“The oil light flickered on in your car, Mom, just as it was stalling out.”
And so Richard drove an extra almost two hour commute time today to take her to work and then to his own office and later back while I took my car in. I haven’t driven it in a long time, and it felt very sluggish going those few blocks to the mechanic. I walked home and waited to hear.
The engine is fine.
The transmission is toast, and so is one axle. The car is an ’00 with 116k miles.
Stitches West is this weekend, the one time a year I need a minivan and the only reason we still have it: so that I can set up the ramp for the electric scooter.
You put a hundred fifty vendors of balls of yarn and thousands of people in one convention center with someone who had the connections between the balance and visual centers of the brain severed by a speeder, and you have the neurologist who looked at that five-day brain EEG and warned me, “You’re not epileptic yet–but you’re real. close.”
My balance is tactile and visual and when the visuals are on extreme overload and I’m trying to walk through it my brain feels like water droplets skittering across a smoking pan. Scooter. Period. Not worth the risk.
You can take the machine apart and put the pieces in the trunk of a car but the heaviest part still weighs 60 pounds; I wrote on Facebook, I can’t ask anyone to do that.
Jasmin says that Sam offered. I wrote back that I already had the manufacturing cream bought to make a chocolate torte in thanks.
And I’m quietly marveling over that: with no plans in mind, and certainly not with any idea of what was about to happen with the car, I had splurged and bought some at Milk Pail on Saturday. Because it just felt like I needed to be able to make chocolate tortes right now. It wouldn’t be anywhere near what I owe in thanks, given how much going to Stitches means to me and what his generosity does, too, but it’s a start.