opabinia

Dad's 2000 BMW 323 has about 100,000 miles on the clock. It drives like a new car. Nothing short of incredible, the way this thing is put together. I don't know how other 3-series people have fared, so I can't tell if this reflects some freakish combination of awesome engineering, perfect assembly, and skilled maintenance.

Dad: Pull over into the BMW dealership up here. I want to schedule an oil change.
Me: Why don't you just call them?
Dad: I keep forgetting.
Me: Here. Call them right now, on my phone. I'll watch you do it.
Dad: Naw, just... just pull right in.
Me: You're shopping.
Dad: Mumble mumble oil change mumble mumble.
Me: Uh-huh.

(in the dealership)

Dad: I'll go set up the appointment.
Me: Sure.
Dad: Why don't you go pick up one of those 3-series booklets.
Me: A-HA!

It makes me happy to see Dad indulging himself a little. He deserves it. Works too hard.

***

Epilogue

Dad: What's that?
Me: That is a Z4.

Dammit, I can't remember the order in which events happened this weekend. I'm too sleepy to get it all straight now, but I'll just barf out an outline.


(1) Not noodles, but sushi. anechoic and I chatted over sushi on Friday evening.

(5) I went over to Sadira's, and she worked on her dreads-faux while we tried to watch Shaolin Dolemite. That film defeated me. I said "uncle" and switched to Black Rain, which is a fine movie, regardless of what the IMDB score suggests.

(3) My baby had a sugar drop, so Saturday started out a little scary. I got corn syrup all over the fucking place. Then we went out to find a dog. I drove to the wrong city, but it was a nice drive. Good weather. Then I drove to the right city, and we saw lots of great dogs, but none that met all the criteria and were not on hold.

(7) Mom starts chemo on Tuesday. Had brunch with her and Dad.

(10) Spent the afternoon looking at the AKC website with the folks. The Havanese wins, hands-down, as the ideal dog for Mom.

(8) Had the car washed and vacuumed. Looks nice.

(4) Lunch with sadira at Bukowski's.

(2) Live-action Tick with pyrric, sadira, and a large, outstanding cat on Friday night.

(12) Dinner with atalanta and eeryg at Christopher's in Porter Square in the Nuts.

(9) Dad and I talked about dredging out the pond in Sullivan, so I can put minnows and turtles in it. We've been talking about this for a long time, but it keeps getting de-prioritized. He gave me the 411 on local contractors. This information is current as of 1986. Heh.

(11) Laundry today, and not a day too soon, unless I felt like freeballing tomorrow.

(6) Hey, I got it all. Saturday night, after dreads and Black Rain, we came to my place so I could experience a bath bomb with my sweetheart. They fizz. Anyway, that brings us to Sunday morning, when I left early to go see Mom and Dad.


[Okay. I'll go back and number everything now...]

That was kinda neat.

My parents bought me a car for Christmas. Now, before you go off and start thinking all those things I might think if someone's parents bought them a car under most conditions, never mind at my age, let me reassure you: The circumstances are truly fucked.

Latin American housewives are, by deeply-rooted tradition, fatalistic. My mother has a life-threatening illness. She assumes it's going to kill her. She leans on my father, talking about how everyone in Puerto Rico buys their kid a car (far from true, and besides, I'm old) and how I'm really in a tight spot and I need their help (far from true -- the Swedish Brick still runs, and I'm paying all the bills), and how it's best for me to enjoy what little inheritance I have coming before they kick the bucket anyway (This isn't morbid at all.). My father, who knows better than to disagree under these circumstances, plunks down a deposit on a shiny new Honda before I even know this plan is in the works.

I would have been a moron to turn this down, for several reasons, at least a few of them quite unselfish (and I'm tired of typing them all out in private entries, so ask me in person); so now I have a 2004 Honda Civic LX Coupe, 5-spd, black, with a black interior. I had the dealer install a LoJack, so the whole thing cost me $700 plus insurance. I will concentrate on how awesome that is, and avoid counterproductive thoughts about how and why I got it.

I've had it for nearly a month, and it's the best freaking car I could possibly own right now: agile, practical, sporty, tight, reliable, pretty, cheap to fix, comfortable, and subtle.

It comes with a 1.7L, 115hp, 110lbs-ft, SOHC, non-VTEC engine. The 2.4L, 200hp, 166lbs-ft, DOHC, i-VTEC engine from the Acura TSX sedan would not be an especially difficult swap for an experienced Honda garage.

