Seal Team Six

I just finished Seal Team Six by Howard Wasdin.

This memoir of an elite navy SEAL sniper is well done.  He isn't a writer, but he has a story to tell and he tells it well.  I knew SEALs were bad ass dudes, but I didn't know just how badass.  He tells his story, where he came from and where he went.  What a life.  


I recommend it highly.  There is a thread throughout of him trying to help people. I think I might check out more military memoirs.  This story made humans out of heroes.

I thought I had a lot to say about this, but I guess I don't.  I guess I am interested in war and conflict and violence.  I bet everyone is though, they just don't want to admit it.  Violence is the way nature deals conflict, so when it happens right in front of you it speaks to you on an innate level.  It gets your blood pumping, kick starting your lungs to draw more air and your brain releases chemicals in response, most notably cortisol, which makes your blood coagulate.  Your brain does this in the event you lose some blood.  Than it releases dopamine to make you happy, and deaden pain and adrenaline to allow you to run or fight as it decides. 

Weird thing abour the brain, it wants to protect itself, and when it sees violence and perceives danger it protects itself.  That's when the fight or flight response kicks in. 

This is where you really get to know people, or rather get to know who a person really is.   I remember this story this guy told me about a car that flipped over on an icy mountain road. Lets call him Stan.  I know it to be true because I have seen similar things happen in front of me.  Stan sees the car lose control, slide across the road and right off the mountain and tumble down the side.  He parks near the edge and goes down to help the people.  On his way down this guy comes running up like its part of an obstacle course, he just had to get out of there.  He doesn't need Stan's help so Stan keeps going while crazy man runs up the road.  At the bottom of the mountain the car is on it's roof.  Stan lays on his belly to look inside.  There is a woman still buckled up and hanging upside down and she calmly looks over to him and says, "Have you seen my husband?  I think he got thrown out."
        "I just saw him, he is fine," Stan says.
        "He's ok?  That's great!" the woman says.  Stan tries to get her out, telling her to support herself when he unbuckles her and they crawl out together and up the mountain they go.  The woman keeps checking with Stan to make sure her husband is ok.  Stan keeps assuring her he is.  Finally they reach the top of the mountain and they see the husband walking away, and he is way up the road by now, like a half mile.  She asks where he is going.  Stan shook his head and offered her a ride to the hospital.  She gets in and they pick up the husband.  She calls out to him, "Honey!  Honey!"  And Stan sees he is crying.  He pulls up and opens the door.  The guy climbs in back with his wife.  And she kisses him all over and is over joyed he isn't dead.  That they survived.  The husband looks up in the rear view mirror and sees Stan looking at him and quickly looks away and starts sobbing.

In the hospital the wife was getting some x rays and the husband was standing next to Stan, the two were alone, and he says to Stan, "You know, I wasn't leaving her back there."  And Stan looks at him.  His face is neutral, no blame, but no belief either.  Than he adds, "I just had to clear my head."  Stan didn't believe him, but didn't want to make a scene.  He nodded.  The husband seemed happy about this, like his conscience was now clear.  The wife returned and was unhurt.  Both were ok, which is to say that the wife was ok but the husband was not.

He would forever be tortured with guilt for leaving her trapped in the car.  He was her husband, how could he leave her like that? Not knowing if she were alive or dead and just running away.  And than to keep on going...  No, he convinced himself there was something wrong with him and she deserved something better.

He tried to make problems with her so she would ask for a divorce, but where this tumble off the cliff had separated him from her, she was only drawn closer to him for having survived it together.  So he kept doing bad, being rude to her, cheating on her, treating her worse than a bad pet, and she kept taking him back and loving him despite all of it.  Finally she suggested they go to counseling. 

They had to come to terms with reality, his abandonment and her deliberate ignorance of it.  After many sessions he accepted what he had done, she was made aware of her deliberate ignorance and could not accept what he had done.  Her forced ignorance was the only thing holding them together after the crash, with that gone they divorced, a year after the crash.      


   

It's been so long.

Hi there!

I'm coming back.  I don't have much time to write anymore, so I decided to make time.  Weird concept, I know.

I forget things a lot, unless they are cool, in which case I remember specific details.  Like the surface temperature of Venus is 847 degrees Fahrenheit and since Russia was the first to send a probe to the planet there is a silver bust of Lenin on the surface somewhere that has since melted into a puddle.  I read that venus book over a year ago.

