Things That Are Annoying But Not Really...

...in the big scheme of things:

1. When you're driving and you hit a bump and your glovebox pops open. Luckily LA roads are well maintained so only happens every couple of minutes.
2. When you're driving and you hit a bump and your glovebox pops open and your A/C goes on. All by itself. Cool car trick or shitty car? You decide. I know what I think...
3. Buckets and cats pooping inside. I may have beaten this horse to death...but I'm still annoyed about it
4. Having spontaneous A/C in your car but none in your house.
5. Dogs upstairs that bark when you blink. Which technically I wouldn't mind since they would be great when intruders were around but they are (a) Unable to distinguish between intruders and people who live there that are quietly sitting on the couch occasionally blinking and (b) the size of an eggplant. 
6. When you have been existing on nothing but vegetables and pickles for months and no one has noticed. Other than your neighbor who apparently was watching you stand on a stool outside your window while fixing a bucket attached to a screen to prevent the upstairs A/C unit from getting the carpet wet on your cats entry mode which was making him poop inside. Good to know that's my environment for shining...
7. Having a kettlebell sit in your living room and look accusingly at you. Which is not really fair since I have been dusting it. Now I drape a cloth over it so it can't make me feel guilty. I think it wants me to use it whereas I like it more as decor.
8. Not winning the lottery. Actually in the big scheme of things, this is more than annoying. It's affecting how I want to live my life.

Cars - And On To The Next!

So I bought my first car. All by myself. A Ford Laser Sport Hatchback, 1984, I think. In bright red. With my student loan money which is probably illegal but since my year was the first year of student loans, there were no rules! And now we all still owe the government a lot of money. Except me, I just paid mine off. Goodbye retirement.

Anyway, let’s back off from the bitterness. I bought the car from a boy racer who met me at a petrol station for the exchange. I know there was paperwork involved, we both signed a napkin stating that I was buying the car for $5,000* and he was selling it and he’d left the ownership papers in the glovebox. Sort of how we do our taxes in New Zealand. Just write down on a bit of paper what you think you earned and owe and drop it off to the IRD when you feel like it. None of this, taxes must be done and posted to the IRS by April 15th or you will be killed, business.

This was a boy racer, who apparently didn’t realize that a hatchback is not really a boy racing kind of car but maybe he didn’t know because the Fast and the Furious hadn’t come out yet. And I wasn’t going to tell him, I was too busy worrying about how negotiating absolutely nothing out of the deal would be impacted by giving him comments like that. So, I ended up with a car that had Tweeters in the front** and in the back, 4 sub woofers bolted into the piece that is supposed to lift up when you open the hatch but no longer did.  Meaning you could hardly slide anything into the boot (trunk) and had to go in through the back seats. I knew nothing about woofing and tweeting, I just knew my car had a heartbeat all of its own and people would turn and look when I drove along. Which is not my thing at all but I really had no clue on how to control the bass. 

So, now I have my brand new car - only problem is I'm on the other side of town and I need to drive it home.  And it's a manual (stick shift***).  And I've never driven one before.  Can't be that hard.  I know when the engine starts to roar, you're supposed to change gears.  I did not know about that pedally thing you're supposed to push down at the same time as you move the sticky thing.  Picked that up real fast.  Did not entirely master the moving smoothly through the gears piece.  Not until 4 years later.  I sweated a lot on that drive home.  Mostly on a hill where I sat at the lights for 4 rounds with people tooting (beeping) at me, me revving the engine and trying to make it go forward and up but just going a lot of backward and down. In the end, I put on my hazard lights, took a time out and cried while the cars drove round me and gave me the finger (flipped me the bird).  Eventually, I took a running leap at the hill and was up and over.  Got back to my flat (apartment) and the car stayed in the driveway for 3 days.  I was traumatised (traumatized).

But, I got back on the horse**** and figured it out.  There was a lot of riding the clutch but that would become someone else's problem later on.

Did I mention that it had these sporty spotlights?  For a while.  Sometimes when you are driving in the rain and you are stopped at the lights, your foot will slip and you will be in gear and the car will hop forward into the next car.  And then one of your lights will face down.  And the wires will fall out.  And there will be a person waiting at the bus stop, yelling "I saw it.  I'll be a witness". And you can't drive over him because he is intellectually disabled and just trying to be a good citizen*****.

This car would actually be the bane of my life, through no fault of it's own.  But wait, there's more.  Just not today.

*I actually think this is what I paid for it which means I paid way too much, I don’t even think I negotiated at all. Which is why I now work as a negotiator and only ever use the word “no”.
**I keep wanting to write Twitters which now seems a much more common word than Tweeters. And I don’t really ever twitter my tweets much.
***I had no idea how much translating from New Zealand to American was involved when talking about cars.  Apologies to my South Korean and Malaysian readers (up to 23 - what?).  All I know is - bbo bbo and kentang.  Neither of which has anything to do with cars unless your are kissing a potato in one.
****Which was good that I had a horse since I didn't want to drive my car.
*****But you want to.  Just a little bit.