With a slightly somber look at the alarm clock I realize I forgot to mention something relevant to my whole somewhat ridiculous job. I've been able to escape the endless parade of shuffling cars with my parents. This can be an exciting pastime since I can't drive my mother's car, and she -- at least until I got whatever it is I'm doing all day -- would leave first and return last pretty much any working day. With two cars in a three-person household we could take simultaneous working for maybe one day before going mad.
So, happily, and actually as of a month plus ago, I've got a car. It's a used car, of course, obtained by the same way I've bought every car I ever bought: my father knew this guy who was selling one and thought this would be good. In this case, the guy is one of the people my father does home repair work on, mostly repairing leaks that the guy had tried fixing himself despite the long track record. But the guy doesn't throw anything away even when he should, and consider the source of that opinion, and if he's the only person in the household who drives, well, why shouldn't he have three cars and let two of them sit under the tree just in case they come in handy? And sure enough, one did. In fact, he offered to sell us two cars, but this would have been contingent on him getting all the stuff out of the station wagon, which will never happen. Not just is the back stuffed full and the back seats filled up, and the passenger side filled up, but you can not sit in the driver's side of the station wagon, because stuff hangs over that.
My car is a reasonably pleasant white mid-90s car that looks like every other car in existence, and my mother would prefer it was blue. There were some repairs needed, like replacing brake pads and screwing down the distributor cap (the screws had somehow gotten stripped and the cap rattled around like a percolator, with precious fuel economy dribbling out on the highway), or going through the signing process. The guy wanted to be sure we went over every single word of signing over the title. Reading legal documents in their entirety is good practice, but I didn't need him to explain in simpler language just which of us was the ``seller'' and which was the ``buyer''. But with all that settled, and registration and plates paid for, the car is a nice and reasonably well-behaved vehicle, except for the dried leaves that got into every crevice during its hibernation, and what seems to be tree sap that's poured on the side that was away from the tree.
Now on to little mysteries of life, like why the Tivo recorded today's episode of The Price is Right twice. In fact, that's exactly the mystery I want to examine.
Trivia: The Vienna Court Opera experimentally used electric lighting in May 1883. Source: Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch.
Currently Reading: Food in History, Reay Tannahill.