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accepting news of my defeat
Monday, April 28 2008
It was a consistently rainy day, completely unsuited for either work on the continued disassembly of the hatchback husk or the fixing of problems with the black hatchback. It was a day better suited to paperwork and email. We made a list of complaints about the new car and sent this to the guy we'd bought it from. The guy had an excellent Ebay rating, so I figured he'd do what he could to make us happy. In the end, though, he just made us feel foolish by pointing out a line in his description where he'd said "the cluster plays games." We hadn't known what "the cluster" was when we'd read that; evidently that's the term used to describe the speedometer/odometer/check engine light/etc/etc readout. The cluster is so many things and such a large part of our problem with the car that this line had the effect of covering his ass while simultaneously not alerting us to what might be wrong. "Plays games" is hardly a technical or detailed description, but instead of shrugging (as we had), we should have, I suppose, asked before bidding (as this dude claims others had done). In any case it doesn't really matter since we had a working replacement. (Although now our car has 178 thousand miles on the odometer.)
This afternoon I drove into Kingston to try to register the car but was told the paperwork hadn't been filled out correctly. There are few experiences in everyday middle class/middle age/middle brow/Mid Hudson existence quite as dispiriting as driving somewhere to have mandatory automobile business taken care of and, for whatever reason, failing in that goal. This seems to happen to me a lot, partly because I'm vaguely autistic and partly because I'm nowhere near as pushy as, say, my wife Gretchen. I usually accept news of my defeat without argument, believing argument will only uselessly prolong a hopeless ordeal. I suspect, though, that Gretchen occasionally argues her way from failure to success. (Our first kiss back in 1988 followed a lawyerly argument in which Gretchen, who was not then my girlfriend, convinced me that I'd already cheated against my then-girlfriend just by wanting to kiss someone else.) The only saving grace related to today's failed automobile paperwork expedition is rooted in the fact that the Ulster County DMV is perhaps the fastest, most efficient DMV in the entire state.
I had more fun melting glass this evening. I melted bottles and got them to stick together at their screw ends and when they inevitably cracked I'd go crazy with the torch, using pliers to bend the glass as if it was cardboard. But it seemed I couldn't generate quite enough heat with a MAPP gas torch to melt more than a fraction of a teaspoon of glass at a time. I also had trouble getting the glass to slowly cool back down to room temperature (anneal) without shattering. I thought maybe I should make a box full of glass wool to throw fabricated pieces into so they would be able to cool away from the frigid drafts of a normal working environment.
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