Gabriele Pauli is a member of the German parliament, representing Bavaria.  She is running for the top office in Bavarian politics.  She has proposed that marriage contracts should automatically expire after seven years unless the parties opt to renew, to prevent all the acrimony, fuss and expense of divorce.  To me, this sounds like the best idea in the marriage arena since the prenup.

Most of the time, the insanities and inanities of our local politics and the campaigns at Alaska state and U.S. national levels are more than enough for me.  I cannot truthfully be called apolitical, but much of the time I tend to withdraw quietly unless I run screaming from the idiocy and hypocrisy that run rampant in the political arena.  I don't go out of my way to seek to keep up with what's going on in other countries unless the media bring something interesting to my attention.

This morning on KTNA, the Talkeetna public radio station, I heard a BBC story about Ms. Pauli's proposal.  In the piece, she was called a "redhead" and of course that intensified my interest.  I spent several hours loading web pages through my slow dialup connection and translating several pages from the German language magazines Stern and Park Avenue, and from her own website, informing myself about this woman.

If she is a natural redhead, she has no loyalty to her hair color.  I found images of her with hair in many shades from reddish blond to dark brown.  An image that has stirred up a lot of buzz shows her in an auburn wig and gloves that most sources identify as "latex," although they look more like vinyl to me.  She has posed provocatively in sexy clothes, and about six months ago she received a lot of press because a magazine article accompanying some of those photos revealed that during the shoot she had removed her underpants to eliminate the panty lines showing through her skin tight leather.

Writers speculated that she had alienated conservative religious Bavarian constituents from her own party by participating in the sexy spread, and went on to alienate progressives by making an issue of the magazine's having revealed her pantilessness, and her threat to sue the magazine over the article.  The voters she needs to win over to gain the position she is seeking are predominately conservative Catholics.  I marveled at her apparently heedless political suicide in the service of good sense and social progress, until I learned her age and had a look at her natal chart.  She is fifty years old.  I remember what I was going through when I was fifty.

Thème astral, carte du ciel et planètes pour
Gabriele PAULI,
née le 26 juin 1957 à 08h57 à Schweich (Allemagne)
Soleil en 4°26 Cancer, AS en 24°17 Lion,
Lune en 14°08 Gémeaux, MC en 12°37 Taureau
Astrologie chinoise : Coq de Feu
Numérologie : chemin de vie 9

This update is updated below.
We had a hard frost here one night early this week.  In the morning, I pulled sheets of ice about a quarter-inch thick from each of the two pans at the tadpole ranch. (shown at left in an image captured earlier this summer)

I moved the half dozen or so tadpoles from the south 40 (on left) into the north 40 (upper right), ran a long extension cord out and put a fifteen watt light inside the black bucket that supports the north 40.  Now, except when the sun is shining, I keep the pan covered with the translucent white domed lid, for warmth.

Lately, each time I remove the cover,  Jumbo is there at the surface to greet me.  If I put my hand into the water, he swims into it.  Jumbo and Blackie, the largest tadpole from the south 40, are the only ones who don't flee from the hand when it descends.  They are the ones I have handled most, and I suppose my body heat is by now familiar and welcome.

Blackie and four or five of the larger tadpoles are now showing signs of legs, and are developing froglike body shapes and features, while more than half of the remaining tadpoles have grown very little and have kept their immature shape.

I didn't know what to expect when I rescued the eggs from the muskeg as it was drying out.  Walking home with the bucket of eggs, I was thinking that if I could keep just one tadpole alive to mature froghood, it would be worth the effort.  I still do not know whether Jumbo has time to mature before real cold weather sets in, so I don't know if my effort has been worth it for her or him.  For me, the discovery that these tiny cold blooded animals could grow to accept me as a warm presence and not a threat, has been worth a lot more than what I have invested in their care.