Anyway, It was bad to forget the important stuff I was supposed to do when I got home from work.  Like get groceries or important paperwork for the bank and work.  I had planned to get one of those mini tape recorder gizmos.  I could say into it, "after work pick up 40lbs of dog food."  I told this idea to loo thinking it was a good one.  She didn't think so because I would forget to rewind it and it costs money.  She got one of my dad's little calendar books and now I have several days on each page that I can write notes in.  So the days of forgetting to take out the trash and clean the cat box and the oft forgotten date night are over.  At least in theory.  I have to get into the habit of checking it and writing stuff down in it.  I already feel less stressed.

Update:  There are usually six people in our house all the time.  Three couples.  Mom and Dad, Loo and I, and Kevin and Oscar.  The house feels a lot smaller now. Add two dogs, two cats, a monitor lizard, two snakes and fish and you have a full house. 

Funny story:  My brother and his boyfriend decorated the house with hearts and pink stuff for Valentines day.  There are strings of hearts stretched all over the house.  They called me out front to the family room to ask me what I thought about the job they did.  We all had some beers on board.  I took a look at all that pink stuff and I wore a disgusted face and said, "God, this room is so GAY!"  and we all laughed.  My brother high-fived me.

Later Kev's boyfriend  and him made a cake and it was all rainbow sprinkles and cuteness.  While I was eating breakfast with Loo and Dad and Oscar I said, "Man, everything you make turns gay!"  and we all laughed.  Than loo said, "You know, Oscar made the coffee this morning."

"Oh, no," I said, "Does that mean the coffee is gay too?"

"Yeah," Oscar said, "But I like it straight!"

We all laughed at that and I had to high five him.

 The two of them were at my work getting some tires put on Kev's truck and the two of them were huddled up outside watching videos on their iPhones and one of my co workers comes up to me and says, "Hey, is that Kevin's gay boyfriend?"

"No, that's his straight boyfriend," I said.  He looked so confused.

Total lunar eclipse 6am

I woke up 30 minutes earlier than normal to see the total lunar eclipse this morning.  It was only viewable for people on the west coast and I think they said it was the last one viewable from the west coast in our lifetime. 

I stumbled over Loo and out the door, down the dark hallway and opened the door at the end.  On the other side of the door was our cat Murrs who was 'murring' loudly and trying to slip through the open door, but I closed the door before she could slip in and I stepped over her while she walked circles around my feet to get to the front door. 

It looked cold and dark outside.  It was then that I realized I forgot my shoes.  I thought about going back to get shoes and missing the total lunar eclipse, the last one in my lifetime.  I walked outside bare foot. 

The brick walkway was icy and it took me a bit of time to scan the horizon to find the moon.  I heard owls hooting in the palm trees in front of the house and when I approached to see the moon an owl leapt off the top of the tree and glided into the field behind our house.  Jerry Bruckheimer's field. 

And there, for all to see was the moon, half of which was red and clearly visible in the early morning sky.  Ideally I would have viewed it for some time to watch it change, but my feet were frozen and I was cold because I was wearing my PJs.  I walked back inside and decided to make a fire and coffee.  Now I have my coffee on my left, the fire at my back and my kitty on my right. 

This is a good way to start a Saturday morning before work.

One month has gone by and a lot has happened.

This time I mean it though. A lot has happened, life changing changes ahead.

I have been stupid-busy with work.  A bunch of people quit, were transferred, or started school.  As the only non student there I had to pick up the slack.  I had back to back 13 hour days giving me more than 40 hours a week, a lot more.  At first I didn't mind it, I zoned out and let my body do the job as my mind wandered to the stories and characters I will write about later, when I have time, when I'm not completely fried to the bone.  Tengo el cerebro frito.  But the part that was bad was coming home exhausted.  I didn't want to do anything.  Eat, sleep, repeat, that was me.  It was pretty shitty for Loo because I was so grouchy and burned out.  She wanted to do SOMETHING, anything and I was like NO!  And finally I relented and went to a bar with her friends.  I was nodding off in the middle and could barely stay awake.  Working all the time was tough on the two of us.

But the money was good, too good apparently.

On august 29th the lease was up at the place I was staying at with my two coworkers.  One of them I like the other I do not.  When it came to sign up again I was an emphatic NO.  I started looking at new places to live with Loo to get her out of her family's house.  I found places for cheap that were nice but I didn't like the idea of facing another Michigan winter.  Or any Michigan winters for that matter.  I started wondering what I was doing out here and why I had come and when I would go back.

