Sunday, January 24, 2010

About a screw or two

I'd like to introduce a new acronym, by way of a brief boring story. The acronym is NVCAA, and it stands for Not Very Cute At All. Now, to illustrate this acronym's use... if there's one thing about my Civic that's just Not Very Cute At All, it would be the air filter screws. Here's the story.

My car needed a new air filter. So, one day when I finally remembered, I stopped by NAPA and picked up a nice dandy new one.

Now after my dad's demo, I knew that changing the air filter would be a piece of cake. Unfortunately, if you work during winter, there's usually not much light left outside work hours to do your car maintenance. So that's when you borrow a friend's handy lantern and handy screwdriver set, go out in the cold wind and pop your hood to do the job in the dark. By the way, this screwdriver is one of those one-size-fits-all - one "driver" with a nice selection of screw "heads" you can pop in, depending on what type you need. This is an important detail in the story, so please take note.

I got two screws nicely loosened, only to find that the third was, yes, nicely rusted and the screwhead rapidly losing its distinct insignia. So I screwed 'em all back down with rapidly numbing fingers.

At my dad's suggestion, next day after work I bought some WD-40. Yes, I did find it all by myself in WalMart, thanks for asking!

Enter Saturday. Sharon applies WD-40 before taking a walk. Returns from walk to happily set about unscrewing all three screws, including the third now de-rusted one, which doesn't take to the screwdriver well but cooperates with pliers.

Time to pull off the air filter, except, it doesn't pull off. Darkness is now descending. Thoroughly puzzled, I dash off to fetch the lantern and discover a fourth screw, and yep, this one is nicely rusted too. Dash off to fetch the WD-40. Apply liberally. Sigh. Remove all the tools, take a last look around to make sure I've got 'em all before dumping the hood. Oh wait! Maybe I should screw down the air filter again, since I'm obviously not going to get this done today. So I twist 'n screw down two of them. I reposition for the third, only to find that the eject-able Phillips screw head has quite disappeared, without even a clatter. I hunt around, no success. Find the next-sized Phillips and finish the job.

Sunday morning dawns very wet and muddy, and daylight does not reveal the missing screwdriver head. And so, I drove off to church, wondering if that piece of metal was sitting under my hood somewhere - if it would melt, or maybe get lodged in the engine and explode my car. Unlikely, but these are the things that keep me up at night and keep me alert on the road.

To be continued... But hopefully that's enough to illustrate why air filter screws are NVCAA.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

How did it come to this?

How did the world move on from blogging? That is, blogging in the sense of individuals blogging as a means of communicating to their family and friends.

The only ones who have survived are the entertaining writers, like my mother. Her blog will never die as long as the Internet lasts to host it!

And the only other ones are the stubborn ones, like me, who don't necessarily write anything worth keeping a blog for sharing, but who hang onto their blogs just the same, maybe because they're second-oldest children and they have that instinct to... umm... to be stubborn.

Facebook versus blogs. Humm. I refuse to say anything that people will shoot down with sniper fire. Facebook is a different landscape than blogging. It seems much more adapted to communication. You can post your immediate thought... you can ask a friend a question... you can invite people here or send them to read that... you can have the nearest thing to a live chat that isn't. A blog is more static. Where you think about what you want to say, you say as little or as much as you like, but regardless, you're making a post out of it, a post that will sit there for at least a day if not for weeks (that's for you blogging slackers) before it gets replaced by anything else. It doesn't zoom down a home page till it's buried beneath a kajillion other thoughts within two hours.

Well, I need to go do the dishes. Some things in life haven't changed hardly one degree in one hundred years.