My nose that was still wet from the sinus rinse I had just used.

I had to wash it again (yesterday) to get the waterspots out. 

I wore it today. Guess what I had to do tonight?

I cannot be trusted to avoid spills. 

cone

I made myself some chai this morning and took myself for a walk. Not an exercise walk, just the sort of walk that ensures that I do not miss the entirety of a beautiful day because I am stuck to my computer.

On the way back from my meandering, I saw a truck stopped about 20 feet back from a stoplight. My first thought was to shake my head at Gone West drivers. They love to leave huge gaps between themselves and the crosswalk box/the car in front of them. Space is frequently wasted. 

I had to walk over and back a block to mail a letter, so I walked past the truck three times. By the third time, I had noticed that it wasn't moving through cycles of the light.

"Can you put your hazard lights on?" I called to the woman in the driver's seat.

"No!" she said. "Nothing is working!"

There was a construction site a block over, with a lane of the street blocked off by orange cones. I went over to it and asked the guy loading the flatbed truck if I could use one of his cones. I explained that the truck was stalled in the middle of the road without lights and I was worried that one of the cars coming up on the light wouldn't see that it was stopped and so would run into the back of it.

He came over with me to help try to push the truck out of traffic.

Only the truck was so dead that even putting the key in the running position wouldn't allow her to shift into neutral (I knew there was a reason to drive a manual transmission). 

I waved oncoming cars over into the other lane while the guy from the construction site went to fetch a cone, which was actually more like a skinny orange pole. 

People in this country are so well trained. It's like magic. You put up an orange cone, and cars just miraculously move aside. We didn't even have any authority for the orange cone! We just put it there! In the middle of the road! And people responded like it was an officially sanctioned traffic device!

A van driving by asked if we needed help and I sort of nodded and shrugged at the same time, so they turned around and came back and parked behind the cone.

One of the guys from the van crawled under the truck and did something, I know not what, and suddenly the truck was in neutral. I was in awe. You can do that? I had no idea. 

That guy pretty much on his own (the other guy from the van was directing traffic and the cone guy had abandoned his cone to get back to work) pushed the F150 around the corner to a parking spot. I pretended that I was helping, but I had my purse and my tea mug in one hand, and I was wearing a skirt, so I probably looked like a comedy sketch of a woman pretending to help push a truck. 

After we got the whole thing straightened out, I went back to my apartment feeling full of purpose and vigor, like I had done something helpful already with my day. 

Then I called Sallie Mae to talk about my student loans. Pro tip: talking to Sallie Mae is guaranteed to ruin your day. Never do it if you can help it.

broke

It's been a while since I've been completely broke. Not a really long while - I was completely broke after law school - but a while. 

For the last few years, and especially the last year, my time has been worth more than my money. I could better afford to buy a lunch then to take the time to make one, because making one meant staying up a few minutes later, and I needed sleep more than anything.

I got used to being able to snap up that cereal in bulk when it was on sale, or that skirt when it finally hit the clearance rack. Shopping for clothes has been a stress reliever over the last year, and even though I only shop in the back of the store, I've still gotten used to buying things when I see them and I like them.

I can't do that now. It is a hard and fast line that I cannot cross: things cannot be purchased. 

It's freeing, actually. I didn't realize how I had come to depend on shopping to make me feel just a little less stressed out.

I still go into stores, especially downtown, because I need somewhere out of the wet and cold to wait for appointments or the bus, and I can't afford to buy coffee to pay my rent at a table in the bucks of Star.

When I go into stores now, I told a friend yesterday, they feel like museums. Children's museums, maybe, because you can touch all the pretty things and admire them, and then you put them back where you found them, and you leave. Before I met up with her, I was in the jewelry department at a discount store, trying to pass a few minutes out of the rain. I looked at all the shiny things sparkling on their little hooks. I let the stones run through my hands. I straightened the links of the chains. And then I walked away. 

