Tales from the Shark Tank

Just a quick update, since I finally posted about Dad yesterday.  This time he’s actually been sprung.  He’s out of hospital and in a nursing home (Hooverwood, for you who know Indy) for physical therapy to regain strength lost to a fortnight barely moving.  The infections are apparently vanquished.

Me?  Standing down from emergency mode, and realizing that I am very, very tired.

Usually I do a pretty good job of keeping perspective, or at least of remembering that whatever is stressing me at any given time is temporary. Back in college, the internal mantra (or sometimes not so internal) was “This too shall pass”, a thing I realized when a girlfriend down the hall came to my room in tears one day and asked me to remind her of it. “You always mean it, and you’re right” she said. “And I need to hear it; my fiance just broke up with me.” That day I hugged her and let her cry on me first, because even if it wasn’t going to hurt forever, it hurt right then, and the reminder would have been a cruelty without the acknowledgment. Right now, though, I’m having a hard time keeping that in mind, perhaps because I’ve learned that some things pass harder than others. It’s easier to hold such a philosophy at 18 than 48, y’know?

Dad’s been in hospital with pneumonia these these two weeks past. Each time mom’s been told he should be getting out in a day or two, something’s gone wrong. The last such side-step involved surgery and a couple of days in the ICU last Thursday and Friday. Yesterday she told me they were talking about it again, but as of today he’s still in; I gather there’s something of concern but no one’s told me what. I was in Indy until yesterday, but I’ve obligations here to take care of as well, so now I’m home. If all goes well, I’ll be back in Indy along about Saturday. I’m unutterably grateful the car replacement project was accomplished in time for the worst of this.

So now I get to wait. I went through this with my grandad, but it is not only because it’s my father and the relationship has always been complicated. My son is nine and needs his mom, and I’m no longer in the same city as my parents. And for all my efforts, I still haven’t mastered the trick of being two places at once no matter how much I want to be.

Any way, gentle readers, please bear with me if my blogging is a bit thin on the ground for awhile. I’ll be spending most of what would be my writing time running up and down the interstate.

This is our year for major purchases. First we had to replace my husband’s car, courtesy of a rude conversation with another vehicle. (No one got hurt, that’s all we cared about.) Then we had to buy a mower because doing an acre with a push mower just wasn’t gonna happen. It particularly wasn’t gonna happen when I would be the one who would have to do it courtesy of the hours my husband works. I’m not allergic to hard work, but mowing and I have never been on good terms. Now, courtesy of the myriad little things that can go wrong with anything that has 168,000 miles on it, we had decided we had to replace my silver dragon.

So today I committed an act of minivan. Yes, I looked at other types of wheeled things, even drove some of them for anywhere between half a day and overnight (dealerships are remarkably accomodating about letting you take something to show a working spouse), but for the most part they didn’t fit me - which is to say that hips screwed up in my teens complain way too loudly in a standard style car seat now I’m hitting middle age. (Really puts a crimp in my driving when my foot goes to sleep, y’know?) I’d wanted something with 4-wheel or all-wheel drive, but there was still that sleeping-foot thing. So in the end we decided to stick with the tried and true and get another van.

Enter the internet. Dealerships (at least the smart ones) have discovered that there are people who will a) car-shop online, coming in asking to test drive a specific vehicle, and b) have done their homework, and know perfectly well what book value is, what loan value is, and what sorts of problems the model in question is prone to - and will ask if those have been looked at and to see the mechanic’s report.

So anyway, off I go to see something I thought would work, a PT Cruiser. Half an hour’s drive later, that foot needs a good shot of espresso. No good. But on the lot there is a minivan, so I ask to test drive it. That’s when the fun begins.

The van itself is very nice. The salesman is very nice. But when I ask about trade-in, he says the price is set on the assumption there will be a trade-in. That didn’t sound right, so I asked him to run book value on the car for me.

“Book value? What do you mean?” he asks, in tones of mystification. “If you don’t take it now, the offer won’t be good later.”

“Look, Joe. If you use pressure tactics on me, I’ll either push back or walk away. I know better, so let’s try again. Are you seriously telling me that a 7 year old van with 70,000 miles on it (which isn’t bad for a van that age) is worth 14K?” He hedged, and hemmed, and suggested I take it to show my husband, which I did. I wanted to give them a deposit, as I really did like the van and had an elsewhere to be. “Oh, we don’t take deposits. You either buy today or not.” I shrugged. “Ok, if it’s gone it wasn’t meant to be.” Funny thing - they took my deposit. Then I met a friend for lunch and went home to do my homework.