Loo recently graduated with a degree in accounting and was ravenously looking for a job.  All day that I worked she was applying, searching and filling out applications for jobs all over. But she wasn't having much luck.  Seems like they want people with experience and don't want to pay them for it and don't want to give experience either.  I asked my uncle what to do (he is an accountant and lives back in Cali)  He said that Loo needed to be in California if she wanted to be an accountant.  There were more people and more jobs.  She started looking for jobs in California.

There were hundreds and they paid better.  Starting pay was often more than three times what I make.

She started applying there too.

Long story short we are coming home to Cali.  I want to tell you I am excited, but it seems naive to say that, or maybe temporary.  No, the feeling I have is a deeper general happiness. 

We were going to leave a week ago, but Loo checked with the University of Michigan's Migraine pain clinic (best in the country, 2 year wait for an appointment is normal, she had been on the list for a year already and had an appt for next November) and they had a cancellation on the 21st. 

That is our departure date.  Our cars are packed and we are taking all our stuff including all my books (whew!) our two rats Swiper and Shredder, and our Savannah monitor lizard Bup and his new big cage, which he hasn't used yet. It looks funny on the roof of my car.

I strapped it to the roof of my car with two ratcheting tie straps and we filled it with bulky and light weight items.  Funny story about that.  EVERYONE seems to have an opinion about how it should be strapped down and it isn't the way that I did it.  Loo's mom wants me to strap a third strap running from the front of the car to the back across the windshield and back window and rear wing.  There wasn't anything to hook it to, but that didn't seem to matter so long as it was hooked.

got to go, see ya soon!

when animals fight

I see animals fight everyday.
They fight and yell for territory and revenge
for sex and resources,
they show their teeth, they snarl and they puff up
to look bigger than they really are
to scare the other away and avoid a fight.
It usually works.
This is the way of the noble animal
the human
The Homo Sapiens
the "Wise man"
the "Thinking man"
though I struggle to see the noble part
I see I am a thinking animal.


Where did that come from? It burned in my mind. Needed to be written, needed to be free. It brings with it some thoughts.

Recently, within the last year or so, I have started seeing humans as animals. When they do things I see the instant similarities between gorilla and chimpanzee. Sometimes with sex, on tv or in real life, I see this animal interaction. The sex face of pain/pleasure identical on a Lion or a Mountain Goat or a moose or a porcupine or a human. Sometimes I feel like I am an animal doing animal things like marking territory not with urine but with pictures and prosody. And I see everyone else doing animal things as well. It can make it difficult to talk to people that think they are better than or above animals, something distinct. When somebody yells and challenges another I see a chimp on a rock slapping its hands down hooting a threat. And when others commend the bravery of these individuals and remark about their sophistication I can barely keep my mouth closed. I want to tell them they are animals.

Sometimes with violence and fighting in movies or real life I see the struggle of animals. Chimps and Gorillas fight one another like we do, minus the guns and stuff. When I see humans fighting the idea of the noble animal or the wise man melts away and I see the savage brutality that is primate aggression, that is us. Its like watching a nature show.

The face with its numerous muscles (52?) expresses some universal faces like pain, fear and aggression in dogs, in cats, in us. When I see a guy get punched and wince in pain I see a multitude of animals in pain, a universal expression of pain. Even when stories talk about people fighting I can't help put envision primitive people hooting and hollering around one another throwing stones and sticks wrestling to the ground kicking and biting until someone dies. That hasn't really changed, except for the weapons which keep improving to kill better and better.

But there is a lot more to it than that.

But I will have to tell you about it later.

Deadly

There is a show called deadliest warrior where they test weapons and armor with fancy technology and science. They use ballistic gel which simulates the density and viscosity of human flesh. Here is a bullet piercing the gel and showing hydrostatic shock.



They also use animal carcasses like sides of beef and torsos of pig which also simulate human tissue. Than they use weapons from the ancient and modern world of war on these items to see what they can do. This interests me but not Loo, so I watch it by myself. In season two they started filling the test items, ballistic gel, and animal carcasses with bags of presumably fake blood. When a weapon hits they bleed, which is useful to judge from afar how lethal a weapon is. However as time goes on and more shows get made the blood and gore increases and becomes sensational. I don't really like that. But at the same time, after awhile, I do. What I like most about the show is seeing these weapons from all over the world. There was this Maori weapon called a 'Mere' which is a flat club made of Jade.

