Wow! I look up and three days has passed!

The horror of automobile ownership continues... the car went in to the shop the other day. Cars have a way of letting you know when you’ve been neglectful and the one I have now is no different. I bought this car new, it was the first new car I ever had in my entire life. Prior to this I had a series of used cars so, I was no stranger to the world of the roadside breakdown. Luckily, I haven’t been a resident of that world for the last few years - I guess I’ve been spoiled.

Anyway, I got stuck alongside of an entrance ramp to a local parkway on Wednesday. I was trying to race into the city and the car decided we wouldn’t be doing much of anything that day. It had acted up on Tuesday as well so, I wasn’t totally surprised when it happened but, I sure wasn’t happy about it either.

Cars are funny in that you always hope whatever is wrong will be something cheap and easy to fix and you work your way up to more serious problems as you rule things out in increasing levels of severity (much like modern medicine I think). I had taken the car in for inspection last week and was surprised when it came back to me without the hidden expense (something that would prevent it from passing but also costing a few hundred dollars). I had replaced the battery the week before as the car had been acting funny for the last few weeks since the weather started getting warmer. I thought maybe I could get off easy but, that was not to be the case.

So, I’m stuck on this entrance ramp and treated to people whizzing past me, beeping their horns and coming dangerously close to hitting the car. I could live without that excitement. I rolled the car back down the ramp in neutral and wound up in the middle of an intersection. Fortunately I was helped in pushing it off to the side by three good samaritans who just stopped and helped me get it over onto the shoulder (just when your faith in people is at its lowest, something nice happens).

I even got it started and managed to get home without a tow so, I considered myself very lucky. The car went back to the shop (locally). I had reservations about their ability to correct the problem but again, you always hope you’ll get off light.

Well, it came back to me without anything really getting fixed but, it did cost around $90 so, I guess we’re locked into going back to the dealership. I’m glad I rented a car to go up to Boston, it would’ve sucked big time to get stuck up in Massachusetts somewhere.

Saw X2 Friday which was really, really good. Even better than the first probably and managed to stay true to the source material. I think it ran a little long because I started to nod off near the end. Of course, during Daredevil I flat out feel asleep.

This was a good news/bad news kind of week.

The good news was that two people I know who had been out of work for long periods of time got jobs. Tom (a friend from Grey) looks like he finally got a job as a retoucher at night (yayyyyy Tom!) and Roberta is working now as a tailor at a midtown hotel (yyyyaaaaaaaayyyyy Roberta!). Also, my friend Mark is beating me to the altar!

The bad news was that two people had lost their fathers in the last few weeks - my friends Sarah and Louis’ wife Angie so, my heart went out to them. I don’t deal well with people passing, I don’t know what to say to people that will help them and I feel a lot of things you could say wind up sounding empty and clichéd - I’ve lost people and I still get upset thinking about how much I miss them long after they’ve passed. It’s hard to say goodbye to someone you love and particularly hard when it’s your parent.