Saturday, April 28, 2007

It's a Long Story...

Well, Fellow Traveler, tired and sore but happy to be home, is esconced on a living room sofa. I am on another sofa.

My car is sitting in my semi-sister-in-law's driveway in Bay City.

It's a long story.

Earlier in the week I'd taken my car in to one of those 15-minute oil change places; there the mechanics said that I was leaking oil and coolant. Yipes.

I went next door to an auto-parts store and asked to see the coolant. The clerk went out to my car and looked under the hood -- it was too hot to open the coolant tank, but we couldn't even see any coolant through the plastic.

I went home and put a couple of pints of coolant and water in the tank. It seemed awfully full, yet from the outside I still couldn't see any coolant at the fill line.

Friday I drove all over the place for work; no problem. I then drove to Bay City; no problem. Until I got to Sister-in-Law's house -- where, and I'm not making this up, as I pulled up to the curb steam started pouring out from under the hood. "Oh, crap," I said, or words to that effect.

So...anyway...Sister-in-Law drove us both back home -- which, in retrospect, was probably a lot easier on Fellow Traveler, not having to schlep into another car.

But my car is 40 minutes away. And -- and this makes the day even more interesting -- so is my wallet, which I evidently left in my car, in Bay City.

Other than that, we're having a swell morning. We really are. It's good to have FT home.

3 comments:

Kirstin said...

Glurp! about the car and the wallet, but I'm glad that FT is home safely with you.

Reverend Dona Quixote said...

Hey LC ... I'm glad FT is home and recovering nicely on her own couch with her own animules.

I have a gardening question that maybe you and FT could put your heads together on. What Michigan-hardy perennial would you plant in a flowerbed, next to the house, that is totally shaded?

Perennials are the ones you don't have to replant every year, right?

I love impatiens ... but those are annuals.

LutheranChik said...

Yes...life is good...and I got my car back and my wallet back. So the car repair is really the only big drama left to deal with until we get around to figuring out how to get FT back to Ann Arbor for a checkup.

Perennials for shade...oh, there are lots. Hostas are easy, and have a lot of different colors and textures of leaves...they're pretty even when they're not blooming. (Hint...interplant some impatiens or coleus or other colorful annuals that can also take the shade.)

I have a small pocket garden, in a shaded area by my front porch, that I've planted with blue perennials. There aren't too many that bloom for long periods of time, so I have a variety with different blooming periods -- blue bulbs of various kinds, violets and periwinkles for spring; blue geraniums and bellflowers for later in the summer; asters for later. I've interplanted some ferns and plants with chartreuse leaves just to lighten things up a bit.