UPDATE:

Zvanoizu asked:

Frog eggs need water in which to hatch and tadpoles must have water to survive.  Those eggs I rescued wouldn't have hatched if left to dry out in the muskeg.  My Frogspawn album includes a shot I captured of some dried eggs after the muskeg dried this year.  I'm sure there were millions of eggs out there this year that never hatched.  If there had been enough rainfall this spring and summer to keep the marsh wet, the tadpoles that didn't become prey to water beetles, birds, other predators, disease or accidents would have matured in the muskeg.  I watched that process from beginning to end in wetter years.  As it is, there will be no survivors from this year's spawning in this little area of marshland, because there was no standing water out there through the summer.

There are still adults surviving out there, spawned during years when the muskeg stayed wet all summer.  We have heard their voices a few times, and Doug saw one recently.  Researchers at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks found that this species can survive frozen underground for at least five years.  Their research was done on adults, and I don't know whether an immature tadpole, if frozen in ice, would thaw out and swim the following year, or just thaw out and rot.  I may get a chance to find out next year during breakup.

Mature frogs are known to burrow into mud to hibernate.  The tadpoles' activity decreases as their water cools.  This summer, with the sun shining on their pans of water, they were in constant motion.  This week when I removed the film of ice from the pans, they were all motionless until I picked them up and they warmed from the heat of my hand.  The species as a whole doesn't need my help to survive.  There are
places at the edge of lakes and streams where this year's hatch
proceeded normally.  I don't imagine that my contribution will ensure
the survival of the frogs in this muskeg.  What I can do is just a drop
in the bucket.  If climate change persists in drying out the marsh each
summer and none of the young survive beyond the lifespans of the
existing adults, they will be gone.

The things I don't know about these frogs vastly outnumber what I do know.  I am learning as I go.  Rescuing those eggs was an impulsive act, partially motivated by a desire not to miss out this year on watching the tadpoles mature.

"Reality is what you can get away with"

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

The first eighteen years that I spent reading Tarot cards and other oracles, all my readings were done face-to-face, in person.  For the first seven years of that, my readings were all done for friends, acquaintances, or a few people who would come up to me and ask for a reading while I had my cards out at a party or in a coffeehouse, on the grass in a park, or other public place.  After seven years of that, I began to work professionally, in a booth at arts fairs and festivals, on call for private sessions, or for company parties, etc.

One of the first things I found I needed to explain to people was that I am not a fortuneteller.  Fortunetellers tell people what they want to hear.  My aim has always been to tell people what they need to know.  Art and science are both involved in each of those modes, but the former does not require as much guts as the latter does.  Fortunetelling is the preferred profession if one wants to make more money and make friends.  The sort of counseling I do requires some detachment from results and a strong focus on accuracy and full disclosure regardless of consequences.

The first spread I used as an amateur, the Celtic Cross, needs a question or a topic on which to focus.  Very early on, I noticed that most people had questions about their love lives.  That pattern held true for the eleven years of my professional practice before I started doing "absent" readings by mail in 1987.  Within months of my beginning in '69, I started adding other spreads, different decks, and different oracles such as runes and crystals.   The first thing I would say to someone was to ask whether he or she had a question, or wanted a general reading.  Most people took the easy route, the general reading, which I eventually began calling a reality check.

When anyone asked a question, the question most often involved love.  I noticed another pattern, too.  The class of questions that came in second in number to love issues were concerned with money or work.  Frequently, my client would preface a money question with, "I suppose most people ask about...."  Oddly enough, I don't recall any of those in the majority of clients who asked about love ever preceding their questions with such a supposition.  Does this mean that insecure lovers feel that they are alone and unique, while the economically insecure assume that everyone else has similar worries?  That's my best guess.

During most of the time I was working in booths at festivals, my exhusband, Charley, my son Doug's father, stood outside the booth, entertaining those who were waiting to get in and fielding questions about what I did, and how much I charged. (He came up with the words I still use, "Whatever you think it's worth after you hear it.") If the fortuneteller issue came up out there, he'd handle it.  If someone sat down and gazed blankly at me until I asked, "What can I do for you?" then said, "Tell my fortune," I'd have to explain that this is not what I do.  Just like the, "whatever," money spiel, it became a standard speech, as succinct as I could make it, so we could get on with our business and free the chair for the next person.

