also, car back from mechanic’s. reports no errors. everybody shrugged and says oh well! it is a mystery! i am now free to drive about the country. KIM.

Bike lane jackass driver 859 2231

last week i had a decent lead on one down around st. louis, a project car that was startable but not drivable (at least, not until it got a thorough checking-over and possibly a new fuel tank), in good shape, for like three grand, but the ebay auction got pulled with like 12 hours to go, as the seller sold it locally. i was bummed, but, you know, them’s the breaks — besides, it had a 302 anyways. pfffft, weeaaaaaaak.

today i idly browsed back over to ebay and imagine my shock when i found one that was almost a replica of dad’s — 351-Cleveland instead of Windsor (2-barrel carb vs. 4, stock, but this one had been retrofitted with a 4-barrel), and with a rear spoiler, and inexplicably blue vinyl upholstery on the seats in an otherwise black interior, but otherwise, dad’s car, down to the exterior color and the decal Mach 1 details. 89,291 miles on the odometer (but since it couldn’t roll over to six-figures, the seller said “let’s call it 189,291″). not just running, not just in good shape — showable. not a collector’s car because of the modifications (the blue and silver scheme was also not original; it was originally green), but nonetheless, in great shape — even the underbody was basically rust-free. oh, it was beautiful. and the high bid was $8,000, with an hour and 45 minutes left on the clock.

enter: me.

i have a small stash of cash on hand, what i’ve been putting aside since paying off my credit cards. it’s mostly my tax refund, which went straight into savings. and my mastercard is more than happy to offer me 0% promo checks all the damn time — as a matter of fact, i just shredded the latest batch yesterday (i have opted out repeatedly; they don’t seem to have noticed). and i thought… i could totally buy that car.

so i examined the listing. i went over all the photos (did i mention how fantastic the underbody was??? they had photos of it up on the lift, and dude, my passat probably doesn’t look that rust-free.). i looked for gotchas. i thought up questions to ask the seller. i made sure the title was clear. i checked the driving distance between chicago and south carolina, where the car was, and priced amtrak tickets. i called d. and m. for advice. i reloaded the page obsessively. i decided what my maximum bid was — $10k. i thought that for The (replacement) Car, i was okay with taking on the credit card debt again.

i imagined the triumphant unveiling — i had it all planned out — i would drive to peoria, and stash it in the parking lot of the bar around the corner from my dad’s place, then go up there and get him to come out for “a beer,” and surprise him. i was completely and totally prepared to be The Best Daughter EVER. i pulled up quicken just to look, and ponder how a “1973 Ford Mach 1 Mustang” asset would look, listed up there next to “2001.5 Volkswagen Passat.”

and then, with 7 minutes left to go on the auction, and without having bid anything yet so as not to tip my hand, i realized that i really didn’t want to have credit card debt again. maybe if it had been a couple of grand, and i could have gotten it paid off in relatively short order… but even at a 0% APR, the thought of seven grand of credit card debt again… all those accounts that i have that are zeros now, i mean… i worked so hard, and seven thousand dollars is a lot of money. even for a car. even for a car i have wanted to drive since i was old enough to know what a car was. so it turns out that even though i was willing to pay ten grand, seven grand was too high a price.

in the end, it wasn’t a decision i had to make. bidding picked up the pace in the last few minutes, and — although i was just *waiting* for it to sell, in the end, for less than i was originally prepared to pay — it leapfrogged my would-be max bid, from $9200 to $12500 in one bid. the final selling price was $13,655, which is still a damn good price — for the condition in which it was described, $15-$17k wouldn’t necessarily be out of line.

i guess it was a valuable life lesson. i know now that when it comes down to it, although i might think i am cool with using my credit for the car, i am actually not. i don’t want to amass a big chunk of debt again. it’s a surprisingly bitter pill to swallow, for some reason. i’m a little sad i’m not sitting here gleefully contemplating my trip to south carolina right now, but … someday my savings will be able to afford me that car. and if it’s not exactly the right shade of blue with silver decals when i get it, why, then, i’ll just paint that sucker myself.

0825: Ready to leave. Schedule after work involves coming straight home, babysitting cat while feeding him and then injecting him with insulin, then carrying spinning wheel and accessories to car to go to Loopy for Spinning Class, Mark II, to be there by 1830. Decision:

1. Blue Line: Walk to subway (10 minutes). Wait for train (5-15 minutes, if very lucky). Ride train (20-25 minutes). Walk to work (10 minutes). Best case: 45 minutes; worst case: 60+ minutes. Also, no knitting as the train will be packed.
2. Pink Line: Walk to North/Ashland (10 minutes). Wait for #9 or X9 (5-10 minutes). Ride bus (X9 – 8 minutes; 9 – 12 minutes). Wait for train (2-10 minutes). Ride train (10 minutes). Walk to work (2 minutes). Best case: 37 minutes; worst case: 55 minutes; typical: 45 minutes. Can knit the whole time.
3. Red Line: Walk to North/Ashland (10 minutes). Wait for #72 (5-10 minutes). Ride bus (10-12 minutes). Wait for train (2-7 minutes). Walk to work (15 minutes). Best case: 40 minutes; worst case: 53 minutes. Can knit on Red Line and while waiting, probably not on #72.
4. Drive: 10 minutes to get downtown; ??? to get across downtown to Clark/Van Buren. Probably make it in less than 30 minutes, though. Have to pay $20 to park, plus no knitting, but driving would make it easier to come home fast, to feed/medicate cat, then go to Loopy, without having a mad transit dash home.