Looking was weirdly almost as satisfying as any purchase. I still had the sensory satisfaction of seeing and touching all the pretty new things, and let's face it: the one thing you bring home never looks quite as lovely on its own as it did among all the other shiny new things. Plus I left with the satisfaction of knowing that I resisted a temptation. I left happy.

foiled

When I lived in Universe City, it seemed like the sun was always shining when I went to Gone West and the clouds descended again as I returned to Universe City. 

I don't know if this is actually true - Universe City does get substantially more rain than Gone West - but it felt true, and it was true today. As I drove on the highway toward Universe City, the pleasant warmth of the sun disappeared into fog, and I had to turn the fan in the car from cold to medium and then warm. 

I was running a little late for my own goodbye party (let's face it: when am I not running a little bit late?) when I heard a loud noise that sounded like something hit the passenger side of my car. Weird. 

The car drove just fine, so I continued on a little ways, as the car began driving less and less fine. 

Back tire, passenger side. 

Recap: 

1. 2010 - Front passenger side tire: faulty valve. Multiple flats.
2. 2011 - Rear driver side tire: weird hernia thing; replaced.
3. 2013 - Rear driver side tire: intentional puncture while parked in front of my house; all four tires replaced.
4. 2014 - Rear passenger side tire: blow out on the highway.

I don't get it. I drive a little tiny car with little tiny tires. How do they keep failing me like this? Is it normal to have so many tire issues in barely three years of owning a car? It's not the alignment. This little car drives straight indefinitely when I take my hands off the wheel, unless there is a cross wind.

I parked well off the freeway and called roadside assistance. I got a card in the mail once that I was supposed to keep in my wallet (I did not) saying that I had roadside assistance, and I happened to see it yesterday as I was cleaning out my office (end cleaning time: 1 am).

Only it would take them up to an hour to get there, and I realized that the tire place that replaces their tires for free if something goes wrong might be closed on Sunday anyway (it was). I am not going to buy a new tire from some other place if I can get this one for free.

I could have gone forward to Universe City, but once the tire was replaced, either by me or by roadside assistance, it would take a very long time on back roads, driving under 50 mph. I would completely miss my party, and I worried about the donut tire making it so far. The distance back to Gone West was shorter.

I can change a tire, but it was freezing out there. I was dressed for warm, sunny Gone West, not foggy, blustery in-between land. 

I had to take everything out of my trunk in order to get at the spare.

My hands were freezing.

The only good news in this picture is that I keep a waterproof stadium blanket in my trunk. I put it on the damp ground next to the car and went to work.

I was in the process of tightening the bolts on the spare when someone stopped to help.

I don't mean to be critical of big-city majority culture (OR MAYBE I DO), but it's worth noting that the very nice guy who stopped to help me, after many, many cars just drove by, was Latino and spoke with an accent. Kindness is still alive somewhere in the world, just possibly not here.

The nearest exit was only a mile or so off, so I took that one and stopped at the bucks of star to try to warm up.

It took more than twice as long to drive back on a winding country road along the river, but it was far prettier. I've missed that road entirely, even though it runs all the way down to Universe City, because it is so much slower than the freeway.

I'm glad I got to drive it today.

Now I'm home, in the warmth, taking this extra time to pack. I probably need the extra time, too.

driving problems

I secretly take a little bit of joy in letting my manual transmission car roll backwards just a tiny bit when people pull up too close behind me on a hill.

Does that make me a bad person? 

Even if you are in a hurry, it is a good idea to be kind to other drivers.

Which is possibly the opposite of what I am doing by letting my car roll back. But I'm not doing it to hit them (I have never hit them), just to remind them that some of us have manual transmission cars, and on especially steep hills, we need a little more space. I think people forget that manual transmission cars still exist. 

WE EXIST, PEOPLE.

...

A couple of times lately I have thought there was something wrong with my headlights. It would be annoying if I had to replace yet another headlight.

I feel like I forgot to turn my headlights on, but I look and look at the road before me and there are two widening Vs of light, so it can't be my car.

Why is it so dark?

It turns out that the power has been going off every time it rains, in different parts of town, which in the Pacific Northwest is a problem. It rains a lot here, you see. 