I never attempted to develop any stock phrases for the readings themselves, but over time I discovered many common threads among all the readings, including those about love.  The cards would indicate things that were consistent with what I knew about the biology and psychology of relationships:  the role of sexual attraction and lust, difficulties caused by emotional needs and expectations, tendencies to indulge in denial and blame, and so forth.  When I started doing readings by mail and encountered the same common threads, I wrote my first "fact sheet" (later, online, to become FAQ) on love.  I titled it, The Love Rap.  It changed over the years, remaining a single page for ease and economy of printing and postage costs.  When I wrote the FAQ for KaiOaty, I had no such restrictions on space, and I had in the interim gained a higher perspective on life and deeper understanding of love.

Much of the material from the print version of the Love Rap went into the Functional Relationships FAQ.  I covered some of the common pitfalls in relationships based on the various emotional needs that are usually called, "love," in Love Versus Fear and Letting Go.  The FAQ on Love of the unconditional kind was as complete as I knew how to make it at the time.  Now, I realize that my entire LOVE collection is lacking all of the essential information about neuroelectrochemistry that I have learned since I wrote those FAQ pages.  I guess I will be working on that in the very near future.  I haven't even decided yet whether I will write a new FAQ or edit that info into one of the existing ones.  First, I will reread, edit, and check the links in all the old material.  Then I will decide what to add and where to put it.

Seeya.

Excuse me.  Right here at the start, I beg you to forgive any incoherence, venom, bias, or other unpleasantness in the following rant.  This essay has been inspired by a convergence of several factors, including:

• Illness:  I am experiencing a severe exacerbation of M.E., myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome.  This is an internationally recognized disorder, with established diagnostic and treatment protocols agreed upon by leading physicians in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas.  Despite the facts that a growing number of U.S. physicians are aware of M.E., and some of them even attended the international symposium that recommended the name, M.E. and the new protocols, to replace previous diagnoses such as, "fibromyalgia," and the ineffective and/or harmful treatments previously used, governmental agencies in the U.S. refuse to recognize it.
• Politics:  Hillary Clinton, and reportedly all of the other major Democratic candidates with the lone exception of Barack Obama, are proposing to make health insurance mandatory.  The insurance industry is reportedly one of the primary reasons that NIH and CDC refuse to recognize the M.E. symposium's protocols and persist in the obsolete terminology and treatments.   It is widely accepted among the patient community, in online forums and blogs, that insurers and the "health" industry do not want to face the expense that would result if the magnitude of the problem was acknowledged, our true levels of disability were recognized, and M.E. patients began receiving appropriate treatment.
• Hypocrisy:  Call it "spin" or PR if you like, but the public face of the insurance industry is as cynically hypocritical as any other business, and more so than most.  I recall when Blue Cross called their policies "hospitalization insurance."  When Blue Shield came along to cash in on the fears of those who thought their illness might not be serious enough to require hospitalization, they called it "medical insurance."  The marketing genius who was inspired to lump them together and call them "health insurance," as if one could, by paying for medicine and hospitalization, ensure health, deserves martyrdom, at the very least.  Let's not even get into what HMOs are actually devised to maintain.  Doctors don't like them; patients don't like them.  To find anyone who does like them you have to follow the money.
• Psychology:  I know people who have used their insured vehicles as weapons or battering rams, who would have found some other way to vent their anger if they hadn't had the insurance.  I also know people who don't bother to take responsibility for their own physical wellbeing because they have "health insurance" to do it for them.  Never mind all the statistics detailing iatrogenic illness, mistaken diagnoses, inappropriate treatment, medication errors in hospitals, and the hardy poison-resistant strains of microorganisms that live mostly in hospitals until some unlucky patient happens to carry one out into the population.  Given the illusory benefits sold with insurance policies, most people are content to ignore their nutritional needs and the deleterious effects of some of their habits and addictions, relying on medicine for things that medicine cannot provide.
• Metaphysics:  This might just be a subhead of "psychology," but the point is that when one buys insurance, one is in effect betting against oneself.  The only legitimate way to get a return on the investment is to lose, to suffer, to fall victim to whatever peril impelled one to buy the insurance in the first place.  "Energy flows where attention goes."

