Dude, where’s my car? (chapter 2)

Took a while to locate my loverly little beastie. Turns out that the collision shop was NOT closed this week (just yesterday but we expected that). It is just running a skeleton crew, certainly enough people to accept payment for a paint job and release a vee-hickle. However, they were still waiting for parts this morning so the Ninja wasn’t ready until I dunno, sometime in the afternoon, so there must’ve been someone there to do that.

I’m pretty impressed with my Ninja’s new paint job and when the GG told me they fixed all of the dents, I was like, “Whaaaaa? What dents? I didn’t run into anybody.” Certainly if you looked at the Ninja pre paint job, you didn’t see big dents. But it is a 9-year-old vee-hickle and “dent” in this case means car door dings and tree branch falling dings and KW putting “stuff” on the top of the trunk dings, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Of COURSE they had to smooth out the DENTS to repaint the car! So here it is in all of its glory. Er, maybe we need to defrog the headlamps…

I was thinking about faaaaarworks today and how people love or hate them. I don’t remember anyone hating them when I was a kid. We loved them. My dad was a WWII vet and they didn’t freak him out but that could well have something to do with the fact that he spent his service time rattling around the American southwest teaching other people to fly planes. He was about to get sent over to the South Pacific when we dropped The Bomb and he spent the rest of his life as a “successful failure” (much like his daughter, aka yer fav-o-rite blahgger, both of us in the banking industry if that makes any sense). I think he would be proud of me working at what I do even though he might not exactly understand it! (I hope no one ever decides to drop/lob/whatever a nuclear bomb anywhere on earth ever again.)

Last night, the typical neighborhood fireworks kind of lulled me to sleep, if you can believe that. I have to remember a long ago incident though. One that scared the bejeebus outta me. It was the summer before Lizard Breath entered kindergarten (or maybe it was even 1st grade) and she and Mouse and the GG were safely tucked in, snoozing in their bedrooms while moom had some moom-alone time in the back room. It wasn’t 4th of July but there had been some “explosions” off and on for a few weeks. All of a sudden KABOOM. A large explosion from the school yard. I didn’t know what it was. I high-tailed it into the bedroom. The GG hadn’t heard it.

I kind of forgot about the Big Bang over the summer and then, days before school started, I came home from my childhood career and was processing laundry and I could hear people having fun over in the schoolyard and it was still light out and all of a sudden… KABOOM. Alas, this time the KABOOM was followed quickly by “call the ambulance”, followed shortly by sirens. Amazing to me now to think how fast 911 got called back in an age when NO ONE had a cell phone!

What happened? A 20-year-old kid and his friends had been experimenting with making “bombs” by putting black powder into gas cylinders. They were not bad kids. They were trying to blow up the old tire playground structure over there and they carefully aimed the bomb so that it would not hit the kids playing baseball quite a way past the structure. Alas. The bomb exploded prematurely and almost killed one of the girls in the group. I haven’t heard anything about her in a long time but last I knew, she was still partially paralyzed.

One Response to “Dude, where’s my car? (chapter 2)”

  1. Margaret Says:

    I hate those bomb type fireworks for that reason. Having pets is also tricky when it’s so noisy and chaotic. Mari seemed to do OK, being a cat, but dogs don’t always fare so well.