Kevmobile 1.2 Dodges a Metaphorical Bullet

(No, nobody shot at my car. That's why it's a metaphorical bullet, ya see.) Anyway, my recent automotive woes have been well-documented, so I was more than a little alarmed when the temperature kept rising and rising on my way home last night. I even had to stop a few blocks shy of my neighborhood just to let it rest for a second, but it shot up again right away upon restarting. I was encouraging it on--"Come on, make it home, you can do it!"--which would have been funny to anyone who had passed me, since the window was open at the time. I got into the garage before anything blew up, waited quite a few minutes and carefully opened the hood. Weird-smelling steam billowed out for quite a few minutes; I was content to let it do so before I checked the contents of the coolant reservoir, which had gotten rather low. The radiator had just been replaced last spring, so I was hoping that, if it was indeed the problem, everything was still under warranty.

So I woke up much earlier this morning than I wanted to on a holiday (8:00), and then hit snooze alarms for the next hour and a half, thus actually getting out of bed at about the time I wanted to in the first place. Upon taking the car in, I found out that it was nothing but a bad radiator hose. Whew! Now all they had to do was get the part in...

That was the only downside to this whole thing--because of the holiday, the parts vendor was understaffed, so it took a while for them to get the hose over there. I lingered at Fuddruckers for a good hour or so, but the part had still not arrived. Seasons changed, empires rose and fell....and there I sat. (I would have gone across the street to Firewheel save for the fact that this unusual wet material was falling out of the sky this morning--I'll have to investigate this further at another time--and the only way across the George Bush was rather muddy.) I was happy to find out that the engine did pretty well on the "block test" and showed no real damage; the only thing that happened was that the steam coming out of there last night did a beautiful job of cleaning all the little sedimentary deposits off the engine. So even though it killed part of a holiday (just like back in October, but with a much cheaper bill), the car is in good shape again. Now, if it can make it to December (the date of my last payment) relatively unscathed, I can start saving up for Kevmobile 2.0, maybe sometime in late 2007.

Cream of viper? Feeling cold and in the doldrums this winter? How about some snake soup? They swear by it in Hong Kong... (via Dave Barry's Blog)

Belly up to the counter: On the subject of food that actually tastes good, the new Potbelly opens today in Firewheel Market. They do have soup, but snake is not among the choices...