Winner: after-work convenience wins out; driving it is. Okay.

0832: Put car in gear. Drive to end of block, turn south on Ashland.
0835: Turn southeast on Milwaukee. Bicyclists are everywhere; drive with caution. Don’t make it out of second gear until Augusta, at 0840.
0843: Decision: go south on Des Plaines, or continue east on Milwaukee and try to sneak in the back way? Des Plaines sucks, the lights are all timed so you hit every light when it’s just turned red; let’s try the new way.
0845: Oh goodie, the new way crosses Metra tracks. Here’s an inbound train … now an outbound train … there’s another inbound train a little ways off but they lift the gates anyways: punch it!
0848: Head east on Washington. Realize that there’s no way I’m going to make it to the parking deck before 9 (when the parking rates go up from $14 to $20). Sulk. Get cut off by dickhead cab while trying to leave space to let in a Jeep who didn’t realize his lane was ending. Morons in charge of motor vehicles are simply everywhere.
0852: Turn south on Clark. There’s a brief, tiny, oh so slim possibility that I might make it to the parking deck five blocks south by 9, if the lights favor me. Engage in more aggressive driving than usual, with lane changes to take advantage of gaps. At one point, downshift from third into second to punch it in order to make a light. And yet, I always stop before the crosswalk, because I’m awesome like that.
0857: Stopped at the light at Van Buren, with half a block to go until my parking deck. Come on, come on!
0859: Pull in to parking deck. Hope their clock is not ahead of mine…

Shoelace!

—

So. On my way out of the parking lot at the fiber fair — and by “parking lot” I mean “grass” — there was a bump which caused me to scrape the underside of my front bumper, pulling out onto the street. I thought little of it beyond “damn, you guys could fill in the craters once in a while.”

Five miles down the road — in some suburb between Crystal Lake and Elgin — there was a mild bump in the pavement, after which my car started making an unpleasant scraping noise. I was on the phone with Kim at the time, and pulled off into the nearest handy parking lot, which happened to be a (plant) nursery which was closed for the day, which at least kept me from getting funny looks from anyone except a couple of employees leaving for the day, one of whom eventually walked over and stared at me without saying anything — I assume he was planning to ask if I needed help but couldn’t quite find the courage to actually speak, and/or overheard me talking on the phone with Kim and figured I was crazy for babbling about yarn while messing around the underbody of my car. Anyways, I got out and looked under the car, and what had happened was that the skid plate — which is a plastic sheet that covers under the oil pan, etc, between the two front wheels, from the front lower valance all the way back to behind the axle — had lost its front bolt and fallen, and was scraping along the pavement.

(Side note: a replacement skid plate is $160. I say again, Crystal Lake, you couldn’t fill in those craters once in a while?)

But I am a girl of no small amount of ingenuity, and I fixed my busted skid plate, right there in the parking lot of the Platt Hill Nursery: I tied it up with a shoelace from my ice skates. Laced it up nice and tight right through the bolt holes – the ones other than the one in the front which was ripped, presumably from the force of a bolt being pushed through it. I even tucked the ends of the laces away neatly so they wouldn’t drag on the asphalt.

Hey, it worked. Shut up!

speaking of fiber arts: this past weekend was the 9th Annual Ohio-Kentuckiana Soapers Gathering, and since i don’t live in Ohio, Kentucky, or Indiana, naturally i attend every year. (har.) we had a little unofficial fiber arts table, which was fun: Molly socked (in tiny bits of time snatched from being this year’s gathering chair!), Kim socked in between running around the gathering to round up people to buy raffle tickets for the Laura’s Rose Garden shawl she designed and knitted and then donated, and Mari worked on embroidery — while i worked on crocheting a swatch to practice. a rather sad swatch, since i didn’t know i was accidentally decreasing at the start of each row and at some point i realized i had not achieved a rectangle but instead a trapezoid of fabric. oops.

shockingly, i actually won Laura’s Rose Garden in the raffle! i was so surprised. i put in several tickets, but literally everyone there (around 100 of us), except one person, put in at least one. unbeknownst to Kim, however, there was a whole big conspiracy going on to ensure that whoever won the shawl, it would make its way back to her: people brought extra things to trade, people were going around spreading the word that they would be willing to barter, etc. i very stealthily (if i do say so myself) snuck it into her luggage while loading up the car, and she found it sunday morning. so that was fun. i did win another item, though, one of Marie’s stained glass items, a beautiful rose colored plate — i loved it to pieces at first sight, so i was thrilled i got to take it home! it’s beautiful, i’m going to try and take a picture of it this weekend for the blog because really, it’s just gorgeous. and she made it! i can’t even imagine.

