Looking for the Cheese. . . .

You know, most days, we’re too busy to stop and think about what we’re doing. You get up, you eat breakfast, you get ready for work, you go to work, you work, you eat lunch, you work, you drive home, you eat dinner, you space out in front of the telly for a few hours and you go to bed, you get up, you eat breakfast. . . .

I was on the treadmill the other night and I suddenly realized how symbolic the treadmill was of my life. I’m going at an okay clip, not as fast as I could go or I’d be uncomfortable, not as slow as I’d like since it really wouldn’t be worth it, but I’m not really going anywhere. I ended up exactly where I started. Was this a metaphor for my life? For all our lives?

Sure, there are people out there that are living it up, loving every moment, carpe diem and all that, but aren’t most of us just mice on a really big treadmill? We’re putting it out there, but where are we going? Are we even going anywhere? Aren’t we all just looking for the cheese?

But what’s the cheese?

I’m saving for my retirement, which while financially a sound idea, seems ludicrous at times. While I work, I save for when I won’t have to work. I save so I can do all the things I want to do, but I don’t get to do all those things now, because that wouldn’t pay the bills. Is my whole life transferring imaginary money on Scotiabank? Is retirement my cheese? That seems dumb because I may get hit by a bus tommorrow, or be too old to enjoy it. Retirement is old cheddar, you have to wait for it.

Is vacation the cheese? Those two weeks you take off work to go someplace, see something, do something? But vacation goes by so fast, and you never get enough. Vacation must be cheese fondu.

Is family the cheese? I’m not married, I may not ever get married, and I don’t really see myself having kids so if family is the cheese then it’s my blue cheese, some people think it’s great and others just pass it by.

But is any of that my cheese? They say life is a journey, not a destination, so does that mean that looking for the cheese is the cheese?

It’s too deep for me! I don’t have time to sit around and figure out what the cheese is! And isn’t that the whole problem? And your cheese is probably not my cheese so even if you figure it out, you can’t tell me.

So, I guess it’s back on the mouse treadmill tomorrow.

photo from Flickr

The Art of the Nap

Why do we shamefully hide the fact that we are creatures who require sleep? Why do people brag about being able to get by on only four hours a night? The hold it up to your face like a badge of honor that they can fully function on minimal quantities of sleep, while you are left to feel shamed and guilty because you cannot function on such little rest.

Why do we lie if someone catches us sleeping?

Ring-ring, the phone intrudes on your slumber, you groggily grasp for it and hit the ‘talk’ button while faking your best, “Nope, been up for hours” voice.
“Did I wake you?” They ask, feigning politeness but underneath it all, there is that oh-so-snarky tone.
“Nope. I couldn’t find the phone.”

I gave up lying like this years ago. Anyone who knows me knows that sleeping is my favourite thing. I love crawling into bed at night, sliding under my pile of blakets, arranging my pillows, snuggling down, and then with a sigh, I close my eyes. When you call me and I answer the phone with a slurred voice, I am not drunk. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the phone. It’s that you woke me up! I don’t care if it is 11 am on a Saturday. I get up with Portia and Rocky at 6.30 for them to have breakfast and a pee break and once doggy bellies are full and bladders empty, it’s back to snooze land I go!

I also try to nap at least one day on the weekend. It’s my not-so-guilty-pleasure. For those of you who don’t nap, you are missing out. It’s the highlight of my day. Here is my guide to the nap.

Start off earlier in the day if you can, to avoid disrupting your nighttime sleep. Although, I require so much sleep, I can generally nap for three hours and it won’t affect me. Not even if I chug a latte right before bed.

Turn off the phone.

Make your room dark.

Let your roommate know you are napping (Jenge knows that when I am napping, someone better be crying or dying before she wakes me.)

Never nap for less than 45 minutes. Whenever I read those books that say have a 20 minute nap, I snort. C’mon! It takes me that long to go through my left-side, right-side, left-side routine to get comfy. Nap at least 45 min, but keep it under 3 hrs or you start to feel too groggy when you wake up.

Now, some of you might be saying, I can’t nap! I have kids! I have housework! I have yardwork! I have to do my taxes! Go grocery shopping!

