PHASE 3
WEEK 13
Welcome to Week 13. This week we’ll be hosting the illustrious First Annual 702 Paulina Idiot Olympics, which I’ll be reporting on daily between now and next Tuesday, so please tune in often as they are sure to be entertaining/idiotic. Just what are the Idiot Olympics? Well that’s what you’ll be tuning in to find out. Duh.
Week 13 also marks the beginning of Phase 3. Now, much mention has been made thus far of these so-called “Phases”. But what are they exactly, other than a website-table-of-contents revision? Rather than leave it hanging with lame, non-helpful teasers (see above), how about I just actually tell you.
The Phases are a series of goals laid out to guide this whole moving to California/new life thing I’ve been doing. Yes, sadly it turns out I’m sort of a goal-oriented person. Each Phase turns out to be about six weeks along, for no other reason other than that’s been about how long it’s been taking me to accomplish stuff. Decry them as “self-help book” if you will, but I figured it was only fair to provide you a chance at explaining some of the bizarre things I’ve been doing out here since I arrived. Or perhaps it will just confound them further. Whatever.
Here are the phases and the goals within:
Phase 1
- Get a job
- Train for/run a marathon
- Write stuff
- Get my stuff out the Spacemobile and into the house. Obtain ping-pong table for house
Phase 2
- Get enough jobs that I can actually break even financially
- Get back into weight-lifting shape (aka exploit my Aura membership)
- Write stuff
- Actually get my room set up. Get other furniture for house
Phase 3
- Get enjoyable job situation
- Get into very good weight-lifting shape (aka really exploit my Aura membership)
- Write stuff/actually get Huge Smile back into regularly-posting condition
- Try futilely to keep the house clean (aka fight the evil)
Phase 4
- Actually start trying to get a job where I get paid for writing
- Run a triathlon, then never exercise again
- Keep on writing stuff
- Phase 4 projects, including basketball hoop, weight room and ball-pit
I don't know what will happen once all Phase 4 objectives have been accomplished. I guess we'll find out.
Phase 3 also marks a personal vow of mine to not talk about the Phases anymore in these ponderings, instead increasing my focus on the more-entertaining subjects of lambasting LA culture and observing the foibles of life. That’s more interesting anyway.
On that subject I had my first encounter with the Redondo Beach public library yesterday, which I think will quickly become my favorite non-fast-food establishment in the South Bay. Apparently they loan not only music CD’s and Books-on-Tape, but also VHS and DVDs, as well as your usual plethora of reading material. The only triack was filling out an application to get a Library Card, on which I had to think really hard about what to put for “Employer”. Since it was my first time I could only check out three things, but still managed to put together an eclectic collection of a mythology book, a book of practice GED tests (to be explained later, in the Olympic posts), and the CD soundtrack to the Lion King.
Also last night was Action Movie Sequel & Beer Night, which resulted in 9 movies being rented from Blockbuster between Sam and I. I finally fell asleep at about 4:30am after having watch Pirates of the Caribbean (not a sequel) Lord of the Rings 2, X-Men 2, and part of Matrix 2.
WEEK 13.5
Ever since all the 24-grocery stores went on strike roughly three months ago, it's been a lot quieter in the South Bay late at night. I have yet to find a coffee shop or restaurant at which to hang out during my security shift. One thing that is open however is the blessed Hermosa Beach Arco station.
There are three types of gas stations in LA. The first is your typical pay-at-the-pump, may-or-may-not-have-a-convenience-store, 170-cent-gallon station. This includes your basic Chevron, Shell or whatever else you might find anywhere else. A couple steps down from this are your "Thrifty" stores (of which "Thrifty" is appropriately the main one), where gas is ass-cheap (155 cents or so) but your fuel may not have enough octane in it to qualify as flammable, much less last you to your next oil change. These stores accept only cash, or barter, for better gasoline. And in between lies Arco.