There!  Got that off my chest.  Now I realize that I've been giving this way too much of my precious time, attention and energy.  I had intended to include a few more points, such as economics, but I think I'd be better served to pay more attention to my breathing... in... and out... and in again.

Today is Ken Kesey's birthday.  Had he not died within two months of the 9/11 attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, he would now be 72. 

His family still runs a creamery (they make Nancy's yogurt)  in Oregon.  When I knew Ken, he was living on the old family farm there.  Not familiar with his name?  Ken has several claims to fame. 

He wrote One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, some great American novels in which he mined his own life experiences with great imagination, irony and humor. 

He was one of the Merry Pranksters who sought to initiate the Psychedelic Era by traveling around in an old bus, handing out free LSD in the form of electric Kool-Aid.  Sometimes, the Pranksters also served up electric watermelon, injected with LSD.  I had some of that, one Fourth of July in Eugene.

Ken owed his interest in LSD and his connections with Owsley Stanley, Timothy Leary, and many other members of the psychedelic subculture, to his participation in Project MKULTRA.  I am delighted by the irony of such a counterculture hero's having been produced by a secret Pentagon war project, and of minds and spirits such as Joe McMoneagle, David Morehouse, and Courtney Brown being inspired by the CIA's secret psychic espionage programs.  If ever there has been an incidence of swords accidentally being beaten into plowshares, this is it.

I am no stranger to irony, ambiguity, or weirdness.  In my youth, I thought irony and weirdness were the way of the world.  Throughout my life, many things such as car wrecks, felony arrests,
broken relationships, illnesses, etc., which would seem to be negative
experiences, have turned out to my advantage.  Successes and achievements have a way of turning around and biting me in the butt.

It took some time, a lot of experience, and more than just a passing acquaintance with astrology, Tarot, out-of-body travel, psychokinesis, precognition, telepathy and general strangeness, before I realized in a sense deeper than semantics that "weird" means "different", "unusual", out of the ordinary.  If it was the way of the world, it would not be notable, nor would it be debatable.  That it happens to be the way of my world, and that the Universe in its ultimate wisdom has provided me with a map to my own weird reality, are facts that I treasure as much as I treasure every hint and clue I see that suggests that this weirdness is becoming less weird and more common moment by moment.

Hey, Ken-- Wherever you are, happy birthday.  The world is a duller place without you.  Thanks for each and every track, trace, and trail you left behind.

Last evening, I put my nebulizer in my pants pocket, picked up my camera, walked out the door, around the front end of the trailer, and off into the woods north of here.  I stayed in my yard and got no farther than about twenty feet from the house, and found things I hadn't known were there.

Crowberries are some of my favorites.  Along with lowbush cranberries, they are among the last berries to ripen each year, and they are not as abundant in these woods as most other edible species are.  Usually, I find a few of them thinly distributed over a large expanse of woods, but this time as I was looking for fungi on the forest floor and fallen trees, I came upon a wide and dense patch of crowberries, with a few lowbush cranberries and the usual mosses, right there outside my windows. 

Around the edges of that patch of crowberries I found a few blueberries still clinging to their leafless bushes.  There were also lots of ripe rosehips.  I hadn't picked in that area, mostly because it is shady there and when I was out berry picking in the sunnier areas out on the muskeg, I could see from a distance that the rosehips here weren't ripe yet.

The flavor of crowberries is intense, not very sweet, and slightly astringent.  Lowbush cranberries are tangy and tart, and their flavor complements that of the crowberries.  I picked and ate a few handfuls of both.  Then, to take away the puckery feeling in my mouth, I ate a handful of the fat, sweet blueberries for dessert.

Where we lived while Doug was growing up, our old place about a half mile away, across the highway, mushrooms were more abundant than here, and berries were scarce.  The land over there had been cleared, topsoil scraped away, and gravel from under the topsoil used to surface the roads around here.  That gave me a great microclimate for gardening, with better drainage and a longer frost-free period than even my nearest neighbors.  Outside the clear area of my yard, the woods closed in on all sides, making a green wall in every direction I looked, all summer long.

