Monday Meanderings - 6.17.2019

Tire Story

Any day you have an appointment with a dentist is a bad day.

Any day you have an appointment with a dentist and then get a flat tire on the way home is a very bad day.

Any day you have an appointment with a dentist and then get a flat tire on the way home and then the On-Star Roadside Service says you don't have a GM vehicle and they can't help you is a very, very bad day.

Any day you have an appointment with a dentist and then get a flat tire on the way home and then the On-Star Roadside Service says they can't help you, but the AARP Roadside Service says they can send someone but it will be about 3 hours before they can get there is a No Good, Very Bad Day!  And yes, I have two Roadside Service accounts. Don't judge.

 And any day you have an appointment with a dentist and then get a flat tire on the way home and then the On-Star Roadside Service says they can't help you, but the AARP Roadside Service will send someone in about 3 hours, so you walk over to the nearby Taco Shack and get a big ol' Iced Tea to dank while you sit on their patio and wait, but the Taco Shack closes shortly after that and now there is no restroom nearby and it's still an hour or more before the roadside service gets there is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day!

Tire Story 2

Early the next morning, I am at the tire place with the spare on the ground and the flat tire with a big old bolt the size of a railroad spike stuck right in the middle sitting in the back. After a half-hour or so, it's my turn at the counter and the service tech goes out and gets the flat tire and takes it into the shop, and eventually comes back and looks up my account and says. "Uh oh." At this point I don't want to hear "Uh oh" because it's a new tire and I know I have road-hazard coverage, but it's "Uh oh" because he doesn't have that tire in stock and I can wait until they can get one sent over from the warehouse or I can go to a nearby location that does it in stock. This is going to be a bad day.

I choose to drive to the other store, and I get to the counter fairly quickly and they have the tire and all will be set right in "about an hour." Maybe this is not going to be such a bad day, after all.

Two hours later, I'm told "the puncture has been repaired and they are balancing the tire as we speak." Except it had been determined (twice) that the tire needed to be replaced. It could not be repaired. So the service rep scurries off to figure out what's what - and doesn't return. "He's on his lunch break." I'm told, but "my NEW tire is almost ready to put on the vehicle." This is now officially a bad day,

After about 4 hours invested in this whole process, I get home with my newly-replaced tire, and all is good, until I open the back to replace the little lug-lock thingy - and there is the flat tire with the railroad spike sticking out of it, pretty as you please!! The bad day just got worse.

"You're kidding me." the service rep says over the phone. "Nope. I'm looking at the tire and the big old spike sticking out," I say. "Just what exactly did you guys do during the 2 1/2 hours you had the car?" Now he's about to have a bad day.

For reasons I still don't understand, the techs replaced my perfectly-good spare with a new tire... and sent me home with a flat tire in the back, But after 3 visits to various tire stores, I now have all tires in place and repaired. Now all I have to do is find out what's up with On-Star.

MMs - 6.10.2019 - More Stuff

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. More Stuff on the way to Half Price Books. This is the 2nd batch in as many weeks and is further evidence of our commitment to de-Stuffing our house. These bags are full of video tapes, CDs and DVDs of old movies, shows and programs that haven't seen the inside of a VHF/CD/DVD player in many moons. Time for them to go.

Oh, and cook books. Not the classic Betty Crocker cookbook that was a wedding gift, or the cookbooks published by the Walker Street church ladies, or the Wilbarger Street church ladies or the Godley church ladies. Rather, cookbooks like "Fifteen Fabulous Recipes for Crock Pot Delights." Maybe we should include our crock pot, too. I'm sure it's in a cabinet somewhere. But cabinets are not on the schedule. Yet.

Social Media has widely promoted the Marie Kondo series, where one examines each item in question and decides if it brings the owner joy. If not, you bid it adieu and a happy life at Goodwill. I decided to try that method. So far, I have failed to find joy in all the vegetables in the fridge, the electric bill and an old tennis shoe.