Arco sells legit gas as a price roughly ten-cents cheaper than most places. You can also by beer, as well as other amenities. And most importantly, you can buy these things 24-hours a day. I rolled in at about 3:15am last week and asked the guy if I could still buy forties at this hour - he just kind of looked at me, then at the open fridge next to me as if to say "well, obviously". I asked him if I could buy forties 24-hours a day. He just kind of looked at me again. I guess anything being sold at 3:15am probably means that it's sold all day long, unless you're at a porn store or something. I told the guy I'd be back soon.
Gabe, Elia and I also had the unique experience of taking in a Sunday morning football game at one of the South Bay's many sportsbars. Football in LA is an odd thing, since there are ten million people living here and somehow no NFL team. I guess the market's not big enough or something. Additionally, nobody who lives in LA is from here in the first place - one of the several reasons people site for why Los Angeles has no soul. Anyway, the moral of the story is you go to a sportsbar on a Sunday and no two people are cheering for the same team. The place we went to had 30+ TVs in it and needed most of them - there were about 18 different games on at once, and little alcoves of fans cheering for all of them. And when some TVs started showing highlights of games on other TVs, while those TVs were showing highlights of games on still other TVs... it was all very confusing. Especially on one hour of sleep with an Arco forty already in my belly at 11am.
Finally, a Thanksgiving recap, since I didn't have the pictures to support it before. Essentially it was a mad dash to Phoenix, a 16-hour sleep, some good family time, some golf, a big meal and back again. The most interesting part of the trip was perhaps my uncle's new car. If you can call it a car.
Sometime in the 30's or 40's, the Germans came out with a jeep-like automobile that became known as "The Thing".  After being used in WWII as a nazi war vehicle, The Thing went into a period of not being made, before being revived again in the late 60's. Only about 100,000 or so were made, and only a third of those survive today. And my uncle drives one of them.
As a birthday present from my cousins, my uncle Daryl (who once lived in Zambia and bartered for a Toyota Land Cruiser with the nationals) got his longtime wish of owning a Thing. And it's quite a Thing indeed.
 A mutated relative of a small jeep, the Thing most closely resembles a cross between a Humvee and a Go-Cart. It has picket floorboards as if from a toboggan, and roughly three buttons for driving on the front dashboard. The Nazi-Engine is the back and the trunk is in the front, including a spare tire that is hooked up to the windshield fluid sprayer, so that fluid is sprayed by letting air out of the tire and pressurizing the hose.  You have to stop every once in a while and fill the tire back up or you can’t clean your windows anymore. Also on a Thing everything is an accessory – including the windshield. Yes, when my uncle got it he had to go out and by not only the canvas covering but also front and side windows to put in. Otherwise you just roll around with doors and that’s it, like you’re riding in a big wagon or something. When I asked him what a driver would do about all the wind and rocks and stuff hitting you in the face when you drove, Daryl replied “I guess you wear goggles.”
So that’s about it, everything up to today. Oh and I came back to Redondo for Thanksgiving part 2 with Gabe’s family involving all of us seated in holiday fellowship around the uncovered ping-pong table. It was all very festive. Stay tuned the rest of the week for the (eventually) continued Idiot Olympics. Unless I break my typing fingers in wrestling tomorrow.
WEEK 14
Week 13 had two long-ass posts. Week 14 has been the Idiot Olympics. Therefore, voila! The post.
WEEK 15
Four days until Christmas, though it might as well be July because I have yet to see a lick of snow or freezing temperature. I’m celebrating by flying home for a rampant 48-spree of partying and family time. I plan on sleeping 8 hours of it, max.
The roommates have been slowly departing for their various ‘better-than-mine’ vacations – Sam left Friday, JD left yesterday and Gabe leaves tomorrow. This has meant a multitude of airport trips, as well as the resulting multitude of free meals bought as thanks for said airport trips.
