Okay, I’ve been a lousy blogger, again. I could bitch and moan about my health but that’s not what you’re here for. No you’re here hoping for a little humor, hoping for a little ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark day. Fair enough. Here it is, true story, swear to God. (Will that get me into Vegas?)
Last Friday a guy calls me up at the office. He tells me I need to take some information down and send it on to the people making his disability decision because this is going to speed it up. (But it won’t speed up a run-on sentence.) He tells me, hold your collective breaths, his brain tumor is making his ears ring. I wanted to laugh and say, ”Yours too? If that’s the best you’ve got let me tell you about mine. Then you can get a job.”
I didn’t say anything of the sort though. I took it down and sent it on. For all I know his is malignant and he’s watching the calendar. Mine is benign. It’s almost unbelievable that anything that causes so much pain is “benign.” The difference is that one will kill you, the other can just occasionally make you wish you were dead. Well that killed the fun right there. Sorry.
Okay, try again. Oh forget that, indulge me. Let me just get it over with. As you may have guessed, the benign tumor has been giving me fits lately. Last Saturday night it hurt me badly enough that I just sat on the bed and cried for about an hour. But it didn’t hurt me to the level I knew it could. It was kind of weird to be in that much pain, fearful of it getting worse, but still grateful it wasn’t any worse.
Ms. Pikachu was a trooper. As soon as it hit she got me my pills, opened them up, and asked how many I wanted. Then she left me alone because there was nothing else she could do except make it hurt more. She acted very well, very quickly. She has probably learned how to do that by watching her mom the Supernurse in action.
Today my knees started to hurt more than normal. A couple times my left one couldn’t bear my weight as I sat down and I just dropped the last few inches to the chair. I am not that old. I shouldn’t be acting this old. But that’s probably a pretty good sign I’m getting that old.
Earlier on that same Saturday I noticed the temperature was not rising on the car’s gauge. Stopped it, looked underneath and saw antifreeze running off the front of the engine. Gotta be the waterpump. Maybe a hose, but probably the waterpump. Put more anti-freeze in, got more anti-freeze.
We brought it to the mechanic to take a look at it. Eventually the wife got the call and it was one of those good news-bad news situations. The good news was that it wasn’t the waterpump. The bad news was that it was the headgasket. This is going to be Expensive, with a capital E and that rhymes with T and that stands for Trouble.
Our usual mechanic doesn’t do headgaskets. It turned out that the place that is going to do the body work for Ms. Nascar’s last adventure has a mechanic that does them. So we drove it over to hear what he had to say. He consulted his Mechanic’s Book of Wisdom and lowly muttered, “This will be expensive.” Well yeah, we kind of figured. Please cut to the specifics oh wizened one. “It has two heads. No use taking it apart and only doing one, then having the other soon fail, and having to take it apart again. $850”
Well alrighty then, when can we get it in? Monday? Well, alrighty then.
He called the wife later and said that upon consultation with the machine shop it would be $1200 instead. Did we say “Alrighty then” too quickly? Did we fail to grumble and grouse? Before calling my wife did he call his own and say, “JACKPOT!”
We will never know, but life is like that.
What I do know is that the CheapWife, excuse me, Frugal Wife will be calling the mechanic that our usual mechanic recommends and see if she gets the same price. Don’t look at me, I’ll be at work. I’ll be interviewing people who probably think my jaw has been wired shut and that I gimp around from some terrible injury. For any that inquire I’ll tell the husbands wide-eyed not to get their wives mad. I’ll tell the women it’s old pirate injuries, and growl “would ya like to look at me scars?”
What I also think is that the headgasket is probably failing because the engine overheated this past summer when the thermostat failed. I caught it pretty quickly, but overheated is overheated. When I changed the thermostat I paid a few bucks more for a thermostat that fails open. So when it fails, and they all do eventually, instead of the engine overheating it will just take a few more minutes to heat up. Considering the expense of a headgasket it would be money well-spent to pre-emptively put such a thermostat on your vehicle. That's my humble opinion.
I have a lot of stories to catch up on and I’ve run out of time tonight. I’ll post them to the blog in groups, leave them until I update again, and then move them to the correct day.


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