Have Car, Won't Travel (Plus Attachments) (Patreon)

I'll be putting together your rewards page some time tomorrow. While you're waiting, I've attached the latest chapters of Khan and Lone Wolf! 

I thought I'd share this too, my attempt to get out of town for a day this past week. Around the start of the year, my washing machine died, we'd kept it running for as long as possible but clearly there was no saving it at this point, and the dryer had been on its last legs for a year, it wasn't a dryer so much as a hair dryer with delusions of grandeur. 

Since I had to replace one anyway, and the other was one unemptied lint trap away from making the clothes wetter than they went in, I decided to replace both and set them up on the ground floor. We have a pipe that runs through this room anyway to allow water to drip from the roof into our sewer line, so if we tapped that, ran some water from the kitchen faucet through the adjoining wall, it could work. Thanks to my father's know-how, he, myself, and my sons spent a couple of hours getting it all installed. When we were finished, my wife played her part, which was to drive to the hardware store and buy two metal strips to hold the new pipes in place.

She returned, with a typically long and angry story as well as the two metal strips. on the way out of the parking lot she scraped a light pole because it was foggy. It was dark so I didn't go out and look at it. She just said she scraped the car. 

The next day, I was hip deep in the fall of DailyMotion and so didn't go anywhere. Instead I asked my one son who had taken out the garbage how it looked. "It's dented," he told me.  A dent, I think you'll agree, is worse than a scrape.

The next day I asked my other son to get something out of the glove compartment. It took a while, and when he came back I asked what took so long. He said it was harder because he had to go through the driver's side, the passenger door won't open. I asked how it looked, he said it's dented on that door AND the back door too. But it was late, I was busy, so I assumed the dent needed to be pounded out to allow the door to properly swing open.

The next day I looked at the car myself.

This was not a scrape. This is what happens when you have perturbed the Hulk. The door couldn't open because the mechanism inside it was clearly damaged. This had to be, at minimum, two strikes, because both doors were hit. 

The most annoying aspect of it is my wife still loudly grumbles about other drivers being idiots, despite having hit a stationary object, twice, whose sole purpose is to shine light.

The car is perfectly functional except for that door being unable to open. It's fully insured, but it's only worth $2000, and the damage is $9000. It's fully paid off, and I'd hope to get a few years out of it, but now if we submitted a claim to the insurance company, they would declare it totaled, give us the $2000, and we could no longer drive it until we repaired the damage ourselves. 

The only choice, then, was for me to get another car - the one we had could still handle all the things it did, unless all four of us were going somewhere. We could have taken the $2000, but I decided after what happened to let my wife have the car she banged the crap out of, lest she bang the crap out of the new one too. I felt crappy enough getting another car, I didn't want to see it somehow impaled on a fire hydrant a week later.

I got it at the end of January. About a week later we took a day trip to Shawano, where we spent our vacation, we'd eat, do some light shopping, enjoy the countryside, and buy a cheap carton of cigarettes at the nearby casino for her. When she comes out, I pull over to the curb to meet her, and I notice this minivan in the parking space, because it's lights come on. My rear section is right behind them, so I wait for my wife to get in, assuming that they are neither blind nor monumentally stupid nor completely incapable of driving - more the fool I. They begin pulling out, right into me, I'm not in a blind spot, I'm right there! I lay on the horn, and they stop inches from my door, I couldn't have fit a baseball between them and us. They were going so fast that if they hadn't stopped just in time it would have broken my legs along with the door, which would have been good for them as it'd prevent me from getting out and killing them.

It's gotten some use, my wife and I use it when we run errands together. I don't ride in her car because it smells like the inside of the Marlboro Man's mouth. At my request she never smoked in there so it wouldn't hurt the resale value, but seeing as how it looks now cigarette smoke is the least of its worries.

During my time off this past weekend I was going to take her to Shawano again, but couldn't. I had suggested some meals and treats to clear out some items in the fridge that were wasting space, so she made me a big hot fudge sundae. She was, however, unaware that ice cream can go bad. I thought it tasted kind of nasty in parts, but it was covered with so many toppings and mixed in with some fresh ice cream as well as the spoiled stuff so I just brushed it off. Until about two in the morning when my stomach was aching and I could no longer sleep. After a couple of hours of catching up on WandaVision, I then puked my guts out (which is a grossly unfair response to WandaVision!). Suffice to say I was in no shape the next day to go on a long car ride.

A couple days later I was well enough, and after she'd run some errands I suggested that trip to Shawano, it was about 3:30 so we could have dinner while up there. So naturally, nearly ninety minutes later, she feels she's ready to go. I, of course, had already done all the required prep work of changing from my Transformers T-Shirt into my Doctor Who T-shirt and was quite ready. But a little before 5PM wasn't too bad, except, the road felt weird, so we pulled into a parking lot, and the left rear tire was just flattened, just nothing. While my wife started inflating it I called around desperately looking for a tire repair at that time of night, and finally found one that would try to squeeze us in. 

By now it was 5:30, and there was a restaurant right next to the tire place, so I suggested we eat there while we waited. My wife agreed (she had gotten her car and followed me), so I hopped in the back like Miss Daisy, and watched as she got out and drove the wrong way. "Only you can get lost driving to the building right next to us!" "I was confused!" "It was turn right out of the parking lot to reach the building to the right of us, how is that confusing?"

Turned out the restaurant was understaffed that night, it took almost half an hour to get a table. By the time the server arrived to ask about drinks, the tire guy called. It was hard to hear, as if he was practicing social distancing by standing six feet from the phone while he talked. So she vanished back into the aether while I finally got out that the punctures were too close to something to be plugged - no idea what it was too close to, but it's not like my knowledge of it would offer a solution he missed. The only choice was to drop a chunk of change on a new tire, to replace the tire that had a grand total of 600 miles on it, 150 of which was driving it to the dealership for me to buy it. Grudgingly I told him to do it.

So as we ate, I said to my wife, "Look, if we're lucky, we'll hit Shawano at 8:30PM. All the shops worth visiting will be ready to close. We've already eaten. It's pitch black so no enjoying the scenery. The roads are at risk of deer at this time. And after dropping a couple C-notes on a new tire I can't really justify doing any gambling. So the only thing up there is a carton of cigarettes."

"The thing that really mattered to me was getting to spend time with you."

"Oh. Well, I was going to suggest we just buy a carton nearby and eat the difference, but we could go up tomorrow-"

"No, I'll buy them here."

"But we could go tomorrow to-"

"No, I'll make the sacrifice and have smokes now. Can we get them on the way home?"

"Sure. Just.... drive safely."

"I'll try, but there are all these idiots on the road!"