Dinner at my parents' tonight. There were about 20 spics of various flavors there: Beaners, Dominicans, PanFlute-Playing Mountain Spics, 'Ricans, you name it. The voices were loud. The food was to die for. The rum flowed. There were chicken flautas and pork and rice-and-beans and flan and mystery foods and cake and more. Dad busted out a bottle of the best damn rum you can get from Puerto Rico. Even with that stuff flowing through our veins, sadira and I decided to made tracks as soon as the Spanish guitars and tone-deaf voices sprang up. The woman tolerated the night pretty well.

There was a tasty fruit tart, too, Sadira says.

And there was this fucked-up rattling instrument made from strung-together dried goat hooves. It was grotesque and fascinating.

I feel totally out of whack. I need to have a normal living space. Whining about this here won't do anyone any good, though. I'll find the time to help speed things along, by labor, lobbying, and inquiry, where I can -- my parents are the first priority for now. The problem is that having a fucked-up living space throws other, more time-sensitive things out of order, which takes time away from apartment issues, and the situation persists.

Weekend with the parents was quite good. Got Dad a digital camera and JAWS on DVD. sadira spent all weekend down there, too. She's a good sport. The folks are starting to be a little less careful about the quips they let slip around her, which makes me uneasy sometimes. Father's Day jokes just aren't cool, you guys. You're going to spook her. Shit, you're spooking me.

Fluffy's huge. I'm worried about the fish that are still in the basement of the old place -- they're not getting enough attention. As soon as the basement here clears up (Thursday, that should be), I can make room for them here.

woke me up with a phone call 20 minutes before my alarm went off this morning. She wanted to make sure I was OK, because my father had told her about a terrible tragedy in a nightclub. White Elephant, he said, is one of my favorite bands.

The basement flooded. Some of my boxes are wet. I knew this could happen, but I never got around to elevating them. I guess I didn't really care that much. I think my important stuff was off the ground, so that's good. I bought plastic sweater boxes to replace the soggy cardboard ones. I meant to begin the process of transfering and thinning yesterday, but I found myself occupied.

Saturday we had keyless entry installed in sadira's car. A gift fit for the concrete jungle.

Yesterday was a busy day. Sadira was my baking drill sergeant. We made tasty ginger cookies for bottleimp and his family, using new kitchen stuff the girl bought for me. I need to ship the cookies out soon, before I taste test them all.

WinXP Pro seems to agree with the new motherboard and processor, which was a big surprise. It detected the new hardware and just kept running. This is sort of like having a fragile mind readily adapt to a new brain and nervous system. It was too good to be true. Really, it was, so then my RAM acted up. Now neither of my sticks wants to work, so I had to buy two more. I should look back and see how long I have gone sans home computer. I would surely be deep in debt, and probably without a temp machine, were it not for the generous arcanus, who performed hours of diagnostics and tinkering.

The important thing is to remember what I want to spend my time doing, and actively seek out ways to put myself in a position to do it. I think I know what I want, but I still have to figure out how to do it. I think most people say they don't want a nine-to-five, that they can't see themselves becoming a drone, but then go ahead and do it anyway. That makes me doubt, but I still think I can do it. I already have the screwed-up schedule nailed down.

I need to work from home, and decrease my daily dealings with The City. High population density turns people into obstacles and annoyances instead of humans. I want rocks and trees and dirt and more elbow room.

Dad is meeting with his doctor on Wednesday. They changed his appointment to an evening one instead of a midday one, because the doc wants to talk to him for longer than the previous slot would allow. This worries us all. I have told my mother that it merely means my father has numerous options, and that the doctor wants to present them all to him.

I've been picking at La Peste. My French vocab is poor, so there are numerous terms I have to ignore or look up, and I'm missing a lot of expressions and possibly some humor. Sometimes I think I should slog through it with a Larousse, but then I remember that I never use French, and that I wish I'd learned German instead anyway. But then I say dammit you took four years of French read the fucking book.

So I've been reading Stranger instead. Not L'etranger, but Stranger. It's a collection of creepy short stories with a common "encounter with unknown person or entity" theme. A lot of them are quite good. I stole this book from anechoic.

bottleimp's kid turned three this month. Where does the time go? I remember cooing at him while holding him on my forearms.

I wish I had a freakish gift for programming, and a deep love of computers. No, I wish my no-money interests were actually profitable. I wish I was paid $97K to figure out how to spawn L. paradoxa.

Holy crap! My woman is leaving for ten days on Thursday! I told her to take insect repellent. Honduran bugs.

Yes, slow day at work.