The Gurly Life

Missed connections

Is there a Craig's List section for missed connections for cars? Because Pixie the Prius

Would like to go out on a date with this dude

But only if he's being ironic.

Caturday

Saturday began lazily, as Saturdays usually do for me. No matter what else I have planned for the weekend, I reserve the few hours before yoga, which begins at 11:30, to just being lazy. I usually wake up early-ish, have breakfast in bed, and either read or watch a movie on DVD. Yes, I still have DVD, I have not made the move to Blu Ray yet. And I have resolved not to buy any more movies ever because I'm sure that as soon as I decide to buy even one movie on Blu Ray, they will come out with some new technology, and Blu Ray will be phased out. Screw that, I'm done. Until the next Kevin James movie. What? I love him.

Yoga was awesome, as usual. Sometimes I'll do a yoga class and I will be sore in places I find surprising. Yesterday I was sore in my shoulder blades. I guess I finally worked those bad boys. Maybe one day I can try a level 2-3 class.

After yoga I drove to Whittier to hang out with my friend Blythe. Blythe and I have been friends since we met in federal district court. During my 3L, I spent one semester externing for a federal district court judge, the Honorable Ronald S.W. Lew, and Blythe was one of his law clerks. The other law clerk was Melanie, and Joe was the second extern. We had a great time working together, and laughed a lot. We are all still friends, even though Melanie and Joe have moved away. The Judge does a law clerk/extern reunion dinner every year, and this year will also be his 70th birthday. A video is being edited together, and Blythe and I couldn't make it to the official taping, so we did a little video together to send in to the videographer, who will no doubt cry from the lameness and maybe use 5-10 seconds of what we send in.

We made several attempts, 3 of which we're sending in and 1 of which we're not. Blythe and I are not exactly movie star materials, and we entertained ourselves by our own lameness. Here's some of the lameness.

In the evening I went to my friend Francesca's 40th birthday gathering. I joined her and a few other great people at La Cachette in Santa Monica. Proceeds from a small silent auction and from bar sales went to the Talbert Family Foundation. This nonprofit's mission is to assist families with children who have cancer and other serious illnesses. Please consider making a donation to this worthy cause. And yes, I donate to about 17 different charities, not including all the friends and co-workers miscellaneous foundations.  And yes, I am asking you to donate to this one, too.

We all got dressed up for this one, and looked lovely. I took pictures with my new iPhone 4. They're not nearly the quality I like, but the phone fit in my tiny purse so that's what worked. Here are some of the pics.

Francesca, the birthday girl, and me.

Dave, Francesca's husband, toasting Francesca's birthday.

With Natalie.

With Fatima.

Meaghan and Adam. You can see part of the baby carriage behind them. They showed up with their 5 week old daughter, who slept through the whole thing.

My good friend Ian.

Francesca and Meaghan.

I drove home after 11pm, SO LATE!, so I turned up the music. At one point I noticed that I had Lady Gaga going so loud that my car was doing the bass vibration thing - an incredibly nerdy thing, as I drive a Prius. But then, I was out till practically dawn, so I thought the hell with it, I'm going to be an obnoxious Prius driver. Until, of course, I got to my neighborhood, when I turned down the music because disturbing people at night is rude, thus fizzling out my bad girl streak.

I was almost killed!

Ok not really, but I could have died. This morning I left for work in Pixie the Prius and as I pulled into traffic I had a sneezing fit. And by sneezing fit I mean I sneezed something like 10 times in a row. This only took about a minute, but you know in a minute much damage can be done.

Here's what I learned about sneezing and driving.

Have you noticed how when you sneeze your eyes shut tightly? Someone told me that it's because the air is forced out of your lungs so hard (200 miles an hour, I hear), that if you don't shut your eyes tightly, they will pop right out of your head and simply dangle off your face by the optic nerve. I have no idea how true this is, but the image stuck with me and every time I sneeze I have this vision. I also wonder whether I would still be able to see, except it would be all weird and I'd see my feet or my lap (depending on whether I was sitting or standing) and whether my 3D vision would be all shot to hell and I would just get two separate images. I mean at some point the 3D vision would no longer work, especially if one eye went all googly and started swivelling in a different direction. Right?

The other thing about sneezing is that your body (or is just me?) kind of convulses, like a giant involuntary spasm of every muscle in my body. When I sneeze once or twice it's not a big deal, but anyone who's had a sneezing fit will tell you how exhausting it is. It might be more accurate to say that I will tell you how exhausted I am after a sneezing fit.

What seems to happen when I keep sneezing is that the giant spasms build on each other. My body hasn't quite recovered from the first sneeze, when the second hits, then the third, and so on. So the spasms become more intense and uncontrolled.

What I further discovered this morning is that if I'm having a sneezing fit while I'm driving, strange things happen like I start to smack my forehead against the wheel, sudden acceleration, and random turns of the wheel, directly into traffic, of course. It did occur to me to pull over, but as I said this all took less than a minute, and by the time I had the thought to do that it was over.

Point is, I could have died. I didn't, but I could have.

The trunk of my car

This is what the trunk of Pixie the Prius looks like right now.

I have 2 yoga mats, a yoga towel, severable recyclable shopping bags, a 30lbs tub of kitty litter, a container with a picnic blanket, a baseball cap, a Dodgers blanky, a couple of makeshift dog leashes (for the occasional dog I end up rescuing off the street), a David Letterman sweatshirt, an umbrella (which I use maybe less often than the makeshift leashes), and a couple of "it fits, it ships" US Post Office boxes. Often my tripod will be in there, too.