(Weirdly, Universe City gets 13 inches of rain per year more than Gone West, possibly proving my ancient theory that it rains more often in Gone West but not as hard. Gone West drizzles. Universe City pours. I needed an umbrella much more in Universe City.)

And still, every time it actually rains (v. drizzling), both towns fall apart. This would be like the Mitten falling apart every time it snowed, ONLY WORSE because it rains 9 months out of the year here. The drains fill up. The electricity goes out.

It is unnerving to be at a major intersection in a major city with no traffic signal. In Liberia, where the traffic lights haven't worked in years, everyone seems to just figure it out. Here, people are so dependent on the lights that they stutter forward hesitantly at the intersections so that I want to open my window and say, "Yes, it's your turn. Yes, all three of you who are headed east. All three of you go at once, and then those of us headed north and south will go at the same time, see?"

That said, I almost ran an intersection completely because it was so dark that I didn't even realize I'd already come to it.

The Month of the Bad Tire(s)

Bad news: I'm back on the bus.

My bike tire went soft on the way to work today. It didn't go all the way flat, so I sort of limped along to work, checking it every block or two, trying not to run over anything too bumpy that might hurt the rim.

There is a tire pump in the bicycle room at work, and when I got to work I pumped the tire.

At the end of the day, the tire was still full, so I got on the bike and rode home.

I was a little more cautious than usual: I took main roads instead of the waterfront, in case I had to get on a bus, and I checked the tire a lot.

I made it home just fine, but my bike made a scraping noise, like something was rubbing against the tire, all the way home. 

It wasn't until one of the last stoplights that I noticed something odd with the tire. 

When I got home, I looked more closely. Sure enough: the tire is fraying off the rim. 

The tire was literally falling apart underneath me as I rode. In fairness to the tire, it is fully possible that it came with the bike when my parents bought it for me twelve years ago, which might just be beyond the normal lifespan of rubber.

I don't have time to bring the bike into the shop before Friday night, so I'm back to the bus.

This is an expensive month.

slash-stab*

Well, the suspicion I placed on my car for ruining yet another tire has been alleviated. The car cannot be blamed. The car was, in fact, the victim.

On the way out of the office on the lunch hour, my coworker told me that there has been a rash of tire slashings in our neighborhood. His car's tire has been slashed twice, and he finally called the cops, which is saying something, since I think of him as probably the last person on the planet who would call the cops other than, say, a mob boss.

He thought that they might be targeting bigger cars, though, SUVs and Subarus, that it might be an environmentalist thing.

 Apparently not.

My car gets almost 40 miles to the gallon on the highway. It is small and light. It is an environmentalist's happy car, if an environmentalist were to have a happy car.

The tire place called me not ten minutes after I dropped the car off to tell me that the tire had been intentionally punctured by a sharp object. (I think the difference is the location: accidental punctures happen on part of the tire that runs on the road. Intentional punctures go into the side-wall.)

Also, the tire that had been vandalized was the newest, best tire on the car, and the others were basically illegally tread-less, and did I want to buy four new tires?

I did not want to buy four new tires, but I didn't seem to have much of a choice.

(Just to fend off any aspersions on the name of the tire shop: I have used this PNW chain of tire shops multiple times, and I have universally found them to be honest and helpful. They are known for those qualities. Almost every time I have gone in, they have fixed my tire without charging me anything. The only times I have paid a dime are when 1. my tire - the predecessor to the one with the puncture today - got a hernia on the highway and pretty much burst through its interior wire caging and was not salvageable, and 2. today.)

While I waited for my tires to be replaced, I called the non-emergency police line, and some detective person called me back.

"You came very close to being our 1000th caller about this," he said. "You almost won the t-shirt."

The tire slashings turn out to be more of tire... stabbings, with a leather awl or an ice pick or some undetermined sharp pointed object that does not have edges like a knife. They have been going on for months.

I mostly called the police to help them establish the pattern and maybe make this stop. I don't ever expect to get reimbursed the $90 for my newest, best tire, but it would be nice to not have to worry every time I go out to my car that my tire will have again been stabbed, costing yet another $90. I only have so many multiples of $90. The multiples of $90 in my bank account are not unlimited.