To which I say: Sucks to be you. Thems the breaks. I don’t have kids, the housework can wait, the yardwork can wait, my taxes are done, and I’d rather have no food in the house than forgo the joy of napping.

Bonus tip: Get an electric blanket! So great to crawl into a warm bed on chilly days!

Choose Your Hell

Mes enfants! Yes, I took a brief sojourn for a few days but I am back!

So, when Jenge and I are bored, staring at a blank TV, with nothing else to say to one another (I mean, when you live with your sister, there is only so much new news. After that it’s all,”Did I tell you about. . “, ‘Yes, yes you did, twice.” “Oh, What about .. . ?” “Yes, that too.”) we have this game we play called Choose Your Hell. Choose your Hell was born on a bus in Greece when we were the only two english speaking people on a tour arranged for us by our Aunt Freida (who doesn’t really speak English and so the fact that we asked if the tour was in English somehow got a little lost in the translation). Hours after hours on a bus in the middle of the Greek countryside, we never knew where we were going, how long it would take or what we were doing when we got there. So we used to play this game.

The object of Choose Your Hell is to present two equally unappealing things to the other person and they must choose. There are good points to each choice but there are bad points. Case example:

Marry a guy with only one eyebrow
Marry a guy with no eyebrows

And then the questions can start:
When you say one eyebrow do you mean monobrow?
Nope. Only one eyebrow, on one side of the face.
Left side or right side?
Um. Let’s say left side.
Can he pencil one in?
Nope. He refuses to. He is totally content with his one eyebrow and that’s that!
Does he have dark hair or light hair?
Jet black. It’s totally noticeable.
Hmmm. It’s just that people with no eyebrows always look so surprised. But I’m a big fan of symmetry. ummm. . . .

And eventually you will have to make a choice. Now, over the years, I have tried to pass on this game to other people and so far VERY FEW people understand that Choose Your Hell is not about grossing the other person out and it’s not about picking two horrific things for the other person to choose between, it’s about giving them two things that are both kinda undersirable, but ultimately, you COULD live with if you had to. Like one day I gave Jenge the choice between P. Diddy or Jay Z. These are both wealthy music moguls, attractive in their own right, but we don’t find either one of them particularly attractive. So who do you pick? I believe Jenge and I both voted for P. Diddy because he has more money.

But most people I tell this game to always go for the ultimate gross out. They think they are being sooooooooo funny and isn’t it terrible that you have to choose??

I generally give them a blank stare, play along for a few minutes and then try never to bring it up again.

Donna and Jenn M (my peeps!) both understand the subtlety of choose your hell. The best one lately was when Jenn M propsed “Guy with no toenails, guy missing a finger” The debate went on for a full twenty minutes. . .
Does he wear socks all the time?
Nope, open toed sandles. He has no shame about his missing toenails.
Which finger?
Pointer finger.
Which hand?
Right hand.
Is he left or right handed?
Right handed. And he’s a hand talker. It’s always waving in your face.
Is it the whole finger?
No, just the top digit. He still uses it to point at stuff all the time.

And just when I was thisclose to choosing the guy with no finger, Jenn M goes. “Wait! Wait!” and then she knuckled over one of her fingers and leaned in and pretended to brush something off my face, mimicking the no finger guy! I squealed like a nine year old girl, “No toenails! No toenails!!”

She however, has a severe fear of feet so she had to choose no finger guy.

So there you have it. Choose Your Hell. The ultimate bordem buster.

Craft is Whack!!

Yes, it’s true, I am a craft junkie. It came as quite a surprise to me. I started out flipping through Ann’s stuff and then she leaned over one day and said, “Maybe you should stamp. You could make your own cards.”

Hmmm, my own cards. So I bought some stamps from Stampin’ Up (Ann had a friend, Shelley, who sold Stampin up).

Soon, I was churning out my own Christmas cards. Card after card of shimmery trees and happy hedgehogs, all with a personalized touch.

And then Ann leaned over one day and said, “You should try scrapbooking.”

