electric relaxation

I’m listening to this piano music compilation and I know for certain that this is in some movie that I’ve seen multiple times (or perhaps many movies that I’ve seen at least once). 

Here’s the song, and the Wikipedia entry.

My mom’s been staying with me since Friday evening. I’ve been completely swamped with work, so I didn’t even have time to go for a walk to the park with her, let alone take her out for a nice dinner. I simply sat at my desk and worked while she cooked for three straight nights for a bunch of my friends (you know who you are) and left me a fridge full of food that ought to last another week. She kept herself busy watching Tamil and Hindi movies streamed off the Internet onto my TV.

Oh yeah, and she also did all my laundry, cleaned my sheets, restocked a bunch of toiletries and cleaned up the whole place.

Thanks Mom.

I asked for, and received, a wireless router for my birthday. I’m pretty sure that some banal variation of that basic plotline has been deployed in at least four different sitcoms that I’ve seen, and probably countless more that I haven’t.

My uncle recently suffered a heart attack and underwent double-bypass surgery at the age of 67. He’s a healthy man who jogged and played tennis regularly well into middle age. 

Meanwhile, I’ve got grandparents and relatives all over the place who’ve died of various heart diseases. Heck, even my mom has super high blood pressure.

Now this…

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/wtsi-thd011509.php

1% of the world’s population carries a mutation almost guaranteed to lead to heart problems and most of these come from the Indian subcontinent, where the mutation reaches a frequency of 4%.

…

The mutation, a deletion of 25 letters of genetic code from the heart protein gene MYBPC3, is virtually restricted to people from the Indian subcontinent. 

…

“We think that the mutation arose around 30,000 years ago in India, and has been able to spread because its effects usually develop only after people have had their children. A case of chance genetic drift: simply terribly bad luck for the carriers.”

Actually it was more like DIH, since Dustin did all the work; I mostly just held the flashlight and fetched tools. It should be noted that I think it was incredibly generous of Dustin and Terry to dedicate the better part of their afternoon to the task of helping me get my car running; very few people would be that generous even if they did have the skills (and fewer still actually have said skills).

Anyway, my diagnosis turned out to be spot-on. I hadn’t driven the car in almost six weeks, since it started overheating one night on the way home. When I got it into my garage and popped the hood, I noticed a loud hissing coming from one of the big radiator hoses, and some speckles of radiator fluid, and more coolant pooled up below. So my theory was that the hose had come loose and I lost coolant and coolant pressure. 

Dustin took a look, confirmed my theory, and then when we took the hose off we discovered that the plastic mount on the radiator had cracked and was crumbling. So the hose didn’t really have a good seal, and it had come loose. First we filled up the radiator with some 50/50 antifreeze, and then Dustin reclamped the hose.

The first attempt at a patchwork solution involved using duck tape to get more stable surface area for the hose to clamp on. The battery was dead, so we first had to jump it. That was mildly challenging given the orientation of my car and the layout of my garage, but I had pushed it out by hand far enough that we could get Dustin’s truck close and hook up the cables. 

We jumped the car, and at Dustin’s suggestion I turned on the A/C and we gave it some throttle to try and generate some heat and force the coolant system into action. Once the car had heated up, we saw that the duck tape was actually making the situation worse, since it was so slick that the hose was sliding off it. I killed the engine before the hose could pop off completely, and then we unclamped it. I used an old cookie sheet I had handy to catch all the radiator fluid that then leaked out the bottom. 

We ended up giving up on the tape and just reclamping the hose directly onto what was left of the mount, but moving the clamp itself up as far as it would go. This seems to be working much better. We then ended up pouring in more than half a gallon of radiator fluid; turns out the car was nearly empty, and Dustin’s theory was that there was a huge air bubble that had gotten sucked in due to the empty fluid reservoir and the leaky hoses. 

Eventually the radiator seemed to be holding coolant at the correct pressure (based on Dustin’s estimation), so we called it a day. I left the car running for another half hour, then we took it around the block a few times to make sure it wasn’t likely to suffer a spontaneous dramatic failure.

Anyway, this barely even qualified as a repair job in Dustin’s playbook (I mean, the motherfucker rebuilt an entire engine in four days on a truck he bought for five hundred bucks in New Mexico, just so he could drive it back here before the end of his vacation). But I was very excited. 

I’m probably going to have to buy a new radiator, given that the mount doesn’t seem to be replaceable. The current plan is to just get it delivered to the office, then drive the car over to Dustin’s house in Pacifica and do the installation there.

Despite spending the last several years trying desperately hard not to care about anything, I still have a few convictions left. One of them is that diamonds and the luxury diamond industry are a shining example of some of the sickest, stupidest, most disgusting aspects of human behavior. Fuck diamonds, and fuck the people who buy them. Yes, I realize this includes many of my friends and family. Fuck you, sell outs!

Now that that’s out of the way. Shane Co. is going out of business! Ok, so I have some remorse for the employees. I have only slight, vestigial twinges of sympathy for the people who are now short their layaways or deposit money. Too bad, suckers. Mostly I’m just thrilled because it means I’ll never have to hear one of their shitbox ads ever again. I don’t listen to the radio anymore, mostly because most radio ads make me want to drive my car off a bridge, and Shane Co. was first among equals in contributing to the cesspool of sewage that constitutes modern radio advertising.

Sadly, diamonds seem to be yet another reason why, despite my claims to the contrary, I’ll never end up actually marrying an Indian girl. In closing, it’s hard to yell when the barr-el’s in yo mouf. 

[p.s. in case it wasn't entirely obvious, I'm in a bad mood today, because I had to get in to work at 8AM for a demo. Personally, the only time it's ever acceptable for me to be at work that early is after an all-nighter .]