Oops, missed last week

So, some of you may know that or car died a few weeks ago. Others of you know that we just got a new one. Heck, most of you reading this probably knew both, or if you didn't, now your do. Either way, what you probably don't know is the story of death and divine intervention that is:
The Epic of the Prius!
(part 1)
It began long ago, back in the early summer of 2012. I had gotten an interpreting assignment up in Heber, and the car we were using at the time threatened suicide whenever we went over 50, meaning making it up the canyon would be impossible. And so, a new car was necessitated. Long story short, We ended up getting a '97 Mazda 626 which we named Gilgamesh.
Ol'Gil served us well, apart from crappy alignment which made our tires wear out wicked fast, as well as suffering from poor compression, which made it seem like he was constantly running low on oil. Because of this, when he really was low, we figured he was crying wolf. That is, until the tapping started. It took us a while to get some oil to put in (details of which I'll spare you) but eventually, on the morning when we had that freezing rain storm, I dutifully went out and put oil in before I went to school. If the sounds that came from the engine after that were any indicator, that was a terrible idea. As soon as I started it up, it sounded like I had put a handful of gravel, an angry wasps nest, and a small but very aggressive honey badger inside the engine, and the gravel was winning. You know that face you make when you see a really fat person rolling out of McDonalds with a quarter pounder in each hand and 20 more hanging off the back of each arm? And then they get mauled by a tiger? You know, something so horrifically gruesome that you just can't get yourself to stop watching? That is the face I was making the entire drive. I mean, it literally sounded like there was a big toothy monster attempting to claw its way through my car.
Anyway, I made it pretty much the whole way to school, was ready to get off the exit, and Gilgamesh have one last shuddering, painful breath, and stalled for the third and final time. After calling assorted family members and none of them answering, my dad was eventually able to come pick me up, after, of course, a cop helped push me off the road with his car.
My brother called me back a little later and, after I explained the symptoms and described what happened, he said that we had, almost without a doubt, thrown a rod. For those of you who are vehicularly un-savvy, like me, throwing a rod means basically that a piston in the engine busts, locking up everything and ding a bunch of damage on the way. According to wikipedia, it's classified as a "catastrophic engine failure" and your car is pretty much done. We were able to go back later that night and tow it to my parents house, and there it sat for a week or so till we could figure out what to do with it.
What did we do? Well, tune in this Friday for the next installment of:
The Epic of the Prius!
(part 2)

Week Two. Ummm...

     The trouble with writing a blog every week is that sometimes, you just don't have anything you really feel impressed to write about.  I mean, stuff happened, don't get me wrong, but not really anything to monumental or impactful.  Then again, if monumental things happened every week, pretty soon monumental things wouldn't be very monumental.  Extraordinary depends entirely on context, so if extraordinary happens often enough it becomes ordinary.  It's like in The Incredibles - Syndrome's plan is to give everyone super-powers, so "if everyone's special, no one will be."  Kinda makes you appreciate the down times in life, in my opinion.
     I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a shadowy figure in the past; shadowing because of a poor memory, not because we talked in a dark alleyway.  Anyway, I was complaining about how depressing watching the news can be, seeing all the horrible things happening in the world like wars and murders and natural disasters and the economy plummeting and society going to pot, et cetera.  They said "I'm grateful that the news shows all the bad stuff going on."
Wait, what?  You like watching awful things happen to random people?  You sadist.
"No seriously, think about it.  If all the news reported was the good things, like some guy picking up a check for someone or little Timmy walking his grandma across the street, that would mean that those acts of kindness had become exceptional while rape and murder turned commonplace.  The very fact that disasters are reported on the news shows the rarity of them, as well as the fact that we as humans are still compassionate beings."
     While I don't think there's going to be a shift to entirely optimistic reporting, much less any slowing in the amount of awful events occurring around the globe, I do think it's a good point.  Focus on the positive, surely, but be a source of it as well.  That way, when things to take a turn for the worse (or keep turning, as the case may be) good things will still be the norm, and kindness will be a daily occurrence.
     Hey, not a bad post after all :)