Vindauga

I guess this is as close to Chris LeDoux as I ever came, even though it’s actually Garth Brooks.

I heard an interview with Chris one time and he mentioned that song. He said he and his wife were driving in his truck and listening to a pretty good little country song and then right in the middle of it the singer says his name…”a worn out tape of Chris LeDoux, lonely women, and bad booze seem to be the only friends I’ve left at all…” He said he just stared at the radio and then at his wife in shock. He said that he felt like he had finally made it. Funny how little things can do that. Chris died recently, succumed to cancer which he had been battling for a while. I don’t know why I even noticed. I guess somehow that story has just always struck a deep chord with me…a shame to hear that the man who told it has passed on.

My car is in the shop. Again. It has a mysterious failure somewhere that makes it stop dead in the damndest places…like the “waterworks curve” on 55 or on the on-ramp at High Street or wherever it damn well pleases.

So I took it to the first mechanic…he tries and tries, but the only thing he can find is a loose grounding wire. He charges me $15 and it works great for a couple days. Then it starts up again, much more frequently this time. It died three times on the way to the shop. This time I take it to the “dealership” because being dealers of cars of this type, they should have more experience with its many quirks.

“It’s the fuel pump. And your fuel injectors needed cleaning and the fuel filter was dirty.” Great. $707 later and I get to take it home fixed. Only I get about a quarter of a mile away and it does it again. Dead. So I finally get it cranked and drive right back to the dealership. It was fun to see the mechanic try to drive the fixed car and then have it die on him and watch him attempt to crank it.

“Should be about 30 minutes. Must be some built up carbon from the injectors broke off and got in something when we were cleaning it.” Right, whatever, just fix it. 45 minutes later…I hear someone trying to start the car to no avail. “Well, we’re not really sure what’s wrong. We’ll keep working on it and call you.”

Great. All for a car that’s worth next to nothing since it’s twelve years old and has 180,000 miles on it. Hooray for cars!

Oh and we’re moving this weekend, which means packing and then loading our little bits of furniture into the POD. I’m glad we are only packing a small house, because if it were bigger we’d have too much stuff. Thankfully we really have very little furniture, all things considered. Couple beds, a couch, couple chairs, couple TVs and a couple of entertainment centers. Thank God the heavy sleeper sofa is no longer haunting me.