It didn't look dangerous at all because it had no sharp edge. But he broke a cow's skull in half with it. A cow's skull is twice the thickness of our own, which is just crazy from a hand-held weapon. Oh I should talk about the Maori here. This is from memory:

The Maori (Mow-ree) are a group of Polynesians that traveled to New Zealand around 1300 CE. Form there, in isolation, they developed their own language and culture and were considered the last 'pure' native group having lived in seclusion until around 1800 when Europeans started showing up. It is from the Maori that the world got tattoos. Captain Cook's crew drew pictures of the natives facial tattoos and brought them back to England. The Maori also practiced cannibalism which is not unique among humans. Humans all over the world tend to think the body has power and when an enemy is bested you gain his power by eating him. If he was courageous you might eat his heart, strong you might eat his muscles, fast his legs, etc. Anyway, the Maori fought against the Europeans who had Gun Powder and muskets and scared them out of New Zealand. Maori are tough dudes.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the weapons from all over the world interest me a lot. The Deadliest Warrior show did a comparison once with Pirate vs Knight. And I thought for sure the knight would not stand a chance because the Pirate had gun powder. But when they put a ballistic gel torso on a stand and put the knight's steel breast plate on it and had a pirate guy fire the flintlock pistol at it the lead ball bounced of the breastplate harmlessly.

There was a very famous episode we talked about in my Japanese Film and Visual Culture class where they had the epic match up of Viking vs. Samurai. It is so culturally charged. The Vikings are huge white guys wielding steel weapons with brute strength. The Samurai are small Asians wielding weapons of perfect quality used with skill and speed. Who will win? (neither of those two statements are accurate btw because both are GIANT stereotypes)

Because of WWII there is a competetive culture war going on between America and Japan and you see it in our movies and our games and our news stories. The Japanese are ninja warriors, faster than light, move without sound, with martial arts training, a serious honor code and a fearless reputation. All of this depicts the Japanese as ninja super men, better than Americans, able to take on huge groups of people and emerge victorious, due to martial training and dedication, they are depicted as being capable of everything, everything except being human. Which makes it easy to fight them in war. An enemy that is like you is hard to kill. I'm jumping around a lot. Point is that episode of deadliest warrior only fed this erroneous idea. Contrary to popular opinion the Japanese are very human with idiots and jerks among them just like us.

Sidenote: WWII propaganda worked for both the Americans and Japanese. The Japanese were told by their government that the Americans were savages, you are better than them, and not to surrender to them because they would cut you up and do unspeakable things to you. The Americans were told a similar thing. They were both told this because humans are scared of that.

When they met each other on the battlefield they fought tenaciously. The Japanese soldiers didn't want to get chopped up or tortured. And the Americans didn't either. After the fight the Americans were victorious and started cutting off the ears, eyes, fingers, toes and teeth of the Japanese as trophies and started hanging them around their necks. The other Japanese saw the Americans do this, forever cementing the propaganda they had been told as truth. Now the Americans had seen similar things done to their guys. So both people did the same thing. I'm not sure who started it first, but it doesn't really matter. What you hear in our stories is how the Japanese did that to our guys. The Japanese were savages. We had to beat them. The fact that we did it back or even did it first isn't mentioned. What matters is they BOTH did it because they believed their propaganda. Its also important to see beyond culture and realize that humans are capable of some nasty things regardless of culture.

It's weird. like, I am aware of violence. When I see it in a movie I often react negatively, like I don't like it. I wonder if it was necessary to show that for the sake of the story. Might there be a way to convey that info without violence? Sometimes violence bothers me and sometimes it doesn't and I like it. Though I think that is human and depends on context. Like imagine the movie The Count of Monte Cristo. Imagine you skip ahead to the final fight and you see this savage sword battle between two people. It is hard to watch, the violence is high. You don't know who will win, or how, or why they are fighting. Its only with context that you understand why they are fighting, that the bad guy ruined the good guy's life and tried to take everything he held dear and now after all that horror the good guy is going to get him back, REVENGE! Revenge is soooo human. We get it, and because we do some of the most violent images can be shown and we can watch and feel justified in doing so.