Here, there are two things that have come to mean more to me than my garden and the shrooms over there.  They are two very different things, at opposite ends of the lifestyle spectrum.  One is the power grid, the electricity that gives us year-round light and refrigeration, and access to the web.  For the fifteen years that we lived over there, we had a freezer all winter in the great outdoors, and could keep food cold in the house by keeping it on or near the floor and monitoring the temperature so we could raise it higher to keep it from freezing when the outdoor temp dropped way subzero. 

In summer, there was no lack of natural light, but in winter there was the continual hassle of propane lights.  They always lit with a whoosh and a bang, and no matter how many times I experienced it or how prepared I thought I was, it would startle me.  Mantles would disintegrate at the slightest touch or a puff of air.  Tanks had to be disconnected, hauled to the station, filled, hauled back heavier than before, reconnected, connections tested for leaks... I do prefer electric light at the flick of a switch.  The microwave, the fridge, the PS2... icing on the cake.

The other thing I didn't have there is the muskeg across the street east of here..  There is just a narrow strip of trees between here and a wide open area that, depending on the season and the variability of weather from year to year, might look like a lawn or a lake, might be an ice skating rink or a huge berry patch.  Early this morning, the light was lovely.  I stuck my nebulizer in my pocket again, crossed the street, picked my way over the rough ground under the trees, and came out the other side in time to see a neighbor walking his dog back from the cul de sac.  They're there, in the shot below, but you might need to enlarge it to see them.

...same as the old car, almost.

The '87 Subaru wagon I call Streak, which I have had for about five years, has had a new alternator, battery, exhaust system, front drive axles, and clutch linkage since I've owned it.  The clutch repair was more than a year ago, and at that time the mechanic said the throw out bearing was going and the transmission would need to be replaced soon.

At the time, right after he fixed the clutch, I started hearing a sound so high in pitch that neither the mechanic nor the neighbor who took me to pick up my car could hear it.  Female hearing extends into a higher range than that of the male.  Maybe that's why. 

The noise would come and go as I let off the clutch pedal and pushed it in.  The mechanic said it was probably the throw out bearing.  I questioned him, and he reluctantly said that if it was the throw out bearing, it could go on like that "for a while," and that it would probably make a lot of noise before it broke.

Whatever it is, I have been listening to that noise for over a year as it grew louder and lower in pitch.  My son Doug has no trouble hearing it now.  After the last oil change at Mr.Lube, I started hearing a new sound when I turn the steering wheel.  Since even diagnostics and estimates cost money (of which I have none and the man who keeps me has not much to spare), we  had been discussing for a year whether it would be more economical to fix the car or replace it.

Last month, Greyfox, my husband, the aforementioned sugar daddy, saw that someone had a Subaru "just like Streak" (he said) for sale.  He asked me if I wanted him to buy it.  Silly man... in many things I am decisive.  In matters of spending money I don't have, going further into debt, I waffle and wonder if the immediate expenditure will save an even greater one, or prevent some major inconvenience or even disaster further on in time.  When the expenditure is for a used car, it's even worse.  Then I have to wonder about the magnitude of the problems that have impelled the owner to sell it.

I consulted an oracle.  Its advice was to hold off a few days and try to negotiate a lower price.  A few days later, Greyfox reported sadly that the car was no longer on the strip where it had been parked with a "for sale" sign.  I breathed a sigh of relief:  a difficult decision deferred.  Then some time later the car was back, Greyfox talked to the owner again, listened to it run, negotiated, and bought it.  That was right during the time when I was all chills-and-feverish, congested and experiencing other less pleasant flu-like symptoms.  We decided he'd keep it at his cabin until I felt better.  Then he would drive out here, get me, and I could take him back home and go grocery shopping at the same time.