Actually, there is some merit to the "find joy" method. There are some things that we did not put in the bags. Things that will probably still be on the shelf when the kids clean the house out.

Like my Little Golden Book of "The Pokey Little Puppy." And maybe the video of Lamb Chop, the hand puppet. Lamb Chop saved our bacon in Prague one night - baby-sitting a very young, very distraught Jericho who simply would not be appeased...until we played the Lamb Chop video. And maybe the....

But if I find the other tennis shoe it's absolutely out of here.

MMs - 6.3.2019 - Stuff

So Neale, our financial advisor and part-time Walmart greeter,  has been gently but firmly moving the conversation toward stuff. Specifically our stuff, and what to do with it.

Now my take on the accumulated flotsam and jetsam that fills our closets and shelves and drawers and cabinets and attic and garage and auto glove boxes is that eventually it becomes someone else's problem. I figure it's my role to hoard it and my kids role to dispose of it.

Neale, bless his heart, is doing his best to persuade us that's not the best course.  His take is that there's not going to be much room at the Casa Pequeno Home for Assisted Living, so we ought to give some thought to winnowing the detritus. He assures us, often, "Your kids don't want your stuff!"

He's persistent, I'll give him that. So Barb and I are taking a long look at the stuff that we have accumulated in our 57 years (Saturday, thank you very much) together. Our own collection is bad enough, but when you add in all the things that we have inherited/acquired from our own parents, we have a museum here.

I have, on a shelf above me, among other things, a non-working crystal radio that my father built as a boy, three glass insulators that were acquired during his 45 years as a telephone lineman, a clay piggy bank that my mother painted, a crystal paper weight globe from our son-in-law, a porcelain figure of a graduate in cap and gown that Burnell Knight made for me upon my graduation from high school, a class ring from that self-same high school - dated 1959 - and 9 VHS video tapes that are unlabeled so I have no idea what's on them - but I have an old VHS player on the shelf in the closet so I could check them out. Or not.

On a nearby shelf  is a (large) glass egg that a teacher gave my father when he was a boy,  a complete set of silverware that belonged to Grandmother Anderson, 7 large binders of genealogy records that my mother painstakingly assembled (contents transferred to digital media long ago), 6 archival boxes of genealogical papers, certificates and historical brick-abrac, assorted books on the history of Johnson County, and.... You get the picture. Oh yeah, there's a couple of bankers boxes of those. Pictures, that is. I just hope Rob doesn't return the grocery sack of 35mm slides he carried off. Did I mention the dozen photo albums? Or the framed photos on the walls and scattered on most flat surfaces throughout the house?

And then there's the books.

We have, at this moment in time, 34 linear feet of books taking up space on shelves throughout the house. And those are the "keepers." At any given time there is a stack of books on the way back to the library or to Half-Price books. Those don't count. We have books on gardening, travel, home repair, medical help and diet. I have nearly 3 linear feet of reference books, such as biographical dictionaries, geographical dictionaries, and foreign language dictionaries.  We have yards of fiction books "because we like that writer."

We have Junior High, High School and College Yearbooks (in duplicates). We have books on becoming a US Citizen (in multiple languages), a dozen antique to contemporary hymn and song books. And then there are the commentaries, Bibles and Bible study books. Any one need a complete set of commentaries by Adam Clark? He wrote them in the late 1800's; they are so old they don't even have a copyright or publication date in them.  How about 14 linear feet of binders containing transcripts of every sermon on Romans that John Allen Chalk preached at Highland in Abilene in the 60's, as well as notes from BSF, and classes attended at Austin Grad?

And I can't even begin to get my head around all the odd stuff piled on the shelves and in the closet in my "office." Need the installation diskettes for Windows 95? How about 3 surplus keyboards? Three monitors? Two obsolete computers?

And did I mention the garage?


I wonder if Neale has any room at his house?