It has also meant a surprising amount of strategy as far a car-placement goes. Our place is only about 7 miles from the airport, but the places I work at are only about 2 miles away. Which translates into only a five-dollar cab ride if you’re unfortunate enough to be flying in or out at a time nobody can drive you. JD returns from Ohio next Friday when I can’t pick him up, so to prepare we dropped his car off in one of my parking lots and I drove him the rest of the way. Next Tuesday I’ll perform a similar maneuver, perhaps biking it the remaining 2 miles, though last time I did that I had to chain my bike up outside the Encounter Restaurant at the airport and came back to find my tires slashed. And next Wednesday Sarah will add to the madness by parking her car in the lot as well then taking a cab. She lives in Irvine; JD and I live in Redondo, and yet for three days all three of our cars will be parked side by side in a lot in El Segundo. The fact that it really does make sense is the disturbing part.
This’ll do it for my vacations for a while – after that it’s down to business. And by that I mean I’m going to start working less and learn to surf.
The Year In Review (sort of)
New Years Eve. A time of reflection, celebration, and web-bloggers posting overly sentimental nostalgic accounts of their year past and year ahead. This year has been an interesting one for this website host too, full of career moves, personal moves and physical moves… but there will be none such mawkish nonsense on this website. After all, Hugesmile is here to entertain. And make money.
So we didn’t make any money this year. But on the theme of entertainment and New Year’s lookings-back, I’d like to take this opportunity to crunch another set of impressive and hopefully amusing numbers.
This year I moved from Minneapolis to Chicago, back to Minneapolis and then to LA with a Caribbean Cruise, a trip to Hawaii and an unprecedented Roadtrip mixed in between. Actually most of that took place in about three months – the rest of the year was spent working my ass of so as to afford all of this preposterous travel. Needless to say, all this running, driving, flying and sailing around accrued a lofty sum of mileage – if Northwest Airlines sponsored Frequent Flyer miles on all of it I could probably cash in for a complimentary flight to Saturn.
Anyway, here’s some numbers to munch on for 2004:
| Moved from Minneapolis to Chicago |
450 miles |
| Moved from Chicago back to Minneapolis |
450 miles |
| Drove through 48 states on a Roadtrips/Moved from Minneaplis
to LA |
19,369 miles |
| TOTAL DRIVING MILES |
20,269 miles |
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| Flew from Chicago to Miami and back |
2,372 miles |
| Flew from Minneapolis to Hawaii and back |
7,856 miles |
| Flew from Los Angeles to Boston and back |
5,210 miles |
| Flew from Los Angeles to Pheonix and back |
729 miles |
| Flew from Los Angeles to Minneapolis and back |
3,052 miles |
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TOTAL FLYING MILES
|
19,219 miles |
| AMOUNT SPENT ON PLANE FARE FOR THESE FLIGHTS |
Way too much |
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| Sailed around the Caribbean on a cruise boat/TOTAL SAILING
MILES |
2,300 miles |
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| Walked around downtown Chicago for work 2 miles a day for
20 weeks |
40 miles |
| Trained for a marathon |
200 miles |
| Ran a marathon |
26.2 miles |
| TOTAL SELF-PROPULSION MILES |
266.2 miles |
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| TOTAL MILES TRAVELLED IN 2003 |
42,054.2 miles |
Last year’s goal: Have adventures. Check. This year’s goal – stay in one place.
WEEK 16
Not to start a post with ranting, but here goes:
I HATE THE VIKINGS. 6-0 start to end up 9-7 and fumble-onside-kick their way out of the NFL playoffs? And this after I just bought yet another cheap plastic Viking Helmet off Ebay to show my support. Alright, I bought it for a drinking hat. Maybe they sensed my insincerity.
I HATE YELLOW CAB. That plan JD, Sarah and I had to park 2 miles from the airport and then cab it cheaply the rest of the way? Well the first part worked well. But apparently taxi meters work on speed out here in LA – it cost me 14 dollars to go the remaining 3 kilometers. On the way back, upon insisting the cabbie take me by a more direct route, it only cost 7 dollars, but this was jacked up to 11 because apparently there’s an exorbitant 3-dollar fee for any cab ride originating at the airport. Originating at the airport!? Isn’t that like half of all cab rides? I was incensed over the apparently rip-off-age, only to find Sarah had paid 22 dollars to journey her two miles. That’s almost 50 bucks for six miles of transportation. From now on I’m taking one of the red or blue or green or other Skittles-flavored cabs. Or better yet, I’m just walking.