* The title of this is funny to me because it is what we used to say when practicing knifework at my martial arts studio in Universe City. Slash-stab. Slash-slash-slash. Stab-slash. Stab-slash-stab.

ongoing tire saga

I was all excited tonight about the littlest of things: my fighting class gets done at 8:30, and I had nothing to do but go to bed afterward. I didn't even need to stop at the store for milk! This never happens to me.

(That was foreshadowing.)

(This never happens to me.)

Remember how, when I bought my car almost three years ago, I kept having problems with the tires? Remember how one would be flat and then another?

It's happening again. 

I suppose one flat tire is too early to call a pattern. I'm just saying: it has happened again.

Fortunately, my dad walked me through changing the tire a couple of years ago, on the phone, and I'm pretty okay at figuring things out. That, and three people from my martial arts studio stopped to help. 

Mostly they put the flat tire into the trunk while I put the donut on the axle. 

"Just maybe move the sword out of the way," I called. "I don't want the satin scarf to get dirty." 

That's what everyone says when they put a tire in their trunk. 

Now my pleasant planned evening tomorrow of getting a few groceries from the one local branch of a Universe City store that has a couple of brands I can't resist looks more like an evening of waiting around at the tire place. This tire is one they sold me a few years ago, and I really hope it's under warranty still.

complications

My packing panic has been alleviated by a weekend of, well, packing. Things are coming together. 

The living room now contains a wall's worth of boxes and suitcases and bookshelves and filing cabinets, where I have moved them from the lower bedroom level. I gave away three bags of clothes and shoes. Another three bags of clothes and a box of miscellani are ready to go to St. Vinnie's. 

I have a plan of spending each evening this week going through at least half a box worth of papers. Tonight I have thrown out about an entire grocery bag worth of paper. (Speaking of which: does one need to keep EOBs? What about pay stubs? For how long?)

I threw one of my sets of sheets in the wash yesterday so that I could pack that set and put my favorite set on the bed.

Half an hour later, when I came out of my bedroom, there was water on my bathroom floor, which seemed odd. Heading toward the stairs, I saw, in that moment when you realize that it's all going wrong, that the carpet at the bottom of the stairs was soaked. 

Yup. It was what you think. 

I opened the door to the laundry room, and there was half an inch of water on the floor.

That is never a good thing.

My friend S. happened to be knocking at my door at almost exactly that moment to look through my clothes for tall girl things that might fit her, and she was an immense help. Between J. and S. and I, we wrung out enough towels to fill five buckets of water. 

The landlady told me to call the guy who fixes the place, and I did, and he came over with a shopvac and heaters and fans within half an hour.

The next time I went downstairs, the hall carpet was gone. 

Yeah, it's like that. We are now living in the sort of house where the white noise is almost too loud to be comfortable, what with all the fans, but it can't drown out the noise of footsteps on the bare plywood. We are wearing shoes in the house, lest we be grabbed by little nails sticking out of the wood.

The good news is that the wood dried incredibly fast, probably because we caught it almost instantly.

From inspection of the washer, it appears that the piece of plastic that directs the hose into the tub broke off and directed the hose toward, well, whatever it felt like directing it toward - in this case, the guts of the washer and thereby to the ground. The sheets in the washer were mostly still dry, since all the water had cascaded to the ground.

Come to think of it, I don't actually know if we have a functional washer right now. That would be handy to know.

birthday party no. 1, 2012

It's my birthday tomorrow, and I am going with the all party, all the time philosophy. Everyone deserves a birthday week, at least, if not a month. 

I planned a hike on Saturday, a little far away. It was a comedy of errors, in a sense - we didn't have a Northwest Forest Pass, the Forest Service office where we meant to buy a NW Forest Pass was closed on Saturdays*, the road to the trail we intended to take was closed and very sternly marked against trespassers, there was a crowd of hunters at the beginning of the backup plan trail ("Should we worry about getting shot?" I asked. "No, we're the only people up here," they said, and indeed: we did not get shot). But it was beautiful and perfect anyway, because everyone along was laid back and cool with the changes.