And guess what? Not only wasn’t the van worth 14K, it wasn’t worth the 10K painted on the window, not by a factor of 20%. So since I had given them a deposit on it, I went back and asked for my money back. They tried valiantly to find a way to get me to take the thing anyway, coming down on the price to where I thought they really ought to have been in the first place, but by that point I was thoroughly ticked for being treated as if I hadn’t the sense of a new-hatched waterbug.  And if that weren’t enough (it was) I wasn’t trusting anything, including the mechanic’s review, so finally I got my check back and walked out the door.

So meanwhile I’d found another one online - same list price, but a dealer in Illinois without a single unresolved BBB complaint (I checked) for one that is 3 years and about 40,000 miles newer. I called - yep, the van was still there. So I went on over, to be met by their internet sales manager. She took me out to drive it first thing, setting it up so I got some city and some highway driving. She popped the hood. She showed me the mechanic’s checklist and went over it with me. She showed me the car’s maintenance history, what they’d paid for it and what they’d put into it, and what their profit margin was. She printed out the book value for me (comfortably above what she was selling it at, because while when it had come in it was considered a three year old car, now that the 2007’s were out, it’s considered four years old.)  And in the space of about 40 minutes, she sold me a car.

So there is a new dragon in the driveway.  This one is burgundy, and mid-level instead of the top-of-the-line thing that has earned an honorable retirement.  But it has the bells and whistles I need, if not all those I’ve come to enjoy, and even after an hour and a half’s drive home, nothing was napping.  And since, according to our son, any minivan is a dragon, and this one is dark red, he has named her Dragon Firewing.

And I’m going to go order a gefilte-fish emblem for her.

I was about to send a friend an e-mail pointing out that she has once again let half a month go by without blogging, when I paused to think how long it had been since I’d written anything. So, since I’m not quite enough of a hypocrite to ask her to do what I have not, I’m writing.

So what have I been up to? Well, let’s see. As my gentle readers may recall, about a month ago my car started acting up for fair. Thereafter it spent a week with a mechanic in Chicago, while he tried to figure out why it was doing what it was doing and I drove a rental car. He figured out what it wasn’t - it wasn’t the transmission, the ignition system, the fuel injector or filter or indeed any part of the fuel system, the primary computer, the oxygen sensors, the high-voltage electrical harness, the underbody wiring harness…you get the picture. The problem is that aside from concluding that it is somewhere in the low-voltage electrical system, he didn’t find it. Every mechanic to whom I’ve spoken agrees. It has to be acting up right then to be diagnosed and repaired. It only screws up when it’s been driven over very wet roads for several consecutive hours, and the weather has not cooperated most days.

Now, I’ve tried valiantly to get it to screw up. I’ve poured water over the assorted stuff under the hood. I’ve taken it through a car wash. I’ve driven through whatever rain we actually got, cruising around and listening to CDs for a couple of exceedingly aimless hours. It’s behaved perfectly. But meanwhile, it’s goofed up three times now, once stranding me in Chicago, wherefore I no longer trust it. It’s entitled to an honorable retirement; it has 170,000 miles on it, and as I understand it, Chryslers don’t generally manage that.

But that has left me car hunting. I truly, sincerely, hate and despise car hunting, but that is how I’ve been spending the vast majority of my time. I thought maybe I’d found something yesterday, but when the dealer let me take it home overnight so Wick could try it out, we figured out that his long legs don’t fit - he can ride in it, but can’t drive it for more than a few minutes. Since whatever I get is likely to be the family distance-travel vehicle, that’s not a viable option. So the quest goes on, limited primarily by what I can both drive and ride in with reasonable comfort. I’ll find something here; I just hope it happens soon.

Ok, Ms. Kettle. It’s your turn.

This morning I was treated to the sight of an unusual game of tag.  I looked out the window to see one of the resident squirrels scooting up one of our oaks at the rate of no man’s business.  Not far behind it was our black kitten.  The squirrel would pause, flip that bushy tail in Tornado’s direction, and then, as the feline marauder actually drew close, scamper higher so that it was always just barely out of reach.  I suspect the translation from the rodentish was “nyah, nyah, you can’t catch me.”  The end result was a kitten who ended up much further up that tree than she usually does.