Hmmm. Scrapbooking. I didn’t have any scrapworthy photos, I thought. But there was the Come as You Aren’t Party and that was a good photo op. I would scrapbook that.

And then I started scrapbooking Portia. Who, quite frankly, is very photogenic.

A couple of months ago, Jengie wanted in on arts and crafts too, so she decided to take up knitting.

Hmmm. Knitting. I could make a scarf!!

Jenge jettisoned it after a week, I am happily knitting away. And I just bought a book to teach me how to crochet.

I’m a CRAFT HO!!

This last couple of months, here is what my chequing account had to say to me:
Latest purchase of stamps – $150.00
Latest purchase of paper – $80.00
Yarn to make cape – $24.00
Yarn because it was 30% off – $25.00
Specialty yarn bought online along with bamboo needles and pattern – $90.00 USD
Yarn because it was pretty and fun to touch – $30.00

It starts off with people lending you stuff, kinda like – Hey the first hit is free! Now, Ann and Shelley is are my dealers. We meet secretely and speak in code: Have you seen the new Basic Grey? I just got Urban Couture, and there’s a coupon this week! If you go to Technique Tuesday, you can get acrylics. Scrapshotz is having a sale on MM!! I’m almost out of Crystal Glaze, and pop ups.

I joined an online knitting group and they are feeding my yarn fetish. Yarn stores online I never knew about!! Patterns for things I didn’t even know you could make!! They too have a code: DK, Alpaca, Mohair, Yarn Over, Chunky weight.

The craft world is the seedy underbelly of suburbia. Women meeting in out of the way coffee shops to show off their treasures and gab about life. You lie about how much you spend, you lie that the stuff you bought was on sale, you tell your non-crafty friends that it’s really an investment, because you’ll have it for years. You spend the day thinking about what you will do when you get home. Will it be knitting? Crochet? Scrapping? Stamping? You jones all day long for your next fix!! You go on weekend benders with the girls to ranches in the middle of no where to scrap (yes, such places exist and you have to book ahead 10 months, they are so busy! – But if you need the number – call me!). You proudly parade your creations in front of anyone who will listen (and even those who won’t) all the while knowing that while they may appreciate the effort, they do not feel the certain je ne sais quoi about it that you do. They don’t realize that this is the last time you can use Basic Grey Black Tie because it has been discontinued, or that your yarn was a steel considering it’s mohair.

Sniff. The life of a junkie. No one but your enablers understands you!!

Wake up and smell the anti-reality!

Yes, I watch soap operas, and yes I enjoy them greatly. I love the crazy plot lines, the over the top dialogue and that one great holy grail of it all – soap opera hair! Where else can you see coma patients that look better than you do after an hour of trying to do your hair and makeup? Where else do women wear fashionable short sleeves and tank tops in the middle of winter with outrageous high heels? You couldn’t even get into your car with those heels but they wear them to catch serial killers.

So what’s my beef? Well, on All My Children, recently, Erica Kane found out that the pregnancy she terminated in the 70’s was not terminated. Her embryo was transplanted to another woman and she has a son she never knew about! The Scandal! The Outrage! The fabulous hair tosses!

But the soap opera community is in an UPROAR. When Erica had her abortion in the 70’s it was even more taboo than it is today. And she had it because she wanted to be a STAR! And she didn’t want to be saddled with a kid! She had dreams!! Ambitions!! And the soap opera fans are complaining because:
1. This apparently takes away from her Womens’ lib choice
2. This procedure is not even medically possible
3. TPTB (The Powers that BE) have decided to rewrite history!

