My day was supposed to go like this: 1. get my fingerprints done at the County Office of Education at 8:30. 2. Stop at the grocery next door for matzoh. 3.Come home and call my new boss to tell her I got my fingerprints done. 4. rent a truck to haul trash to the dump. 5. Continue safifying the house.
Naturally I left late and it was a little after 8:30 when I was nearing the correct freeway exit for the County Office of Education when the car gave a lurch and suddenly lost power. It wasn't total loss of power so I continued on my way, exiting, and I saw that the heat gauge suddenly climbed almost to the top. The County Office of Education parking lot is almost the first thing off the freeway so I calmly parked the car and went and got my fingerprints done and got the matzoh.
I started the car to make observations, noticed I did not have my cell phone, went in to the Co. Of. of Ed. and called my mechanic, who said I should check the fluid level and come to them by way of surface streets. This was good advice. I had to stop every few blocks to cool the car down, and there was no phone at any of the places I stopped at so I couldn't just cut the whole thing short and call a tow truck.
The amount of time I could drive without heating up got shorter and shorter so I finally pulled into a 7-11 parking lot -- for the locals, it was the one at Broadway and Ocean, in the River Flats neighborhood, the sleaziest 7-11 in town, probably in the county. I called the mechanic again and he said I should have the car towed. I noticed at this point that I had locked my keys and my wallet and all in the car. I went inside with my twenty-five cents (the phone takes fifty) and asked to use their phone because my car was dead in the parking lot. No dice. But he'd call AAA for me. I was going to use 411. There's a phone book with the phone outside -- a miraculous rarity, these days -- but it has no business listings. I mean, it has the government pages, the residence pages, and the yellow pages. The business pages have not been ripped out: they were never bound into the book. And no, it's not the old-fashioned kind with business and residence in one directory.
So I tell the guy I'm going to walk home and call AAA and get my son's keys. I tell him it will take at least an hour to do all that. I get home, I call AAA, and that's not so bad though she can't find me in the member list at first and she has to put me on hold for absolutely ever and AAA plays advertisements for irrelevant services instead of Muzak. So then Frank and I walk back to the car. It's about a mile and a half each way, I think (MapQuest says just over a mile, but I think they're wrong, they've been wrong before).
The idiot who works there gave me crap about how I had got back just in time. I dismissed him and he told me he was going to have it towed in a couple of minutes. Then later another ill-tempered jerk comes out to tell us to move the car. I tell her that AAA is coming, and that first jerk knew the whole story from the beginning and had already given us crap. She gets shirty, explains that her boss makes these rules and they have to be assholes about it.
About fifteen minutes after the outside time the tow truck was supposed to there I called AAA again. It's very busy, she said, and we were going to have to wait another twenty minutes. I told her Iwas in a bad neighborhood and the business people were hassling me. She offered to call the police on my behalf, but I told her she didn't need to.
There was a loud noise and people yelling behind us as we were listening to the BBC doing a big piece on the Falklands 25 years on (Frank thinks the story was actually aimed at Iran: "See, we're willing to go to war and kill lots of people over weird little things"). We turned around and there was a woman yelling at the driver of an SUV who has bumped into her bicycle. Frank went and checked on her, and the driver called the accident in, a firetruck and an ambulance and a motorcycle cop arrived, and the first jerk from the store went out to hassle the ambulance drivers about parking in front of his driveway. How stupid can you get?
The tow truck driver came by with a car on his truck and explained that he was going to drop off the car he had and then come back for us. He did, and he did, and he was cheery and competent and funny and fast like every tow truck driver I've ever met. Frank and I rode with the truck to the Engine Room, Frank took off homewards with the matzoh, I signed in the car, bought two bunches of irises from the nice lady who came to the mechanic's door, cheerfully refused a ride from the nice office manager at the mechanic's, and ambled home.
I have not gone to get the truck but I have done more safifying. I want to put the meeting with the insurance guy off for another day, but I'll decide that in the morning. Now I'm going to reserve a truck for the morning.
On another front, I got the greatest copyedit query: "The author refers to stave and daub remains, but Icelandic houses were turf. No staves because of a severe wood shortage. Please advise?"
The answer, of course, is that the earliest houses in Iceland were stave and daub, because there was driftwood and tiny forests of dinky trees which they used up promptly with wood construction and fires. Later houses were stone and turf because they used up all the trees and there was not enough driftwood. But to think I had a copy editor who knew enough to ask that question! How cool is that?
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