So she tried to climb down, and as usual when she’s in that tree, she gave up when she got in reach of the roof.  And it was from the roof that I rescued her.  Oh, the squirrel?  He climbed back down and sat just above her head, still chattering, and taunted her inability to catch him.

One of my mom’s favorite stories about me is that on one occasion when she was frustrated with me and telling me so in no uncertain terms, I looked up at her and inquired “Mommy, are you five minutes mad or ten minutes mad?” Evidently, realizing her kid had her figured out to that extent was quite an eye-opener.

My son has me just as thoroughly figured out. I was yelling at him tonight, because he forgot something he has been reminded of daily for a week, and I was frustrated by it. So he went off to calm down in the attic, and when he came back asked if I was done being mad. I said I was done yelling, though we still needed to talk. We did that, and then he went to play a computer game.

A few minutes later, he came over and gave me a kiss. (I don’t take boy-kisses for granted; it took him years to learn the difference between a kiss and a bite.) Then he stepped back and nodded. “Ok” he said. “That made your mad meter go from 50 down to 20. If I give you another kiss, it’ll go to zero.” Then he suited deed to word, making me laugh. “Good!” he observed. “That does work. The experiment was a success!”

Did I mention my son was too smart for my own good?

I did it.  I went and taught 6th grade social studies dressed in the height of fashion 1000 years ago.  I started off by explaining what I wore, and why - that standards of modesty were very different, and so my hair was covered, and my wrists and ankles.  I told them that one of the things that showed that I was a lady of some wealth was that my gown was green, because a good strong green is hard to get with natural dyes.  One child thought to ask me how a lady would get things done, and I told them of climbing a ladder to retrieve a kitten off the roof in full garb.

And it worked.  It got them thinking about just how different things really were that long ago, so that we talked about transportation, and trade, and peace-keeping, and what changes modern understanding had made.  Someone asked me how old I was; the answer was that I was a venerable elder by the standards of that time.  (Then I told the boy I was old enough to be his grandmother, which is only a slight stretch.  Two generations having their first born at 18 would do it and then some.)  I watched a lot of eyes get big at that one.

They did pretty well, though, figuring out that the anachronisms were my glasses and watch, and there were a few in the bunch who were re-enactors and so asked me what other stuff I had at home.  That was fun.  So all in all the day went well.  Tomorrow I’ll be in for the same teacher, as she still hasn’t recovered her voice.  We’ll see about Friday.  And if there’s a section that made me question why on earth I signed on for this, there was also the group that had the curiousity to question whether the period was the “dark ages” for any place other than Europe.  The Saracen Empire certainly had science and medicine and literature, and so did China.  These kids recognized that the Roman Empire hadn’t covered the whole world, and that its fall and the subsequent invasions by Germanic tribes and later Vikings didn’t affect the other continents.  They made the whole thing worth while…and I’m looking forward to having them again tomorrow.

I’m substitute teaching for a friend for a few days, while she recovers from laryngitis.  She teaches 6th grade Social Studies in our little district.  They’re starting a unit on the middle ages, and that’s what I’m to teach.  That’s going to be great fun; Kathy’s actually asked me to come in in full garb.  So I shall be in the height of fashion for 1070 or so.

But since the problem is her voice, she came in to show me what she’s doing, where everything is, and so forth.  We’ve all read and heard about how kids coming up can’t read, and what a problem it is.  So all right, I understood that, or so I thought.  Now I find, as part of the teaching material that comes with the textbooks, CDs that read the book aloud to the kids because they can’t read and absorb it without that help.

Say what?  Instead of making sure the kids can read, read it to them?  I know the theory, that whatever it takes to get them to learn is good, but when they get out of school no one’s going to read everything to them.  That’s fine in 3rd grade, but in 6th?  I don’t know if reading is even still being taught in 6th grade.  (Was when I was in school, but that was a long time ago)  I’m sure it isn’t by 7th grade.

So there’s a CD that reads to them, to spare the teacher doing it over and over.

And I only wish I were kidding.

J. to Dad (who just said “no” to pizza): “Ok, wise guy.”

Dad: “Well, sometimes I’m foolish.”

J.: “Ok, foolish wise guy!”

“Chew and swallow before you brush your teeth, big boy.” — my husband