 Ranting over now. A lovely 52-hour jaunt to Minneapolis for Christmas, full of family, friends and food.  Also I guess it rained all day on the 25th in LA, whereas we enjoyed blue skies, white lawns, and a tropical 20 degrees in MN. Take that California.
I also experienced my first Earthquake on Monday, although I didn’t notice. I guess parts of central California were shook up pretty bad, though down here it trickled to like a .001 on the Richter scale. So the game of Jenga I was playing at the time wasn’t effected. I was disappointed.
Finally, a message left by Johnny Green on my answering machine: In response to a voicemail message stating “Hi, this is Paul’s microwave. His answering machine is broken this week, but if you leave me the message I’ll see that he gets it in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… (beep).” Yeah I know, kind of lame. Anyway, the response: “Uh… yeah… 30 seconds on high. No, no wait! Wait. Fifty percent… No, wait, no… I’ll just use the popcorn button. Popcorn button. Popcorn… Hello?” Classic Johnny.
2004
So I got a digital camera for Christmas, a gift from parents and aunt and uncle. Apparently after all the megapixels I wasted on the Roadtrip last summer, they thought I would put it to good use. And I shall - this site now has photo-fuel without having to resort to borrowing/stealing of Sam's camera. A merry Christmas to all.
I figured, then, that it was only appropriate that I begin the New Year with a photo treasure hunt of some of the quirks of our apartment, to prove the graphic generosity not wasted. So, welcome back friends, to another year of lambasting Los Angeles and lampooning life... This year we're technologically self-reliant.
The Features of 702 Paulina - A Photo Tour (part 1)
 The Salmon-Colored Exterior - Some may recognize this picture from the Roadtrip. Since that time, the color of our house has been definitively decided on as "salmon", as opposed to the briefly considered "pink", "peach", and "daiquiri-puke". Names aside, it's still straight out of the early '70's, and it's still ugly.
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 The Pants Planter - I don't really remember how this hideous rubber-plant-in-an-Ants-in-the-Pants came into our house, but I think it had something to do with Gabe's grandmother heirlooming it off to him and insisting on her deathbed that he display it in a position of prominence in all his future homes. Why it's still here has something to do with Gabe threatening us with death should we defile his grandmother by removing it. Note the dancing Santa-Homer to the left and Gabe's garage remote (which he has never used) to the right.
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 The Chocolate Candle - Combine the warm, romantic aura of a candle with the scent of baking/burning chocolate? Doesn’t quite work. I don't know why we don't just throw it away, since it makes the house smell like singed fudge whenever it's lit. For some reason we just don't.
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 The 1930's Refrigerator - Manufactured before the energy crisis (the one in the '70's, not the current one), this abomination of a fridge is responsible for at least one-third of our total electric bill each month. It's also dirty, has several broken shelves and smells faintly of rot. Thus, by next week we will have bought a new one and thrown this one off of a high place. Maybe the ChocoCandle with it.
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 The 1920's Oven - Unfortunately they won’t let us throw this off a high. At least it works (both times we've used it), and once we replace the fridge it will be the only interior thing chronologically consistent with the Salmon-Colored Exterior.
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 The Decor - Yes, this is what passes for decoration in our apartment. Made famous by the Ugly Baby Article from Hugesmile News, this picture was printed by a friend, put on top of a thermostat, and has not been taken down. Aside from a few actually-classy Chicago pictures in the living room, this is about all we've got. None of the thermostats in our house work, by the way.
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 Sam's Bed - Sam's bed is used more than any other piece of furniture in our house. He's there for roughly 18 hours a day since his job allows him to work from bed, and when he gets up JD is right there basking in the warm indent like a cat in a fresh laundry basket. Even when Sam leaves town someone finds a way to sleep in his bed, be it Gabe and cookie crumbs, Jeremy's friend and an abundance of feminine hygiene products, or Walker and packing peanuts.