The world looked different from one highway south of where we usually hike. The familiar mountains were far off in the distance or hidden completely, but new ones rose around us. 

We ate lunch on a rocky outcropping with the heat of the sun on our heads, looking out at wilderness area. The temperature was ideal for hiking: warm enough to be satisfying, cool enough to keep from sweating. We sat next to a little pond while R. took a swim. "It's quite nice, actually!" he called from the middle of the pond. (Mountain lake in late September: you will not catch me even making the attempt. Everything in me revolts at such cold.)

After hiking, we made our way to the prettiest hot springs I know. I went there two years ago with N. and S., when I lived in Gone West, and I've been on a quest to get back ever since. We had to scramble up a dusty slope to get there, but the little natural pools are on a bluff over the river, and they are indeed lovely. There were fewer nude people this time, which meant that we didn't feel awkward in our suits. (If everyone else is naked, it actually does feel odd to have a swimsuit on, like you are ashamed of something.)

We lingered too long in the warm water, with a break for slices of cake and camping cups filled with sparkling juice. 

The light turned golden on the drive west through the mountains, and it was long dark by the time we got home.

...

* We got a NW Forest Pass at a sporting goods store only a block from the closed Forest Service office, but when we got to the trailhead for the hot springs, we found out that yesterday was fee-free for National Public Lands Day. Yay for public lands and free things! Even if you've already paid. (The pass is good for a year.)

Nonsense

The Mitten was a whirl of hugs and weddings and baby necks to snuffle. Altogether very satisfying.

On the way to the Mitten, the entertainment system apparently malfunctioned on the flight from San Francisco to Chicago. I wouldn't know. It was a red eye, and the only thing to do on a red eye is drift off as the plane takes to the air and partially wake up only to shift positions until you have to actually wake up to stumble off the plane. That is precisely what I did, although I vaguely recall feeling annoyance at the repeated announcements being made about the entertainment system when they had promised to talk as little as possible so we could sleep.

I got an email, however, offering me a free gift because of the inconvenience I suffered on a flight on which directv was unavailable. (Side note: there is approximately a zero percent chance I would pay money for directv on a flight. I bring these amazing items of entertainment with me: books. Also, I have an iPod. And the clouds below provide endless entertainment. I actually switched seats on my flight back from Amsterdam to Newark to sit in a row with non-functional entertainment systems. I had a book, and those rows had empty seats. I value sleep over television to a degree I cannot describe. One can never have enough sleep.)

I redeemed my free gift for a $75 credit toward my next flight.

On the way back to State of Happiness, I got caught in the debacle that was United Airlines last Tuesday. I don't know the extent of their computer malfunction, but I can tell you that it made my flight to SFO just late enough that the doors had closed to my flight to Universe City when I got off the shuttle across SFO at gate number no, we cannot be bothered to maintain in working condition a terminal for flights so piddly and small. (Lie. It was fine, just old.)

The last flight of the day arrived in Universe City just after midnight. My roommate, J., had to work early the next morning, so she couldn't really stay up that late, and I had to pay for a taxi home. I also had to be at work at 8:20 the next morning. It was unfun.

The moral of this story is that United Airlines will give me a $75 credit for their failure to provide me a service that I did not miss and would not have paid to use in the first place, but nothing at all for costing me several hours of my life and actual money that I couldn't really afford to spend, here at the end of the month. Odd.

flotation

It is finally warm enough to be called summer here in Universe City (and everyone who is now complaining about 80+ degrees F can SHUT UP. You get your nine months of rain. Let us have a few weeks of sunshine. We have to stock up on Vitamin D sometime).

Anyway, it is finally (almost) warm enough to satisfy me, so obviously I jumped at the chance to float the river on Sunday. 

