Letters to Holly

Tuesday, April 20

Mixed Messages


I say this is a vague warning light. My car has it. Your car has it. When it lighted Friday afternoon, I didn't know what it was trying to tell me. I thought it might be the battery. I had been warned the battery was low during my last check-up. It came on about 20 miles from home, and I worried the car would die on me. And I didn't want to ask Your Sister to curl up in the Nissan to fetch me. I did get to town and pulled into a car shop to check the owner's manual. There I found this light has two meanings:
1) the brakes are gone; or
2) the tires are low.

The brakes felt fine, and I drove home (just over a mile away) and inspected the tires. The rear left tires was pudding. I've lost a couple of tires this way since moving from South Carolina. I'd say I've had three flats in six years, and that seems like a cornucopia. I put on the spare tire only after taking a hammer to the wrench to dislodge the lugnuts. The next morning, I drove to our favorite local tire place -- a sign of bad tire luck is that we have a favorite tire place -- and found it closed. On a Saturday morning, no less. This hamlet's service businesses are insane. The other tire place fixed me up within a half hour using a $5 tire patch. The dealership said a tire fix done somewhere else doesn't void the warranty. Double bonus.

After polishing off the last inked page, Your Sister demanded I celebrate with beer. We got an outdoor table at the pub, and I ordered a Bass. It arrived in a Samuel Adams glass, and I thought that name looked awfully good. She agreed. But a good friend of hers also as a boy named Sam, and we're trying to avoid that kind of parallelism.

Your Sister had quite the haul from the Sunday baby shower. We now have three copies of Goodnight Moon, and I got the baby owner manual book I've wanted for a few months. My baby knowledge is nil. The majority of my statements in the second half of 2010 will be "you can't do that? really?"

The nursery is filling up quickly, and both mothers had to be told that we can't accept a furniture suite. A crib and changing station, yes. But a chest of drawers will not fit, not with the wall of shelves we intend to keep and use. This upset Your Mother, who thought she could fix the problem by giving us one from her house, misunderstanding that we don't have room for ANY extra furniture piece. Now she's worried we won't have adequate storage space in the room. I called My Mom to warn her she may get a confused, frantic call from Your Mom about nursery furniture. And she wanted to know, foremost, if we had named the baby yet.

No. No, mom. Not yet.

Picture of the Day
To the Book Wheel!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i'm being selfish. here i am getting this medical education with all of these eponymous disease names, and not sharing the very best of them with you and your great-with-child wife.
a selection of today's offerings:
Baker's Cyst
Lesch Nyhan
McArdle
Raynaud
Marfan
Sjorgen Syndrome (the o gets an umlaut)
Bence Jones (those are a type of protein in pee!)
Von Hippel Lindau
-and more to come as I review for boards. More fodder for my last name as first name scheme.

Gregory said...

Baker has potential. That's also the street where Sherlock Holmes lived, and we know a new baby named Holmes.

Also, every time I call to him, I can start singing the Convoy song.