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WEEK 17 (Year 2)
The Features of 702 Paulina - A Photo Tour (part 2)
 The Garbage Room - Another familiar picture. This is the only room in our house that’s been named (besides generic titles like “JD’s room” or “Livingroom”). Not that we have a lot of rooms to name… which makes it even more depressing that we have one of them entirely designated to garbage. Hey, we keep recycling and a water heater in there too.
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 The Flag Hallway - There isn’t much to the upstairs of our house except three bedrooms and a well-used bathroom… and a half-room/half-closet that we tried to convince Elia to rent out for 500 dollars a month. He would have none of it. For fear of our second floor being entirely bare, we did manage to hang these three flags – it was our only recourse since any table-like fixture would only impede traffic and immediately become another dumping ground for Gabe’s stuff. American, Mexican and Scottish. If anyone can come up with what these nationalities have to do with JD, Gabe and I, email us. We would like to know.
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 Gabe's Boxers - Somehow, someway, every single pair of Gabe’s boxers end up on the floor of our bathroom, as opposed to normal places such as a laundry hamper or even in his room. He says they’re marking “his area” of the bathroom; we say they’re gross. At first we just donned rubber gloves and transported them gingerly back to his room, but lately we’ve taken to just kicking them under the sink until he runs out and has to buy more. The strange part about this picture is that it was taken about ten days after Gabe left for break, after I’m pretty sure I removed all his boxers from the bathroom and put them back in his room. I swear to God they’re migrating. And multiplying.
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 The Breaking & Entering Roof - Four times now this path has sufficed for access into the house, though only once for sport. Note the faux rocks and the slight slant that make rooftop picnicking and sunbathing sadly less than desirable. Sorry, no prominently-featured Spacemobile in this picture.
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 The Backyard - All 8x10 of it. Fenced off from our neighboors, too small for a picnic table, this tiny patio functions only as a dock for our two free grills, a smoking pit and a wall for Wilson next door to poke his head over and offer maudlin, unsolicited advice.
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 The Stove - No, this shot was not set up. While not inherently disgusting like the ‘20’s oven or the ‘30’s fridge, we seem bound and determined to let our gas stove also contribute to the bringing-down of the house – perhaps in flames. Or at least by never ever cleaning it. You’re more likely to find paper left on the stove than food, and more likely to find half-finished GED tests than healthy food.
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 The Board - Though currently covered with a giant Idiot Olympics Board, this board is perhaps the most long-standing and most meaningful of additions to our house. It has recorded our ping-pong games since Day 1 (Sam has beaten JD 128 games to 4) and quotes that have been uttered since about then around said table (“If I was a Gypsy I'd turn myself into a forture cookie who had a different answer for everyone who came along.” – JD). And not to turn this into a Gabe-focused website, but it also contains a Top 10 list of Teaching Situations That Would Be Worse Than Teaching In Watts (inspired one day when Gabe’s job future seemed uncertain due entirely to asinine bureaucratic stupidity. Maybe this is where he got the idea for his essay. For your enjoyment, the list has been reprinted below. Not that the board could ever be erased at this point.
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Top 10 Teaching Situations That Could Be Worse For Gabe
- Vampire children
- Hebrew school
- No-Unicorns-University
- The kids bite and have rabies.
- The Helen Keller school for blind, deaf, dumb children-in-a-box.
- Barber college
- Whatever school the Meatheads go to
- Hooked on Hponics school (ouch)
- Dishwashing school (double ouch)
- To be reassigned to his current position
WEEK 18
One thing to be said for Los Angeles – it certainly has more interesting news than most places. There was that week back in October when a one-third of the city’s work force went on strike, a ring of fire was burning through suburbs, hail was flooding Watts, hot dusty winds were knocking over trees in Woodland Hills and Arnold had just been elected governor. OK maybe that was a particularly tumultuous week, but most newspaper days have at least a car chase or a riot of some kind or another.