Ummmm.. . . Did y’all forget that you are watching a soap? Just off the top of my head, here are some things that the soap opera fans have not been in uproar about in the past. . . (from a bunch of different shows)
1. People who have come back from the dead or presumed-dead: AMC – Tad, Dixie, Zach Slater(although we didn’t know him when he was dead, lol), Miranda. ATWT – Holden, James Stenbeck, Paul. GH- Luke, Laura, Lucky, Stavros Cassidine, Helena Cassidine, Carly. OLTL – Todd, Nikki Smith, Cristian, Mitch Lawrence, Victor Lord, Margaret Cochrane. B and B – Taylor (TWICE!!). DAYS – Don’t even get me started!!
2. People who have been kidnapped/held hostage/terrorized more than once: AMC – Greenlee, Kendall, Lily, Dixie, Little Adam, Bianca, Miranda, Babe, Brooke, Krystal, Adam, Opal. ATWT – At last count I believe Lily had been kidnapped at least 7 times! OLTL – Nora, Natalie, Evangeline, Marcie, Blair. GH- Carly
3. People who had dramatic face lifts, came back to town and no one recognized them: AMC – Janet Green/Dillon. OLTL – Todd Manning. DAYS – John Black/Roman Brady.
4. Had a doppleganger or secret twin: DAYS – Marlena/Samantha, Marlena/Hattie and Bo/Evil Bo., Kristen DiMera/Susan Blake/Sister Mary/Penelope (Yes there were FOUR of them!). OLTL: Bo and Faux Bo (I kid you not! That’s what he was called!), Colin/Troy. ATWT: Lily/Rose. Sunset Beach – Derek/Ben. Santa Barbara – Robert/Quinn. GH – Connor/Nicolas, Lorenzo/Luis. YR – Katherine Chandler/Poor Waitress. AMC – Maggie/Frankie, Stuart/Adam, Anna Devane/Alex Devane. Passions – Grace/Faith
5. Had Amnesia (Curable or Not): GH – Jason Quartermaine. ATWT – Holden Snyder. B and B – Stephanie Forrester. AMC – Tad Martin. DAYS – John Black, Marlena. OLTL – Cristian Vega. Passions – Grace.
6. Slept with someone and later found out they may/maynot be related to you (through DNA): Passions – Chad and Whitney (so far, they are half siblings – ew!). Y and R – Cole and Victoria (verdict – Not related). ATWT – Holden and Lily (verdict – related by marriage and adoption, not by DNA). GH – Lucky and Liz (verdict – related by marriage, not DNA). OLTL – Tina and David (not related, but they still did the deed when they thought they were!).
7. Slept with someone who later turns out is married to/involved with a relative (or slept with someone you knew was married to/involved with a relative): GH – Sam and Sonny. OLTL – Lindsay and Bo. Days – Sami, Austin, Lucas, Carrie. Y and R – Cole, Victoria, Nikki. AMC – Tad the Cad Martin, Liza, Marian. Kendall, Zach, Ethan, Michael.

I could go on and on. . . .
Don’t panic, I don’t watch all these soaps, but I do keep up to date with my Soap Opera Digest 😉

Clearly, we are not dealing with reality here, people!! If they have to bend the rules of space, time and physics so that I can be mindlessly entertained for an hour (or so), I’m okay with that!! Why aren’t you??

Rob Thomas, you rock my world!

Donna and I went to Rob Thomas tonight and it was AWESOME! Thanks to Donna getting pre-notification for tix (because she goes to all those Motley Crue concerts) we had awesome seats, 9th row from the front. We could see the whites of his eyes!

It was a great show. His opening act was Anna Nalick (whose music is available at iTunes) and she was really good. She had a great voice and her music was fabulous and she had on the cutest pair of shoes I have ever seen. You totally need to download her album from iTunes, ‘Wreck of the Day.’

And then it was on to Mr. Rob Thomas. He has an amazing voice and it’s even better in person than it is on his records. He did alot from his new album, ‘Something to Be’ and some of his Matchbox Twenty stuff, and even a cover of David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ which totally made me get up outta my seat and shake my bootie, and I’m rather shy about my bootie shaking so you KNOW it was good if I got up and got my groove on. His band was super! And the lights were so great! It was such a good show, totally worth any price. I normally think concerts are a great idea until I get there and it’s too loud and there’s so many people (They don’t call me squirrelly girly for nothin’) but I hardly noticed because it was such a terrific show.

I’m running out of adjectives to tell you how much I loved it! Great music, great sound – you could actually make out the lyrics unlike some other concerts where all you hear is ‘Whanh whanh whanh – drum solo – whanh whanh whanh.’ And my ears are hardly ringing, which is a first for me.

