Good Grief!

Things are getting a little intense. To be accurate, they’ve been getting more and more intense for weeks, but good grief!

Just to recap, I’ve been having issues with Good Girl, my wonderful Prius with whom I do not want to part. A lot of my resistance has to do with my slightly competitive nature. Not that I’m competing with anyone outside of myself. Rather, I’m motivated to see just how many miles I can get out of her.

Karl and I pride ourselves on taking good care of our vehicles. We’ve managed to get hundreds of thousands of miles out of every car we’ve owned. Except for that company car he had early on in our marriage…not sure how many times (if any) we got the oil changed in that puppy. And it ended up “throwing a rod,” which turned out to be worse than throwing a fit.

That was a lesson we took to heart. Ever since then, we’ve been religious (there’s an ironic term coming from me, eh?) about changing the oil in our cars and keeping them otherwise well-maintained. And it’s paid off handsomely.

Good Girl

This one, though…Good Girl. She’s gone the farthest of all of our vehicles, and I want to stretch her record out as long as possible.

That said, she’s sort of been falling apart and behaving somewhat haphazardly. Mirroring in some ways, at least you could argue, my own frustrations of late.

Others might scoff at how I entertain the possibility that experiences with my automobile could somehow be indicative of a message applicable to me and my life. But that’s how I roll. I do my best to pay attention to what goes on around me. Notice the details. Remain open to possibilities. And listen to the messages.

So when I let you guys in on my ‘ripping the ass off’ my car the other day (“ripping her a new one?” Karl suggested), I realized as I was writing about it that I was using a specific word to describe what had happened that was consistent with another event that had occurred only a week earlier.

Even the Loaner Failed to Escape Unscathed

The evening before my two day CLE seminar in Philadelphia, I ran out to the grocery store for some frozen spinach. I parked the car my mechanic had generously allowed me to use while he and his men tried to figure out what was wrong with Good Girl. I went to hop out – and the lever that opens the car door on the inside snapped off in my fingers. I just sat there for a moment, stunned. I stared at the hunk of baby poop brown plastic in my hand. Good grief, I thought. I cannot believe this. I’ve succeeded in breaking the loaner car.

Not thinking clearly, I crawled over to the passenger’s side to exit the vehicle. Snagged my spinach. Returned home.

I’d texted Karl in the store and he greeted me in the driveway, helpfully suggesting that I could roll down the window, reach out, and open the door that way. Yep, better than crawling across the console.

What’s the Message, Kenneth?*

I didn’t write about that situation in a post – even though I did get the metaphor of snapping, and it did feel significant – because I found other, debatably more interesting, things to write about.

But as I wrote about all the plastic and all the metal connections snapping on the back end of my Prius the other day, I have to admit, I was not feeling all that cavalier about the potential message I was receiving. I have been under a lot of stress for a fairly extended period of time. So has Karl. Was I somehow unconsciously transferring pent up frustrations, anxieties, or other energies into the objects around me causing them to snap? Were they warning me that I’d better pay attention? Perhaps be extra careful with myself, my health, my attitude?

Yikes.

So I laughingly shared the story with you, but didn’t delve too deeply into the possible implications other than to breezily remark about the potential metaphoric application to my life.

Et Tu, Printers?

Cue another weird experience I’ve been having with our printers. We have two, one of which is a great but ancient color laser printer from my law practice days, an undeniable workhorse, and the other a more recent vintage black and white laser printer/copier/scanner. Earlier this week, Monday I believe, the black and white simply stopped working for me. No error messages come up. It appears to accept the print command. Yet nothing comes out of the machine. It works fine for Karl and his laptop. It even prints from his stupid phone.

Fine, I thought. I’m not going to get bent out of shape over this. It’s just another odd glitch. I’ll use the color laser printer. So I did. It’s been fine.

Karl needed to print some stuff out in color for a presentation. He got most of it to print, but a couple times the paper got jammed. Not a problem. This morning, he was printing out one last thing before leaving. It jammed again. I corrected the problem and thought it had all cleared. I closed the machine and it started whirring, as it normally does when it needs to bring itself back up to speed.

It continued whirring. And whirring. And freaking whirring. I was standing there, getting really annoyed as I waited to see if it was going to spit out any additional pages for Karl, because what was with the freaking whirring?

Suddenly, it stopped. Its lights were blinking. I walked over, irritated, and looked at the message on the printer. Believe me, I felt a chill. I think I need to pay some serious attention.