not sitting by the roadside surrounded by….

….murderers and abductors, trying in vain to find the can of mace I haven’t seen in, oh, YEARS. Nope, I’m safely home in my livingroom. Huge sighs of relief all around! The car continued to have peculiar problems with that whole lurchy-downshift-accelerate-decelerate thing, but on the interstate it was fine and I made it in five hours, no problem. Naturally it poured rain in Columbia, which apparently is akin to the Amazon jungle as far as rainfall goes, as it is ALWAYS raining when we go through Columbia. But overall, it was a fast and easy trip. Even after I decided to stick in a CD so I’d quit hearing every little teeny odd noise the car made (and being eight years old, it can make some odd noises) and since I know way better than to listen to Radiohead if I’m worried about the car (Radiohead also can make some pretty odd noises) I put in Arcade Fire. Which is kind of sweet and quiet and doesn’t feature Thom Yorke and his Bizarro Sound-O-Rama. So I wasn’t expecting the ZZZzzeEEEzzzzeeeeEEEEzzzzzzZZZZZeeeEEEE noise that nearly sent me straight to Massive Coronary Failure — until I realized it was fingers on guitar strings. Not the engine flying to pieces. It took me ten miles to recover.

Yes, I’ve been just a wee bit anxious today.

But all is fine, and I took the car straight to the Honda Place and left it there so they can look it over. I gave them my detailed list of problems it was having and gave them the receipts from Bill detailing what he’d done, and they listened very carefully to me and assured me that if it wasn’t acting weird when they started driving, they’d keep driving until it did. So it better lurch around with them or I’m going to be REALLY REALLY annoyed. We seem to have a very trustworthy Honda place.

And now I must go to bed. So I can drag myself into work tomorrow for what is sure to be a day of hell — but, no matter what happens, I can just tell myself I have a new job and I’ll be out of there soon!!!