So, Rob Thomas, if you’re out there in cyberspace and you happen upon my blog, your show was simply marvy!! THANKS!!

The Perils of being Female. . .

As a woman, I am well aware every day of the dangers that I face. Walk alone late at night? No, thank you! Go to FutureShop to buy a computer? Um, no, not unless I want to walk out the door with a thousand dollars of stuff I don’t need and a warranty that will expire a mere two days before my hard drive crashes. Go to the mechanics? Nope. Prefer to wait until the entire thing blows apart in pieces while doing 100 clicks and hour.

But, last night I faced the most treacherous part of being a girl . . .


I was waiting for Grey’s Anatomy to come on (which CTV had said was going to be on a 10pm due to the Junos. Fascist liars!!) so I figured I had time for a bath and a quick pedi. After getting the water just right I added my moisturizing bubble bath. As I soaked, I used my moisturizing body scrub and then my moisturizing foot rub (I live in Calgary, okay! It’s very dry here!). About 15 minutes into my Calgon moment, Jenge yelled upstairs that Grey’s Anatomy was on and I was missing it! Stupid CTV didn’t stick to their schedule! I have a very firm bedtime of 10 pm (due to my tendancy to fall asleep in my car) which I had decided to forgo, but if there was a chance I could still make it, I knew I had to hustle.

And then came the dangerous part. . .

Trying to haul my very soapy body and soapy feet out of a tub full of moisturizing product. I nearly died!! I could have been killed!! Thank GOD for the handle on the wall of my tub. Seriously! I need a valet to help me out in times like this!! There was sloshing and a heart stopping moment when I nearly lost it, but I prevailed, upright and unscathed.

I get the chills just thinkin’ about. It’s dangerous work being a girly girl. NOT for the faint of heart!

‘Sucks’ to be you!

So I write fiction in my spare time (although I haven’t put anything to paper in 2 years! I’m working on a lot of if in my head). So, consequently, I have a lot of kooky stuff rattling around in my noodle. New characters, new plotlines, snappy dialogue . . . Prolly explains why I have so many weird dreams. But I digress . . . I am going to be introducing a new character into my coven of witches (the central group of my current story). His name is Sebastian (or Baz, as I like to call him). Sebastian is a vampire (you had to see that one coming, I mean I write about witches for crying out loud). But thinking about Sebastian, where he comes from, what he does, got me thinking.

If you’re a vampire, following the traditional rules of fiction, summertime SUCKS for you! (Oh the PUN!)

I mean, you have, what, maybe 6 hours of darkness at best?? How does one rule a large conglomarate of vampires, run a business and do his grocery shopping all within 6 hrs of darkness in the summer?? Impossible!! (Although some of you may think that the whole idea of a vampire is impossible, to me, it’s just another literary device to get my story told)

Lucky for me, I am god in this crazy universe so I can bend the rules. This time, I’ve simply changed the rules. Baz and his hoard of vampires simply prefer the night, but can be out and about during the day. Much like us mortals who can be out in either day or night but have made a choice to make daytime our preference, Baz and the vamps prefer the night. The ultimate night owls, or bats, as the case may be.

Even though I have outrageos plotlines and insane twists in my stories, I’m a practical girl at heart. My characters are frequently seen in the grocery store buying milk or grousing that they have no clean socks because with all the running around killing people and stealing sacred artifacts, laundry day fell to the wayside. They stop to eat, they bitch about waiting for public transit, they spill spaghetti sauce on their shirt at lunch and have to go the whole day with a large marinara stain on their shirt, despite the fact that they are the most powerful people in the world. I think it adds a sense of quirkiness that you could burn an entire forest down with the snap of your fingers or shapeshift into a bird, but spill your latte in your car, and you’ve got to get it to the car wash before the milk goes bad. Or the whole things will smell, despite the fact that you are one of the most powerful creatures in the universe.

