March 23, 2005

• You got questions; I got answers.

  My answers may or may not makes sense.  They might not even be
  totally on-topic today.  I’m in a silly mood.  I woke this
  morning from a silly dream.  Cops again, only this time I was
  alone, driving a car.  I was in a city, headed down a wide 4-lane
  street, when suddenly all the traffic in all the lanes was coming at me
  head-on.  If there was any signage warning of an upcoming one-way
  area, I missed seeing it. 

  I pulled off and got out of my car.  There were about ten or more
  cars that came to a stop around me, most of them cops.  They were
  all joking around except this little sergeant who wanted me to sign a
  form for him.  One of them said they were going to take me to
  jail, and several others shushed him and said that wasn’t
  funny.  

  The sergeant was twitchy, nervous.  He kept going through several
  ritualistic routines reminiscent of OCD.  Everything he said was
  repeated several times, with hand gestures.  He laid his form and
  a strange electronic clipboard thing on the hood of my car and told me
  they’d let me go if I signed it.  But he was having trouble
  positioning the form just right on the backing so my signature would
  register.  He kept stopping and doing a shallow bowing motion with
  his arms circled out in front, fingertips touching, and saying: 
  “Queen of England… Queen of England.”  Then I woke up.

  Cinnamongirl78 asked me:

  …would you find as a Virgo that you’re fairly emotionally stable/level-headed?

  I don’t know… compared to what?  I can think of a few of
  my past employers, psychiatrists, husbands and boyfriends who might
  laugh at the idea of my being stable and level-headed.  My mother
  would have scoffed loudly.  It seems to me that most of my good
  sense and stabilty comes as a result of age, experience, and some
  excellent mentors.  I’ve “been a Virgo” all my life.  I spent
  the first thirty of these sixty years bouncing around, a certifiable
  nut case.  Even now, I have my moments.  You wouldn’t have
  thought me very level headed if you’d heard me screaming as that moose
  was stomping my Koji dog a couple months ago.

  The traits I’ve had all my life that seem to be associated with my very
  full Ninth House of Virgo/Libra relate more to intellect than
  emotions.  You mentioned that your Virgo BF is “always
  right.”  That’s something that Greyfox and a few of my ex-partners
  would ruefully agree applies to me.  But being the precise Virgo
  that I am, I would say they are wrong.  I’d argue that I’m not always
  right.  I’m not perfect.  I’m just one of the very few people
  on the planet who is consciously trying to be perfect.  To a
  Virgo, the rest of you don’t even seem to care about getting things
  right.  The concept of “close enough” or “good enough” is hard for
  me to understand.  For example, if I’m cleaning up a mess, it is
  still a mess until it is all cleaned up.

  Greyfox, even though he knows I can sometimes be wrong, still gets
  terribly excited when he’s right about something and I’m wrong. 
  Recently, he was dancing around the library parking lot, singing to me
  over the cell phone:  “I was right and you were wrong, doo dah…”
  and so forth.  I was just as happy about it as he was, but I
  wasn’t singing and dancing.  I’m too emotionally stable and
  level-headed to act that way.

  Then there is this question:

  How do you turn a Fiat into an off-road vehicle??

  Posted 3/23/2005 at 8:03 AM by lupa

  It is simpler than you might think, no mechanical skill or tools
  required.  You just find a place where there’s no curb or ditch to
  get your low ground clearance hung up on, and drive it off the
  road.  Of course, it helps if your little Italian sports car has
  been wrecked and declared a total loss for insurance purposes, so that
  there’s no worry about damaging a valuable vehicle.

  
  I loved Gina — still love her even though she’s rusting away in the
  driveway over at Elvenhurst (our old home).  If I could afford to
  get her running, I’d do it, but that would be frivolous.  She’s a
  summer car only.  Coming down off Mesa Verde on our honeymoon, we
  ran into a little snowfall, and she is so low to the ground that her
  bumper was pushing snow.

  A few years after that, Doug and I went on our Big Field Trip in
  her.  On that trip, I had to replace her clutch hydraulics and
  transmission, brakes, suspension… and right after we got home it was
  the engine that went.  Ya know what F.I.A.T. stands for,
  dontcha?  Fix it again, Tony.

  Still, before Greyfox decided that repairing her once again would be on
  the wrong side of the cost/benefit ratio, I got a lot of mileage out of
  her.  He’d bought her new, drove her about six years and put just
  under 50,000 miles on her.  When she was wrecked and the insurance
  company paid off on her, he gave her to me because that was cheaper
  than buying me a plane ticket home (this was during his “cold feet”
  period when he’d decided not to marry me and move to Alaska).  On
  two long cross-country trips after that — honeymoon and field trip –
  I put another 55,000 miles on her.  Most of that was on
  pavement.  She does perform better that way, but she also has had
  her time on slickrock and “desert pavement” as well.
  

  • 2:40 pm
  • 6 Comments