Monday, March 13, 2006

Garrett + Car News = Everyone Falling Asleep

Speaking of crazy stuff, I'm going out tomorrow to get about 12 boxes of comics that this guy is giving away for free. I have NO idea what they are, but at the very least it'll give Garrett some reading material until he's 9.

I haven't posted as much as I've wanted to lately. I worked evenings last week which, coupled with Garrett's insistance to be awake at ungodly hours of the morning and my having to chase him around until he went to the babysitter in the afternoon, left me falling asleep at the keyboard most nights after work last week. I'm a little more with it tonight (the coffee I drank at 8:30pm on the way home from teaching a course probably won't help me sleep...) so here we go, just in case it's another 4 days between posts.

Garrett has been VERY chatty lately. He is either singing his brains out all day or mimicing everybody around him. He's getting quite the vocabulary, although he keeps calling ears eyes. Wierd.

I had to take my car in to get the gear shifter solonoid replaced today. I don't know if I've mentioned it but my car wouldn't shift out of Park into Drive (or Reverse) for the last few weeks. Well, it would eventually shift into gear, but I had a couple times where I had to sit there fighting with the shifter for upwards of 20 minutes. This meant that I was loathe to drive anywhere besides work unless I had to, just in case that was the time when it would stop shifting into gear at all.

I finally got the part replaced today and is it ever smooooth. I can really tell the difference between the old shifter and the new one. The old one really had a lot of grinding that it had to do to get in gear. This one doesn't. (Hooray for eloquence!) The upside of the whole thing is that the repairs came in over $200 less than I expected them to be, which was nice. Hopefully this was the last thing that I'll need to get fixed on my car for a while.

I went for a good 5 years with basic maintenance and a bit of brake work. Since Christmas, I've spent far too much time getting things looked at, although the big repair (leaky head and air gaskets) were covered by warranty and this gear shifter thing was just wierd. I still love my little plastic car, although I do need some new tires... Sigh.

Now that we're on this topic of car repairs and such, my wiper blades essentially crumbled off my car last week as well. So I went out and picked up a couple of those funky Reflex blades from Canadian Tire and they are great. Thankfully I had a huge wad of Canadian Tire money that my dad had given me a couple years ago (Thanks Dad!) so I only really had to pay for one blade. It's so nice to be able to wipe my windows and not have streaks.

I think that's about it for now. I'm going to go find something to read or play or watch as I'm still rather jazzed on coffee. I'm going over to a friend's friend's place tomorrow with Garrett to play my first game of D&D in many a long year. Garrett is going to come along and learn how to make a saving throw against vegetables. Or play with the little boy who lives down the lane. One of the two.

At least one of my days off will be fun. Today's day off was a combination of teaching my driver improvement course and waiting for car repairs to be finished. I did hit the comic shop though, which netted me a few titles I'd been looking for and a bevy of graphic novels to read. A bevy, I tell you!

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