Comma Dot Comma

The graphic is a little messy. The movie is 40 Year Old Virgin, and the movie status is Very Long Wait.

Wow, life is feeling busy. Last night I stayed up late thinking up sixty reasons why the Mister should finish his dissertation by April 6th. I put them in a little book and illustrated them. It makes me sound like a sweet little wife, I know, but I didn’t think of the idea– it was commissioned by the Mister.

So far I’ve only come up with 42. It really got difficult after the first 30. I cut a picture of a red Dust Devil out of a department store ad. A similar item has been waiting for us in “storage” (if by “storage” you mean indefinitely borrowed by a sister) in Oregon for five years. I wrote,

TODAY’S MOTIVATOR:

You will be reunited with the vacuum cleaner

I wonder if the Mister will read the motivator and decide to spend that day eating ice cream and throwing things off of overpasses. Wouldn’t surprise me. You win some, you lose some.

READER INPUT DAY:

If you have any ideas for the motivation book lemme know. Keep in mind, all the obvious ones have been used. Including free time, a real job, vacation, outdoor stuff, food, money, and the satisfaction of a job well done.

The mister has complained about the length of my blog news cycle. There tends to be about a week’s delay in Happenings and when I announce them. But I have to wait until all the chips fall! But now, without further ado, the Automobile! Thanks for all your previous advice, folks.

Last Saturday we bought us a 1996 Toyota Corolla with 90,000 miles on it. On Friday, The Mister had gone to check out various “private seller” cars for sale. He would call these cell phones, and the guys on the other end would say things like, “Meet me at the CVS off of York road. The car is there.” (Yes, THAT CVS. The one where the drug dealers hang out.)

The Mister would say when he got there, “Why are you selling this car for higher than its Blue Book value?” and “You listed this as good condition, but to me it looks fair.” To which the parking lot guy would invariably say that the stated price was actually an excellent deal and he wasn’t budging. “Let me be honest with you,” he’d say, and lie through his teeth. “This car has never needed a single repair even though it is ten years old! The only reason I’m selling it is because my teenage daughter doesn’t like the color!”

So it was a relief to find the listing for the Toyota, and meet an ordinary working person in front of his house, and get the maintenace records and take the car for a test drive, and have him offer a lower but still reasonable price and throw in a pair of new tires he had sitting around, primarily because he took a shine to us. He drove the car to our house himself and in general oozed friendly, enthusiastic trustworthiness. It almost seemed too good to be true. I wonder if maybe he had trouble selling it because of the piles of papers and the giant teddy bear filling up the back seats.

We were pretty sure we got a great deal, but I didn’t want to say so until we got the car inspected. Our nice mechanics put on the new tires and replaced some belts and gave us the thumbs up and the coveted yellow “pass” paper!

Woohoo! couldn’t have been easier, really. The only problems were that car apparently hadn’t been cleaned out for five years or so (yay for coin operated industrial strength gas station vacuums), and the very prominent bumper sticker, which read “secular jews of baltimore.org”

Our last car had a Christian fish on it from the previous owner. We left it on there despite our suspicions that the Mazda was not born again. “Close enough,” we figured. This bumper sticker was a little different since it did not correspond to our status in any particular. Not secular, not jewish, not from Baltimore or planning to stay here, not organized. We spent a week falsely advertising ourselves to Maryland traffic. But The Mister came through again, with a little elbow grease, some solvent, and a scraper! Now we are unidentifiable. And that’s the way we like it.

First, a comment on the title of some email spam I got yesterday, telling me I could generate “more sperm than there is water in the ocean.” I have never generated a sperm in my life; to go from zero to an ocean’s worth? Remarkable! But what I noticed about this sweet little hyperbole was the noun problem. Sperm is countable; water is not countable, making the comparison moot. Actually, now I’m confusing myself. Because you can’t put an “s” on the end of “sperm” (believe me, I tried!) indicating that it is non-count. And yet you could certainly count them if you had a big enough magnifying glass. What’s wrong with this language! I feel sad that English is taking over the world. I can’t imagine having to learn it from scratch.

Speaking of which, time for a weigh-in from my favorite Netflix reviewer. He is going to tell us about Million Dollar Baby, gender roles, and eating your own food. He gave the movie two stars.

This movie of the boxing woman makes me to feel for the confusion. Is not the boxing for the man? Why would the pretty woman desire to punches and haver her attractiveness to put in danger with nose breaking? Also, it make me to wonder regarding her eating of food remaining on plate of diners who consume food in her restaurant. If she is the business owner, why cannot she feed herself with fresh food? This was too much confusing for me. And I don’t like to see the womans hitting to one another.

I agree with him on the last point. I don’t like to watch anybody hit each other, except Mohammed Ali, because he makes it look like it’s not even hitting.