i donated several skeins of my handspun… like an idiot, i didn’t take any pictures of them first!! one of them i was especially proud of, too — it was an attempt at a lighter weight yarn, which i spun from a variegated dyed roving, and then navajo plied to preserve the color variation. oh well. sigh. i know who won them… maybe i can ask her to take a picture for me. :-)

anyways, i did get a little better at crochet, and now i have a respectable start to rippling, and i even ordered some yarn from JoAnn’s Fabrics — Caron Simply Soft, since i wanted a washable, inexpensive yarn — so that’s fun. i just need to figure out how to hold the yarn in my hand so i can go quickly (without picking the yarn up and throwing it), i’ve got the hook motion down. i just need practice. oh well, that’s what swatching is for.

and in knitting news, i have another nearly complete transit sock — out of blue and grey striped Step yarn, which is very nice yarn indeed — which needs to be tried on and have a toe knitted, and then to have a mate knitted, so maybe i’ll have another pair of socks in a few weeks. i may give this pair away, not sure. and, in much more exciting news, i am going to start on the Nelly Shawl pattern that my SP9 sent me! i started out on it a while ago — actually, the night i got the box of goodies! — because i was so excited about it and the yarn. i still haven’t posted about that box because i wanted to post a picture of the shawl-in-progress with the yarn from the goodie box and on my shiny new needles from the goodie box. this plan was thwarted when, after i cast on and knit six rows in garter stitch, i decided i had better practice the lace part first with some scrap yarn — so i cast on some sock yarn on some other needles and proceeded to knit the lace pattern multiple times, not one single repeat of which came out right! i kept coming up with extra stitches at the end of the row. i thought i was misreading the pattern, or maybe losing track of where i was and skipping to a different row, so i got out graph paper and wrote the pattern down for myself in rows of alternating ink colors, so i could remember “i’m on the red row” and it would be easier to see… and still, extra stitches. i counted stitches obsessively, and i could not figure it out! it was making me crazy! i promised myself i could start on the “real” shawl with the “real” yarn as soon as i could do one repeat without mistakes… but i just couldn’t! and that’s about when it dawned on me that maybe it wasn’t me that was messed up, but the pattern. it turns out that the pattern has you casting on 58 stitches but, if you look at the graph, there are only 56 stitches indicated. it looks to me (and it seems like Kim agrees) that they forgot two purl stitches on the right-hand side of the pattern, symmetric with the two purl stitches on the left-hand side. so, i think now that that is figured out, this weekend i will probably get out my trusty graph paper and write the pattern in colors again (i liked that idea a lot, actually), and add in those two purls, and see if then i can’t finally get a repeat to come out right.

tomorrow: baseball game at 19:11, vs. the Ligers. the weather looks promising — if you prefer wintertime to spring: “Cloudy with a 40 percent chance of rain showers. Lows around 40°F.” i might take my crochet swatch/future cat blanket. :P i hope the hot cocoa guys will be out again… i mean, cold beer at the ballpark is just not very appealing when you’re already wet and shivering.

ennyhoo. this weekend i will try to catch up on backlogged craft blogging and so on, just as soon as i can catch a few hours at home.

okay, time for falling down, going boom now. am exhausted!

they are NOT HELPED by my inkjet printer suddenly deciding it has to be fed cardstock one page at a time. or my lack of a hole punch and having to run to staples. or having not yet done my homework for class. or or or or or.

i think my head is going to explode.

AIEE.

if my head explodes, someone go feed my cats, ok?

they took care of my baby car, fixed her all up bright and shiny, and then when i came to pick her up the mechanic who worked on her took me over and showed me what had happened to my rotors, knew exactly why it was (“do you let the car sit for long periods of time?”) and explained how it had happened (not driving leads to rust building up on the rotors’ edges, reducing surface area for the brake pad to make contact, thus resulting in noise and vibration). and he was totally cool about it, didn’t baby me or whatever, he was just really rational and nice. then he comisserated over the price of my battery (i picked a high end battery, an Optima deep-cycle gel pack, for a few reasons, such as “i tend to let my car sit for long periods of time”), and then casually mentioned that since i was due for an oil change soon anyways he just took care of that for me, for no charge.

which. i mean, i was going to take the car to class next week and do the oil change myself, but, how awesome is having service thrown in for free? i mean, okay, once it’s up on the lift and you’re poking around the underbody it’s not a real stretch to pull the plug out and let it drain, but still, it’s extra effort and materials, and it’s an industry not known for throwing in lots of freebies. i thought it was very sweet.

i’m going to go back to the car talk web site, where i found them, and write up a review on their complete awesomeness. seriously, i can just punt my old dealer mechanic off a cliff now, ‘cos Sal took good care of my baby for me. and she rides so much nicer now with clean brakes! i was never particularly bothered by the vibration of the brakes before the service, but now that it’s fixed, it’s just smooth and really a noticeable improvement. i’m extremely happy with my official new mechanic.

my dad just emailed me; their garage was hit by lightning and burned, and with it, the mustang.