This week the news hit close to home. To summarize as briefly as possible, at about 7:30 Wednesday morning a cop approached two guys at PCH and Beryl, about 4 blocks from our house. It was a routine call, at least until one of the guys turned around and shot at the cop with a handgun, hitting him in the stomach and then running off. The cop was OK – the bullet just hit a love handle or something – but he went to the hospital and the guys went off hiding.
Needless to say, a massive manhunt ensued. LAPD officers (or RBPD officers in this case) do not like being shot, and have a tendency to react strongly when they are. So they blocked off nearly every street within a 2-mile radius of our house. I was sort of wondering why it was taking so long to get anywhere. Nothing happened for most of the day, until Irvine Sarah was coming down to see me and was annoyed by having her route at 190th and Prairie (about a mile from our house) blocked. The reason for this, as we later discovered, was not just because of the usual dragnet - it was because about five minutes before she got there, they found one of the guys. And shot him. Many times. I guess the guy (the one who’d done the shooting) had been holed up in a mobile home all day, until he finally got bored and stole a pickup truck and tried to leave town. The cops spotted him, and when the guy got stuck in traffic he got out and ran for it. The cops ran after, and the guy turned around again and started shooting. He apparently makes a habit of this. Only this time the cops fired back, and the guy caught about thirty seconds of solid fire before falling neatly into a chalk outline.
Not that I’ve never been near an area where somebody’s been killed before, but there was something distinctly LA about all of this. Especially the part where the guy shot at a cop for no reason, in possibly one of the most laid-back areas of the city. And the part where his mobile-home hostage-taking efforts did not seem to be yielding enough excitement so he decided to leave and go find people to have a shoot-out with. And the part where his accomplice is still on the loose. Sarah insists that we can now brag about having a “Serial Murderer” on the loose in our area, despite the fact that he is neither a murderer not serial about it, since he didn’t shoot the cop, the cop didn’t die, and it only happened once. Just the same, I think I’ll lock our door tonight.
WEEK 19
So the latest Spacemobile disaster. My brothers came to town to visit me on Monday, and the Spacemobile’s last deed was to transport them home from the airport before breaking down Tuesday afternoon as we tried to drive to the beach. The events:
3:00 (and for a few days before) – We depart for Venice Beach. The Mobile is having real trouble making it up hills, or even starting from a stop for that matter. Hm. Smells like Montana.
3:25 – A horrible clunk is heard and the stick subsequently refuses to shift into gear. Repeated attempts yield a terrible grinding noise. LA drivers refuse to let me off the busy road we’re on so we pull to the left pseudo-shoulder and stop the car. Hmm. Really smells like Montana.
3:30 – Call is placed to AAA. I have the number memorized.
3:40 – After 10 minutes the dim-bulb dispatcher finally locates my membership and politely informs me that I’ve used all my tows for the year. I am not surprised. Cars continue to swerve around us.
3:41 – By chance a flatbed truck passes us and stops. Mark goes to negotiate with him while I am told by AAA that they’ll give me another tow for 55 dollars. Mark returns and says the guy will tow us for 50, and that if we’re not gone in five more minutes the cops are going to ticket us. I hang up on AAA.
3:45 – Mark and Alex cross traffic to go rent a car while I help the Flatbed Samaritan piggyback the Mobile for the 6th time in 6 months.
4:00 – None of my roommates are around so I call Johnny in Chicago to help me figure out where to get towed to. Meanwhile the Samaritan changes the tire of a family car nearby – the real reason he was out and happened to drive past.
4:15 – Finally we arrive at the Manhattan Beach VW dealer, possibly the final resting place of the Spacemobile. Mark and Alex pick me up in a gray Gallant they’ve just rented. We proceed to Santa Monica and a Clippers game. One hour fifteen minutes. Record time for a Mobile breakdown.