Axle number 3

Political topic sprang into my head, an uncaused cause.

You know the tea party movement? Listen to this:

http://youtu.be/An6CeNRCBvo

It's like the shift from top dog to equals that really bothers them. I imagine that is why there are so few minorities within the tea party movement. This must also be why that when they come on TV they are white, christian, republican, conservatives that write signs and spell poorly and chant about Obama being a Kenyan spy or some such.

Somebody asked me to consider the tea party movement for a moment, to give it a chance, to stop being so close minded.

It's like, guess what, if your position is crazy I dont have to try it on for size or give it a test run. I can look at it and say, "That looks crazy, so, no thank you." And the tea party people should accept that.

I have this crazy idea that political movements or other life practices should stand on their own principals. And by that virtue alone should they be considered good or bad.

new topic: Loo's car broke it's axle AGAIN. So I ordered axle number three because they were fresh out. The first axles went bad about a month after installation. They started to wobble under acceleration. So when you gave it gas it would shake the steering wheel like the car was coming apart. Once I found the problem I replaced the axles with set two of Autozone Chinese-slave-labor-specials. They have a lifetime warranty so I keep getting new ones for free. It would be nice if I didn't have to, like they could make a quality product, but apparently we don't have time for rational solutions.

Shortly after I installed axle set number two the transmission started leaking transmission fluid. I undid the work I had done before to get a look at the problem. The transmission seals had gone bad and did not seal anymore. Back story: her transmission died a while back and I replaced it with a certified used one from a giant auto wrecker online. The seals in that new-to-us trans were on their way out. I didn't think to replace them at the time. Anyway I called up my brother, lord of car knowledge, and asked him what I should do. He said that Autozone was worse than Pepboys, which is pretty bad, and I should get parts from Kragen/Oreilly's or the deal, which was closed that day.

I went to Autozone and saw a woman behind the counter. Now, I am usually very good about not being sexist, or prejudicial, but when women work at auto parts stores they usually, in my experience, know very little about cars, and it is difficult to be objective on account of the failure rate I have experienced. Of the ten women behind the counter I have got parts from only one of them knew her stuff, and knew more than I did. The others can, with my assistance, look up my car, show me a picture of the part and ask me if that looks right before walking off to match the numbers up. That's what this lady did.

The part she brought back looked far too large to be correct.

"Are you sure this is the right part?" I asked.
"Absolutely," she said, "Transmission axle seals."
"They look too big to me."
"Oh, that's the right part."
"Will you check the axle hub seal part number and make sure these aren't them?"
"Sure, lets see, nope, same part number, same part inner and outer. Can't go wrong."

Here she asked the manager about it to double check her work. I was causing doubt. He said she was right. I wasn't convinced, but I had no evidence.

"Hmm... Ok, well, if this doesn't work I can exchange for the right one, yeah?"
"Yep!" Came her chipper response.
"Alright, thank you," I said before buying 70 bucks worth of transmission seals.

Than I went home, removed the axles and used a wrench to pry the old seals out because they fit so tightly. When the old seals came out I compared it to the new seals. It fit inside the new part and passed through it.

"Wrong fucking part," I said to myself. I got up, put the tools away, cleaned my hands and drove over there in the Green Machine ( a 96 Pontiac grand prix with 211k miles). I brought the old bad part with me so I could show them as well as compare it to the new part they would give me in the store.

"You gave me the wrong part," I said placing the parts, old and new, as well as the receipt on the counter. Having worked in the customer service industry (tires) for almost eight years I knew all the tricks. I have been on the receiving end of customer ire and there aren't that many forms it can take, but it causes a certain kind of action to take place. 'Shit gets taken care of,' as they say. Besides I was angry for having to come back. If they had given me the right part I wouldn't be there. That meant that super-polite me and wrathful me met somewhere in the middle to be stern me.

I didn't want an apology because it would be hollow and well-faked after being rattled off so often, but I wanted them to acknowledge their mistake and take action in the future to prevent this. Anyway, this new guy picked up both parts and examined them for about a minute before proclaiming that I was in fact correct in my original assessment. Than the woman from four hours ago saw me and stood silently at the new guy's shoulder watching his screen.

"Did I give you the wrong part?" She asked.
"Yes," I said.
"I'm so sorry!" She said.

