MMWUC for May 26, 2008

One hundred and twenty-nine days.

Holidays can screw up your sense of what day it is. I knew without consciously realizing it that it was Monday as I drove to pick up two pick-up trucks worth of oak from a fallen tree at a friend's house. Still have to split it, but I'm sure there will be a 50 degree morning sometime soon. (He snickers at his own thought knowing full well that the 50s are not a number on thermometers in the South in the June, July, and August.)

In the afternoon, I went to the concrete graveyard near me to pilfer a load of concrete slabs from some broken sidewalk that met the sledgehammers blows without dignity. It's for the ever larger garden wall. Loaded up, I started my Ford Explorer and drove toward home, a mere four miles away, only to find smoke rising within the car. Oh great, now my car's on fire in the middle of nowhere. Long story short, I stopped the car and let it air out and flagged some guy on a bike who happened to have a cell phone (Yes, I one of the great unwashed without a cell phone.) Called brother-in-law, who is not familiar with the area, to get my wife and come to my stated location. It was a long wait. He went to our house, but couldn't find her. Went home. Never really understood this part. Changed cars. Came back to my house. Went back inside to look for her and couldn't find her. He leaned on the horn to see if she would respond. She didn't. Finally he went to the back side of the house and found my wife in the full sun with near heat stroke. "Didn't you hear the car horn?" "Oh, yes!" "Well." "Well what. I knew it would stop soon." (She sometimes plays Gracie Allen to my George Burns.) So they get in the car to come assist me. (I could have walked home by now.) "I think I need to puke," Gracie says turning a whiter shade of pale. "Not in my car," erstwhile brother-in-law says. Meanwhile, I'm wilting in the hot treeless plains of another developer gone mad PUD. "Come for the rural living." The sign shows a picturesque area of lakes and trees and a brick two story with 2.5 kids in the nearby community swimming pool. I'm always hoping that the .5 kid isn't being sucked into a pool drain like a Japanese beetle (who are arriving late this year by the way). Where was I? Right, I'm melting on the plains of destruction; brother-in-law is driving the car in which heat struck wife is threatening to regurgitate like a momma bird with a brood of ill-tempered Cow birds; sister-in-law is coming now in her car for moral support; thirteen motorists, two motorcyclists, six bikers have passed my propped up hood with my car doors open without stopping to check on the half-naked guy sitting on the curb and wrapped in a dirty sheet to keep the rays of the sun off of him. If fact, the only thing that seems interested in my are six red-headed turkey vultures whose circular pattern is down to the top of the telephone poles. I need to move, but I have to go to the bathroom so I'm concentrating hard.

They arrive. B-i-l checks under the hood. "I've suspected by now that it is the fan blower motor that is causing the problem," I kibitz with all the knowledge of a newborn speculating about brain surgery. He tentatively agrees. I start the car and drive home, the smell tolerable by now. They follow, and when we get home, I empty the concrete while B-i-l tries to see if he can get the fan blower motor out. He can't. Ford Explorers were built to incur expensive repairs. Tomorrow, I search for a inexpensive mechanic who can fix the blower fan on a 1992 Ford Explorer.

Have a happy remainder of the holiday.