I don’t want to pronounce it dead because the Spacemobile has already died and risen again so many times it’s approaching Messiah status. But this really might be the last time. Early analyses estimate 1,400 dollars to get the Blue Beast drivable again, and by ‘drivable’ I mean it will still have no muffler, a cracked windshield, a panel missing on the inside, rust on the outside, no cigarette lighter, dents in the roof, three hubcaps and a noxious, choking smell that spews from the engine if you drive if it for more than 30 minutes at a time. Perhaps having Mark and Alex there for the final ride was a sign. But again, I will update rather than make assumptions at this point. I don’t want to depress myself with thoughts of losing the Spacemobile until it’s truly time.
On happier news, the Jury brothers’ visit to Redondo Beach was everything it was cracked up to be. A quick look at the numbers:
715 – The total poundage of Jurys the Spacemobile and later the Gallant had to tote around LA. Perhaps that’s why the van broke.
32 – Bowls of cereal consumed in four days by said poundage of Jurys.
74 – The number of seconds it took for the us to cooperatively drink a 40-ounce of Mickey’s.
7 – Consecutive games of Beer Pong played with JD and the neighbors (the same night) before taking a “vigorous constitutional” around the neighborhood at about 3 in the morning.
11 – Rough estimate on the number of public property items moved or damaged during said constitutional.
By any figures, the Implement of Destruction Takes South Bay was a rampaging success. The only ill-effects were suffered by my dropped digital camera and Mark’s leg, which was badly scraped up when he fell off a wall and rolled down Beryl Avenue, which isn’t well remembered but may have led indirectly to the procurement of a construction horse for our living room with a giant “Sand Bags” sign screwed to it. Oh, and our livers. Our livers suffered immensely.
See the Implement of Destruction Takes South Bay" picture page for photos of a our ping-pong table being used for eating, drinking and opening a can of beans with a power drill when we couldn't find an opener.
WEEK 20
So when you give a 95% chance that the Spacemobile is done, there’s always that 5% chance that will somehow come back to life. That damn thing just won’t die. Here’s what happened – briefly, because frankly I’m almost tired of talking about it.
A couple days after the $1400 transmission estimate had started nailing shut the coffin on the old girl, I innocently dropped off the papers from the Billings repair, just in case that helped them in any way. The next day I received a call from the guy reading it who told me the whole thing might just be covered under warrantee. One catch – I had to authorize a $700 tear-down fee that would allow them to tell for certain. If they got in there and the problem was covered, they’d give back thee 700 and fix everything for free. If not, I lost the 700 and they would hand me the parts back in a bag unless I wanted to pay more to have them put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
“So basically,” I said “You want me to gamble 700 dollars on whether or not the problem is covered by warrantee.”
“Well that’s kind of a silly way of putting it,” he said. “But yeah.”
I told him I’d need to speak to the financial-backers-that-be before I could make such a bet, since this wasn't the worldpokertour.com, and called Mama Jury who said she wanted to talk to the guy as well and see if she could get any more information. And the next day I got a message that she gave him the go ahead to dig in.
That was 5 days ago and I haven’t heard another word from the dealer, but I guess we’re gambling now. C’mon big money big money no whammy no whammy stop.
Also, the following is a conversation JD and I had (basically) with the proprietor of a restaurant in El Segundo labeled “24-Hour-Coffee-Shop” as we walked in at 3:45am one morning a few weeks back:
PROPRIETOR: Sorry, we’re closed.
PAUL: What? I thought you were open 24 hours.
PROPRIETOR: Sorry about that. We actually close from 3:30 until 5:00 each morning.
JD: So it’s like a 22-and-a-half hour coffee shop.
PAUL: But your sign says-
PROPRIETOR: We’re closed.
PAUL: So… what exactly is “24-hours” about it?
PROPRIETOR: I guess nothing. Do you want an omelet or something?
PAUL: I thought this was a coffee shop.
PROPRIETOR: Mostly we serve breakfast, and other food.
JD: So it’s like a 22-and-a-half hour coffee shop that doesn’t serve coffee.
PAUL: But your sign says-
PROPRIETOR: We’re closed.
JD: It smells like a gerbil cage in here.
We ended up going to Denny’s.
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Email me! paul@paulspond.com
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