What obviously had been flu or a similar virus segued into a flareup of M.E., and I have been hors de combat, out of the fight, for many weeks, with currently no end in sight.  Roof repairs were interrupted, Doug has not only had to do all the water schlepping, but lots of other little chores I usually do, and take care of me.  The most disabling symptom is dyspnea.  Breathing is an effort.  In recent days, I have made it easier on myself by remembering to grab the nebulizer and load up on Albuterol before I try to get out of bed or up from this chair, and I take it with me wherever I go.  Sometimes I can walk slowly no more than ten to twelve feet before I have to stop and catch my breath.  At best, I can go maybe forty feet or so in a single burst of snail-like speed.  Getting to the outhouse is a challenge, and until yesterday was about the greatest challenge I had been willing to attempt.

Greyfox had been accumulating a lot of stuff for us:  books, selected bits of newspapers, videos, non-perishable groceries and various bits of mungo from the dumpster at Felony Flats, until in his opinion my "new" Subaru was full to the brim.  We contemplated his bringing it all out here, unloading, and my taking him home and doing my shopping.  We contemplated that, waiting for me to recover sufficiently to do the shopping, until Doug and I had run out of a lot of things and had to pay the triple prices locally for a few essentials. 

Then we decided that I'd give Greyfox a shopping list and he'd do the shopping for me.  He unloaded a bunch of the junk in order to make room for the groceries.  We left open the question of whether I'd drive him back home and return here with my car, or whether the car would go back again with him.  Doug is still on his learner's permit... but that's another story. 

I took it easy, conserving energy yesterday as Doug and Greyfox unloaded the car, except for a set of snow tires on rims that came with the car.  After some discussion as we were ready to leave, about where we'd store them, I said, "just leave them there for now."   I drove Greyfox home.  Doug went along for backup in case of emergency, even though there was only a brief window of time before he needed to be back for the start of his weekly online D&D session.

Before we left here, I noticed a tire was almost flat.  Greyfox said, "No wonder the car was pulling to the right."  Doug used our inflater and aired it up.  Greyfox rode shotgun and uncorked my nebulizer for me to use when I needed it.  On the drive to town, he pointed out modifications the mechanic
who had owned the car had made:  a manual choke, the heater control
dial replaced with a toggle switch, the radio replaced with a
non-functional CD player, etc.  I observed that the man had been a
mechanic, but not very skilled at electrical or electronic work. 

We had intended to load the junk back up that Greyfox had taken out to make room for groceries, and some books he'd forgotten, etc.  We left all that behind because I was feeling pretty ragged and Doug was in a hurry to get home.  None of us was at our sharpest mental best.  Doug and I made two stops on the way home.  Coming out of the Meadow Lakes Discount Center, empty-handed because they'd had no tortillas, I saw that the tire was almost flat again.  Doug got the inflater out, hooked it up, then stood up, shook his head, stuck the head back in the car and told me that the tire wouldn't take air.  The valve stem had come off.

Feeling grateful for having left the extra tires in there, since the spare is a weird little thing bolted on top of the air cleaner, I backed the car to a quiet corner of the parking lot.  Doug got out, saying, "I hope we have all the necessary tools."  We did, after a fashion.  There was a good hydraulic jack that, even when blocked up with the chunk of lumber supplied, wouldn't raise the car high enough to get the tire on, and the same sort of flimsy screw jack we have in Streak.  As Doug was getting back in the car after having completed the task, he said that the valve stem appeared to have been attached to the mag wheel with epoxy.

We stopped again, at Miller's Market in Houston.  I waited in the car while Doug went in for ice cream cones.  We had both forgotten about tortillas by then.  I ate enough of my ice cream so that I thought I could handle the rest as I drove, and handed it off to Doug.  He had his strawberry cheesecake cone in one hand and my soft serve vanilla melting in the other, as I turned the key to start our new car.  Nothing happened.  None of the gauges lit up, nothing.  I fiddled with it, tried several times, took back my ice cream, ate a little of it and thought.