One of my major complaints about State of Happiness (and the Pacific Northwest in general) is that the water is so cold. The water in the ocean is cold. The water in the rivers are cold (snowmelt). The water in the lakes is cold (snowmelt, springs). This is not okay, people. You cannot swim in water that causes hypothermia in mere minutes, even in the middle of the summer. Particularly not summers here, where everyone whines when it hits 90 degrees F.

Somehow, though, on a 91 degree F day, the water in the river had warmed enough to be tolerable all these miles from the snowmelt, as long as only one's butt and feet were in the water.

Problems abounded. Probably because I was involved. K. had an extra tube for me, but he blew it up. As in, over-blew it, so that it popped. SHO's raft had been chewed by a varmint. So SHO and I went to the most Africa-looking store I have ever encountered in the US (few aisles, lot of bright plastic crap made in China) and bought tubes for $11.99. The good kind, from the sporting good section. Okay, as good as a store that sells tubes for $11.99 offers.

We arrived riverside with our tubes, and all piled into one car to shuttle up the river. K. and SHO held a tire tube onto the top of the car with ropes through the window. Periodically it would blow back over the back windscreen and sort of flutter there, begging to be let loose.

Then that tire exploded, just about as soon as K. set it down on the ground to tie some rope around it.

We all got back in the car and went to the Africa-looking store on that side of town.

The floating, though, was lovely. It was peaceful and comfortable and sometimes a little bit exciting.

There were, of course, a few minor glitches. 

At the risk of talking about work, floating the river does come up sometimes at work, in a context that is less than flattering about the standards of some of the people who float the river. And sure enough, there were the teenagers lying to the cops about having life jackets. ("We lost them back there on that curve.") There were the teenagers who were hiding beer cans. There were the teenagers who somehow managed to keep cigarettes and lighter dry in order to contaminate the air of all concerned when we got stuck floating next to them.

You know you are old and boring when you wear a life jacket the whole time you are floating the river, and you are tempted to scold the smokers. And when you thoroughly sunscreen yourself well in advance, just so that sunburn is not much of a worry. Because otherwise I would, in fact, worry.

that easy

When the keys got locked in my car while we were camping, we tried the logical thing first: everyone else's keys. We even shaved down one of SHO's keys by scratching it on the ground and some concrete structure, just because he happened to have an extra on his keychain. We were hoping that the fact that I drive one of the most commonly stolen mid-1990s cars would make it easy to break in. 

Apparently it's only easy when you have a shaved key belonging to that brand of car. Or something. Shaving a key did not work. I would make a painfully inept car thief.

One or more of us could drive back to Universe City, an hour each way, but we couldn't get into my house, because that key was also locked into the car. I could call my roommate to let us in, but my phone was locked in the car, and I don't know her number by heart.

We could call a locksmith in One Horse Town nearby, but it was impossible to predict how much that might cost on a Sunday on a holiday weekend.

And so I ended up wandering around the campground looking for someone with the same model of car and/or the camp host and/or anyone who looked like they might know how to break into a car.

The first people I came upon were two men, a middle-aged man and perhaps his father, standing next to their boat, still on its trailer, tying up fishing tackle. They did not have the same model of car, they were not the camp host, and they did not look like they knew how to break into a car.

Of course I asked them for help. What could possibly make more sense than asking the first random strangers you see to break into your car?*

The crazy and miraculous thing is that they did it.

They didn't have the professional tools, but they wedged some wood in the top of the door and straightened out a wire hanger, and partway through we realized that the ignition was set to on, so they didn't even need to get to the lock, and one of the men managed to hit the power window button for the back door, and we were in.

It was just that easy. I'm still sort of awed by this.

* I actually have precedent for the random stranger thing. I locked my keys in my baby Land Cruiser in Rwanda more times than once. The first time, I tried to hire a thief - a random thief off the street! - to break into my car. He was unsuccessful. I was disappointed, but also reassured that my baby Land Cruiser was not so easy to steal. The final time it happened, having learned a thing or two in the intervening two years, I called the Toyota dealership. Their technician needed less than 30 seconds to break into my car. And it was free. And I didn't have to worry about running into a random thief on the street who already had practice on my car.