How About FahrvergNOgen

My friendly neighborhood credit union has agreed to purchase this vehicle and let me stick a Flying Spaghetti Monster emblem on it and park it in my carport.

You think that's silly? Progressive has agreed to let me drive it!

Being without a car for a couple of years has probably skewed my view of car "ownership." It's hard to spend money on a car (as opposed to a bike, amirite??), because it's a ridiculously expensive thing just to keep around idle, even more ridiculously expensive actually to use - that's if it doesn't break down or get bashed up - and loses value faster than Broom Hilda went through bobby pins. But, as cars go, this seems like a decent value for the money. It's small, it's a stick shift, and the miles are very low. It has paint, upholstery, and air conditioning. The radio works, as do all the doors and windows. So it's pretty short on character, but I guess you can't have everything.

What I really wanted was a 1967 Karmann Ghia listed on Craigslist for $3000, which was perfect, except for missing part of the floor. I was cool with that. So you have a little additional stopping power, right? But "practicality" prevailed.

The argument for a "practical" car was that I'm going back to school this fall. It means my schedule is full, with long days, and a limited amount of time to get from work, to the UT campus for one class, to ACC campus for another one. It isn't the distance, and as far as time goes, it's definitely faster to get around central Austin by bike than by car. It's more the part of town and the time of night I'd need to be there. Austin Community College's East Riverside campus is where that woman was sexually assaulted last Saturday, and just a couple of blocks from Cody Johnson's ghost bike.

Driving is scary, when you aren't used to it. The responsibility of operating even a little bitty car like this one is a bit overwhelming. Plus, it's unwieldy and inconvenient. You're restricted to going where cars go - highways and parking lots - which often travel at about the same speed, and in any case are not pretty or fun.

Oh, but I wish everyone would bike. Just to try it! It really should scare the crap out of you to drive, you know? You should approach it as if you were carrying a primed bomb with you, everywhere you went. And if people would get over the idea of cars as an indispensable convenience, when they so often aren't convenient at all, the world would be a considerably quieter and less smelly place. Well, at least until you got to the office.

Anyway, I signed up for one of Progressive's "Snapshot" devices, which it's my goal to confound thoroughly by driving my car as little as humanly possible. Maybe I can sell it in 40 years as a classic, missing a floor maybe, but with under 100K miles! What a bargain.

But What Price Freedom?

There are people in the world who take a lot of pride in their automobiles. Their cars are always shiny and smell new, the upholstery is plush, and they never let you eat Cheetos when you ride with them.

Then there are regular people, who have regular cars. Maybe a dent and a scratch here and there. Maybe a little dusty. Maybe there are a few unidentified loose interior trim pieces rolling around under the driver's seat, and maybe there are a few random other things, too, which may be sticky.

And then there's me. If I had set out from the infancy of my driverhood to possess only cars with what we may charitably term Character, cars that require, nay demand, a humorous cartoon soundtrack to accompany their questionable progress down the street, then I would have made a smashing success. But there was never a conscious effort on my part. It just happened. Oh, sure, I covered my last VW in silk daisies, taped a magic wand to the antenna, affixed frog and rainbow and peace sign stickers to the windows, superglued three plastic martini glasses to the dashboard, and hung a purple disco ball from the ceiling, but that wasn't an attempt to make the car silly. It was only an acknowledgment of the silliness that already existed, and put more of a positive spin on the billowing clouds of white smoke that obscured the immediate vicinity every time I started it up.

I still have the poor thing. I haven't driven it in probably two years. The clutch was getting a little iffy, and my environmental conscience was suffering pangs over the smoke issue, and then someone smashed the driver's side window to steal the radio (as if it worked!!), and I kind of lost heart and stopped driving it. It won't start now, of course, because it sat for so long the battery is dead. I assume the clutch didn't just need a nice long rest to get better, the tires are flat, and the amount of smoke it would probably give off if I did manage to get it started might permanently alter the delicate balance of the Earth's atmospheric gases. Perhaps I can trick a local charity into accepting it as a donation.

So now I drive this large, bouncy thing my friend Diane sold me, on ridiculously easy terms. I like it fine. Parallel parking is of course completely out of the question, and filling up the gas tank will give you apoplexy, but fortunately I don't drive so much that I have to put gas in more than once a month.