I would have thought she meant it had she not worn the fake sincerity face. It's a face I know well, a face I use often at work. If you don't work in customer service and don't know this face you can recognize it by the extra long time it takes to blink the eyes. The best fake sincerity faces slowly open their eyes at the last word of what they say so they don't have to look you in the eye when they lie.

The most jaded of us can look you right in the eye and show you how much we care. It satisfies all subconscious queues, and its undetectable even to veterans of the industry except in one area: it is too clean, too perfect, exactly the right amount of words in the right order. And beneath that mask there is nothing resembling sincerity. A genuinely sincere person expresses sincerity with whatever words they can, often repeating words or using words like gosh, oh no, that's horrible, I had no idea, and many others.

Of course the customer has a role to play as well. They don't believe that we deliberately fooled them, but they insist on an apology almost every time as though we did. This causes us to apologize all the time for stuff we have no control over. We both know this, but the charade continues. This conditioning bleeds into my life and I often apologize to Loo for stuff that I'm not responsible for. And she corrects me.

Where was I?

Oh yeah she apologized.
"It happens," I said. My typical response.
"you know what happened?" she asked me. I didn't really care what happened. I wanted to fix Loos's car and get back to my day off. Did I mention I was annoyed to have to come back there? "I clicked the wrong part and compared it to the wrong part and told you it was the right one." She said with a shrug, meaning perhaps it was a simple mistake that could happen to anyone. I still wasn't interested. But she seemed desperate for forgiveness. I felt like if I forgave her she wouldn't change, and I didn't want to give her a lesson about finding parts that she would have to listen to because the customer is always right and then disregard after I left. So I said nothing, let her imagination fill in the blanks. When customers do that to me when I make a mistake (I rarely make mistakes at work) it helps me to be better. I am scarred by the sting of my incompetence.

I like that last sentence.

Anyway the mood in O'reilly's dropped down a bit and everyone worked toward solving my problem. They grabbed the correct part, of which there were two different part numbers. One for the left and one for the right side. They were slightly different sizes. Anyway I thanked them (why did I do that?) and went home. With the right parts for the job now I finished in a few hours in time for dinner. I think. I can't remember.

After fixing the seals and the leak I needed to fill the transmission back up. Loo came down to check on me at this point.

"Whatcha doin?" she asked.
"Adding trans fluid," I said.
"How do you know how much to add?"
"I don't," I said, "I got to kind of eye-ball it."
"Do you need a funnel?"
"If you have one."
"Let me look. Hey, thanks for fixing my car."
"yeah."
"I can't find a funnel. Do you need me to get you one?"
"No, I know a trick," I said. I was actually kind of excited to use the trick which I had only ever heard of but never seen or tried myself.

I pulled the trans dipstick up 90% of the way out and poured the trans fluid into the dipstick. The red fluid stuck to the dipstick and slid right down the tube.

"whoa, cool!" Loo said, "Why's it do that?"
"Capillary action," I said.
"What's that?"
"The molecules hold together so well that they pull themselves together and stick to things. It's how trees can pull water up from the ground to their leaves."
"Thats pretty fancy Beyo," she said. (hear a baby try to say the word bear)
"Yep."
"You're smarter than the average bear," she said.

After that we drove it to make sure it was fixed. For a few days it worked great without any problems at all. Than a couple days ago on my day off, a day I requested, we were pulling into traffic and there was a snap and a crash followed by a grinding as we slid backwards slowly. I quickly deduced the problem and turned the car off. We called AAA and had them tow it to her Ma's house where it would have to sit until today, my next day off. And today I pulled the axle shaft out to examine it.


You can see the end is rounded off.
I think the metal clip that holds it in failed and allowed the shaft to slip out. And when I tried to get out into traffic all 200 horse power was applied to the end of the shaft rather than the whole length and it shredded those teeth right off. Luckily the transmission is made out of a stronger steel and it is OK.

OR

They gave me the wrong part, a part for another car, one that is too short. Either way there were fresh out of CV axle shafts for a '96 Nissan Maxima. It should be in tomorrow. So after (11 hours of) work I get to install a new axle. Yahoo!

Loo and I recognize how much that sucks, but she needs her car. To help the situation not suck so bad she bought me lunch with plans for two full-body massages, one tonight and one tomorrow.

Winning!

Hopefully tomorrow's new axle install fixes everything.

Huh, I just realized that about a year ago her transmission died. Weird.

Maybe July is rough on transmission?