As an aside, I almost tidied up before taking this picture. I thought if I stuffed the bags inside each other and folded them properly, it would make the trunk much tidier looking. But having decided to reveal my mini hoarding corner, I cleaned up after I took the picture instead.

I used to look at people's packed trunks and think, really, it's not that hard to keep your trunk clean. Well, it turns out I was right, it's not that hard. But the point is not whether it's easy, the point is, is there any point to it? The inside of my car is pretty clean. I have a Thomas Guide in there (really, I do, though I can't think the last time I used it), and maybe a roll of toilet paper (you never know), but other than that it's passenger-ready.

The trunk on the other hand seems like the perfect mobile mini-storage space to me. Why take the yoga mat out of there when I have to bring it with me every single time I go to yoga, which happens to be several times a week? The box with the picnic blankets and various and sundry bits is in there precisely for those times I go somewhere picnic-y and I forget a towel to sit on, my hat, or what have you. The leashes - well, that's self-explanatory. The kitty litter is temporary - it's just that it's heavy and I always wait till the last possible minute to bring it upstairs because I hate to carry the thing. The recyclable bags: again, why take them out of the car, when I only ever use them when I go shopping in my car? And so on.

You might say: if you were a better woman, and perfectly organized as good women should be, you would have a place for everything and everything in its place, and you would take your yoga mat from your closet each and every time you go to yoga class and return it to the closet when you get home. And you would not forget your hat or your picnic blanket or your umbrella when you might need it.

Alas, I fall short of the good woman in more ways than I can count, so I ask myself, why should I keep the trunk of my car always perfectly empty and clear? And I can't think of a single good reason.

Merry Christmas!

This was inspired by the SUV I saw driving around with a big menorah on the roof during Chanukah. Festive, no?

This should get any straggler into the holiday spirit.

In the land of the blind, Captain Obvious is the one-eyed king

Today I dropped off the car to get its regularly scheduled maintenance. I mentioned to the service guy, Mitch, that just last week I had felt my front left wheel wobble a little as I was turning right at high speeds. No, I didn't screech around a corner on two wheels, I was on a freeway that bent to the right and as I followed it at 76mph (what? it's only 11mph above the limit, and I was the slowest car, I swear) the wheel weebled wobbled for a few seconds.

A few hours later, Mitch called me with an update.

Mitch: Hello, Ms. Gerli, this is Mitch.
Me: Hi there, is the car all done?
Mitch: Yes, I'm all done. About that wheel wobbling, did your car have an accident?
Me: Yes, it did, soon after I bought it. [In my head, I'm all, wait, I thought he said he was done. Does this mean he's not done? Is there something wrong with the car? OHMYGOD two years later I find out that the work the body shop did was not good and now I have to pay money to get it done right, and then I'll have to go back there and haggle with them to redo it or pay for it, and then I'll need a rental oh god I fucking hate rentals, I always end up backing them up into some pole damn it seriously after all this time NOW THIS PROBLEM COMES UP WHAT. THE.FUCK!]
Mitch: Yeah, the bolts that hold up the undercarriage [or something] weren't tightened properly so that's why the wheel was wobbling. Maybe they just got loose or something. Anyway, I tightened them for you...
Me: Ok. So what else needs to be done? Is anything wrong with the work they did?
Mitch: Oh no, everything is fine. The wheel won't wobble anymore. I just wanted to tell you that I had tightened the bolts for you, because they were loose.
Me: [?? That's it? Loose bolts? Nothing else? That seems almost too good to be true.] Ah. Ok. Well ... thank you very much for that, for tightening the bolts for me, that's terrific. I just need to pick up the car, then?
Mitch: Yes, it's ready for you.

At the time, I thought it was weird that he would call just to tell me he had tightened some bolts for me, but now I think maybe I'm the weird one.

In other news, it took me most of the day to figure out that that awful rotting garbage smell pervading my condo was coming from the garbage.

Convertible pup

Proof

Every time I fill the gas tank on Pixie the Prius, I zero out the MPG's to keep an eye out on my gas consumption. So far, so good.

Umph.

Yesterday I took in my car for its 40,000 mile service. I take good care of my cars. I figure, pay a little bit now, don't have to pay massive amounts of money to replace the engine when it burns out because I haven't replaced the oil, or drive into a tree because one of the wheels falls off. Granted, likelihood of either of those happening is not very high, but you get the idea.

I got a call from the dealership to tell me that everything looks good, but that there is some carbon build-up in the fuel injector system* and I should get it flushed. You know, that just sounds like baloney. Maybe I'm wrong, but I kept asking what the disadvantage would be of having carbon build-up, and I did not get a satisfactory answer. The answer was along the lines of "You don't want carbon to get built up." Upon asking why not, what would happen, the answer was that the carbon would build up more. Finally I got some vague answer about fuel efficiency, but I keep an eye on my fuel consumption and I've been averaging 54mpg's for a while. I am not worried about fuel efficiency just yet. When I drop below 50mpg, then I'll get the fuel injector flushy thingy.

So I said thanks, but no thanks. The helpful service guy said he would make a note of the carbon buildup on my invoice. He did not. Can't be that important if he forgot about it the second he told me about it, right? RIGHT?

*Don't ask me what a fuel injector system is, or what it does, because all I can tell you is that it injects fuel, and that sounds like it could be useful.

Oops.

Recently one of the cities I work with had a Lunar New Year parade. At this parade, like most parades, the council members rode in convertible hot rods or antique cars. One of the council members rode in this car, and no one noticed this on the back of it until later:

 

Eh-hem.