I figured that Greyfox would have the former owner's phone number, and maybe I could find out if there was some tricky thing to do with the ignition switch.  If that failed, I could call AAA.  We got out and went in the store looking for a public phone.  A few times we've discussed my getting a cell for such situations, but can't justify the expense for something I'd use maybe a couple of times a year.  There was no phone nearby.  Doug couldn't use my AAA card and I couldn't walk the distance to the bar where there was rumored to be a pay phone.

I got in, popped the hood latch, and got out.  The first thing either of us noticed upon first sight of our new car's works was that the battery cables and terminals looked small and flimsy by comparison to what we are used to.  I was wiggling terminals and tracing wires when a wiry and wobbly silver-haired, gray-bearded drunk stepped up and got in my way.

Right away, we had several problems.  I am not sufficiently highly spiritually evolved to suffer fools or drunks gladly.  He was smoking a cigarette, waving it around, blowing smoke in my face as he spoke to me.  I am allergic to tobacco smoke, and was teetering on the thin edge of status asthmaticus already.  I am also reasonably knowledgeable and competent at mechanical things, and this guy started right out treating me as if I were as idiotic as he was.

He asked what the problem was.  I replied shortly, "no power."  He reached out toward the carburetor, did a double take at the spare tire, gestured vaguely, and slurred, "prob'ly not getting enough gas."

I sighed, and wheezed out, "No, electrical power -- not getting any juice, nothing!"  Then he peered around and finally found the battery, pointed at it, and said, "problem's the battery...  Your battery's no good.  All your electricity comes from the battery there."

Practically unable and largely unwilling to try to keep the contempt out of my tone, I did try to compensate a bit with my words:  "I know that, sir."  Then he looked at me, I think for the first time.  I told him we'd been looking for a phone.  He said there was one at the bar.  Then without pause he went on to say, "There's help here, but you gotta listen to get help.  We're all locals.  We help each other."

I lowered the hood slowly, to give him time to get his arm out of the way, and got back in the car, using what breath I had to mutter something about getting away from his cigarette.  That time, when I turned the key, the car started.  My soft serve vanilla cone was dripping in Doug's hand.  He had one napkin, and I used it, getting it soaked and stuck to my waffle cone.

I licked and slurped the ice cream into what I supposed was good enough shape to deal with as I drove, and pulled out onto the highway.  The ice cream had been too long neglected and was liquefying faster than I could lick it up.  I got drips down my shirt and on the steering wheel before I pulled off the road.  Doug jumped out, went to the hatch and brought back a roll of paper towels.  I got one of them stuck to my cone, too, and did a lot of wiping, slurping, picking and peeling before wrapping a fresh towel around my cone and pulling back onto the highway.

I had drips all down my front again before I'd put away the last of the ice cream, but Doug wiped them off for me as I drove.  We had some stuff to drop off at his dad's place:  the last two volumes of the Harry Potter series, and he had some stuff for us, but he wasn't home.  I knew where to find him, and when we got there he was ready to go  home, so we gave him a ride.  Finally, Doug and I got home.  Sitting there in the driveway beside Streak, we discussed a name for the new car.  Very quickly, we settled on "Blur."

 I made a quick call to Greyfox to tell him we'd arrived safely.  I think he took the news of our car troubles harder than we did.  I learned as a child that when one buys a used car one is buying someone else's car trouble.  Doug has had lots of troubles of various sorts in his life and just doesn't let much get to him at all.  Blur has no roof rack.  I will want to do some electrical work on him, exchange his battery with Streak's, and fix a few other things. 

In the plus column, all four doors and the hatch open and have weather stripping intact.  Streak's weather stripping  hangs loose.  In all the time we've owned him there have never been more than three doors that would open and in winter sometimes only one.  In Streak, return springs on the ignition switch and the hatch latch are broken.  Blur's work. 

I will miss having the roof rack.  I still need to get used to the higher RPM shift points and the manual choke in Blur.  I don't have a source for any more of the limited edition UNLOADED stickers, but that's balanced by the fact that Blur is tabula rasa for new bumper stickers whenever something worthwhile comes along.  Best of all, now Doug can go on learning to drive in Streak with no anxieties over the failing steering and drive train.  It all works out.