yesterday, i took my go-cart in for an oil change and a tune-up. this car is ELEVEN years old with 80K miles on it, AND it’s paid for. don’t you love cars that are paid for? i sure do.
anyway, i haven’t really had to replace a lot on the car due to the first four years i owned it i was traveling by airplane, rather than car AND getting a car allowance. the car is in pretty good shape considering it’s age.
so anyways, my daughter and i drop it off at the place and they say it’ll be an hour. then, we had planned on doing some small shopping and eat lunch, within walking distance to the car fixing place.
it turned out that a whole lotta stuff needed replacing, so it ended up taking four hours and about $500 dollars. when i picked it up, they mentioned that there would probably be some smoke burning off the engine for a bit due to the work they did.
(for the past couple of weeks the car will only start on days that it chooses too.)
this morning, i tried to start it up to take the boy to gymnastics camp and no dice. later in the day when it was to be time for the husband to stop working, we’d discussed taking it to an auto zone place to test the starter and the alternator. i decided to skip that until tomorrow and the husband went to pick up the girl in the go-cart. it started up just fine.
the problem arose when he got home and the car would not turn off. i was in the garden, doing my garden duties and i wondered to myself why is he gunning the car like that, he’s going to flood it.
soon after he came walking over to tell me that the car would not turn off. i’ve never heard of a car not turning off in my life but i was open to the idea of it i guess. i went to inspect it for myself and by george the man was right, the car wouldn’t stop. in fact, the damn thing started moving (emergency brake on), shaking, and smoking.
turns out, the car was on fire underneath the hood.
i’ve only heard about cars being on fire. it’s a standard question i’ve asked throughout my life to an array of mechanics as i’ve pretty much always only had bomber cars. i’d take the car in for a typical oil change and casually ask the mechanic if it was possible the car would catch on fire and explode.
not one person ever told me yes, it will catch on fire and explode. those are the things i actually worry about, you know the things you’ve never really “heard” of happening. kind of like spontaneous combustion. i believe in that, b/c who’s to say that it can’t happen if they’ve never actually seen it “NOT” happen? i always like to keep an open mind.
the car finally sputtered itself to death and stopped. i went inside to check on the home pc, (i’d been running some diagnostics on it throughout the day), and check on the sweet potato fries in the oven.
i noticed the puppy had just thrown up carrots and was in the processing of trying to re-eat the carrots, and the phone rang. to recap: checking food in oven, doing the pc thing, watching the dog throw up and my car is literally on fire in the driveway.
did any of us panic? no, not a one of us panicked. in fact, it was just business as usual over here. i wondered if that is a bad sign, that we’re so used to total disasters happening all at once?
i’m fairly certain the car isn’t drivable, and that i’ll have to call the boys at the shop tomorrow to have them tow it in and see if they can fix what is obviously still broken.
later, after we’d eaten dinner and had a great cheesecake (from costco) with fresh rasberries AND strawberries we were all outside just playing around and talking. despite the calamity of the day these are the days i’ll remember, when we were all home at the same time (a miracle) and just enjoying each others company. i can’t imagine that life can get much better than that.
Posted by leah 
Posted by leah 