It has not yet sprouted any flowers.

But it SCREECHES. I nicknamed it "the Behemoth" shortly after acquiring it, but it's becoming "the Banshee," because it just gets louder, and louder, and louder. One time it stopped screeching, and it turned out that was a very bad thing, because it meant that the alternator/water pump belt had broken. Fortunately, I was only a couple of miles from a Pep Boys, where I was able to get a new belt, which made the car screech again. Embarrassingly. People turn and stare.

I started it up in the parking lot at work today, and a guy I know slightly from another department signaled for me to roll my window down. "That sounds like a serpentine belt," he said. "It's bad. It shouldn't do that. It could break."

"Yes, I know," I said. "The old one did break. This is the new one."

"Well, it needs to be tightened, then," he said, "and I know somebody who works here who can help you - he's a mechanic. I'll call him tomorrow, and ask him to take a look at it for you. No, no, don't worry about it. He's cool."

There's this coworker of mine that I'm dating, and that's probably just about enough said about that. Not long after we began going out, he came into my office rather perturbed. "I'm not sure how to handle this," he said, "but there's a guy I know who keeps asking me about you, since we work together. He keeps asking me if you're seeing someone. The thing that really bugs me is, he could be competition! He's a mechanic..."

Our relationship being clandestine as far as work goes, he never told this guy that yes, I was seeing someone, and in fact the person I was seeing was him.

So now my car is getting looked at tomorrow by a guy who doesn't know that I know that he was asking about me, unless I can think of a polite excuse for begging off - but then my car really is exceptionally screechy.

Speaking of which, Katie has recently turned eighteen, and clearly intends to allow no one any rest by night or by day until somebody coughs up a car for her. Maybe I should just give her mine, and flee the country. By bicycle.

Saturday Ramblings

I swear, I can quit blogging anytime I want.

Last night baby Anna climbed into bed with me and snuggled up close. She stroked my arm. "You have smooth skin, Mommy," she said. "Like a hot dog."

My skin is also delicious, apparently, as I'm being eaten alive. Still, it's a perfect day for sitting on the front steps with the plants, an entirely ineffectual citronella candle, and my iBook. Margie's moving over the next couple of weeks and I'm plant-sitting for her. Her plants are much cooler than mine.

If mosquitoes are so repelled by citronella, how come I find drowned ones in the melted wax? Remind me not to sit out here in daisy dukes anymore. I'm going to be incredibly itchy in some really embarrassing places tomorrow.

It's also a perfect day for installing my happy new hood ornament.

Morning Sickness

Around 5 a.m., I awoke from a vivid dream that I had just found out I was pregnant. Timing is a bit muddled in dreams. For one thing, it's odd that I was only just finding out as I was beginning to feel the baby move. For another thing, if my last sexual encounter had knocked me up, you'd think the diapers and 3 a.m. feedings would have tipped me off some time ago.

My alarm went off just as I was getting back to sleep, and I was agonizingly tired, and I don't want to go to work, and I haven't taken a sick day in a month or so. I got up to compose an email to the panicmonger. "I'm sick (cough, cough)," I wrote.

The joke's on her, because I moved my car back into the break spot before riding my bike home yesterday.

But now, of course, I'm wide awake. Maybe I'll go shopping. I could use a pair of these:

They're perfectly safe. I have an IUD!

Today's Tuesday!

Today's band name: Amish Floozy

Today's addition to my car: An Apple sticker

Today's fortune cookie: "All of your hard work will soon be paid off."

Today's aggravation: I got back from lunch to discover that my parking spot, the one right in the middle next to the three-martini break area, had been taken. Now, I realize the common folk can't be expected to understand that this spot is the rightful property of their betters. But the car parked there this afternoon belongs to the panicmonger. Unacceptable!

Today's feat of derring-do: A coworker received a .gwi attachment from a District contact and asked if I knew what kind of file that was. So I googled it.

Today's magnetic fridge phrase:
please go away
I am having a sausage moment here

Saturday Project

A little light ride-pimpage:


I'm hoping the magic wand on the antenna will hold up a little longer than the pinwheel we put on it yesterday. It turns out pinwheels don't do that well at highway speeds.

It needs a hood ornament. Any suggestions?