Why has no one else addressed this in previous vampire novels? Why does no one make mention of the fact that you have 6 hrs to get all your pillaging done before you get all crispy? It irks me when published writers don’t address what I consider to be serious plot holes. Is it winter all the time? Do they live in the North Pole? (Discussing this with my chiropractor, he said that if he were a vampire, he would live half the year in the north pole, half in the south pole, that way he could go out whenever he felt like it!). Do vampires get shack-wacky in the summer? Suffer a form of Seasonal Affective Disorder because they are trapped inside for most of the season? (Wait a minute – this could be a whole other book!)

Does anyone care but me??

Anarchist Catholic

Used to be, if someone like me was going on and on about issues they had with the Catholic Church, they would fit me for a nice oak backbone before they burned me at the stake. Now, they can’t even be bothered to know who I am long enough to excommunicate me.

It’s not that I’m not religous, or don’t believe in the Big Guy. I just have a real problem with his adminstration. I mean, I don’t get to choose who my pope is. I don’t get to choose my representatives. The Vatican is not a democratic state! So I’m left to trust that the leader of my faith is appropriately chosen by some really old, right wing guys in funny hats who don’t seem to know what is going on the world today. Guys who still think that a woman’s best place is either a: by her husbands side churning out hoardes of Catholic kids or b: wearing a habit dedicating her life to the Guy Upstairs.

And we’re all waiting for the second coming, but let’s be honest, if Jesus did come back, we’d probably look him up in an insane asylum because we wouldn’t believe him.

Like I said, I believe. I pray. St. Anthony (patron saint of lost stuff) has never let me down! But it’s the organized in organized religion that I have a problem with. Where do these guys get their decisions from? It’s not like they have a special red phone in the Vatican that links them directly to God, like Commissioner Gordon had for Batman. And the truth is, alot of our cornerstones are choices that were made for political and financial reasons in days gone by but now we’re stuck with them. No marriages for priests? – Financial decision by the Church so that they would not lose incomes to any potentials heirs that may arise from the union. No women in the higher echelons of the Church? – Well I don’t recall that being in the Bible (although I may be wrong). That’s because we have traditionally lived in a patriarchal society.

I mean, the used to make you pay for forgiveness for crying out loud. If you had a government like this, you would be outraged!! Forming underground movements! Calling on other leaders to pressure your government for change!

But you’re Catholic, so you sit down quiety and feel guilty about it.

So, what’s a girl who wants to believe to do? Overthrow the administration? Form an anarchist Catholic state? The other uber-catholics would most likely be the ones to burn me at the stake then (or send me hate mail – What is with that? The ones who claim to be most religious always end up to be whack jobs. – God save me from religious zealots!), but I still doubt that Benedict XVI would even know or care who I am.

So I put my faith in the Big Guy upstairs and hope that when I finally do croak, St. Peter doesn’t meet me at the gates and inform me there is a GOD-Phone identical to the Batphone and God has been phonings his decisions in (or voting by proxy) for the last couple hundred years.

Caution! Mechanic at Work!

So the ‘engine coolant’ light has been on in my car for about three weeks now. Since this is not the first time it has come on, I’m not as squirrelly about it as I should be. I’m due for an oil change too (or overdue, since I shoulda gone in September), so I just thought that I would get them done at the same time.

Flash forward 3 weeks and I still haven’t gone and that little red light is like my conscience. Quiet, unassuming, but it’s there all the time, weighing heavy on my soul

So I blow the dust off my owner’s manual and read up on Engine Coolant, inconveniently located in four separate sections of my manual, all of which you have to read if you want to know what’s going on.

I go to Wal-Mart and couldn’t find exactly what the manual said I needed. So I called my mum and asked her to ask my dad (Dad’s a little deaf and a lot Greek so asking him technical stuff on a cell phone is generally a bust. Your best bet is to ask mum, who will then shout it several times at Dad and when he mumbles an answer, she will tell you what it was). But Dad and Mum weren’t 100% sure (at least you didn’t sound 100%, Mum!), so I asked the guy who worked there. He was helpful, but unfortunately they didn’t have what I wanted. And I hate asking questions like that because it makes me feel dumb. I’m not dumb, I’m just not an auto-mechanic.

So off to Cambodian (Canadian) Tire, where I purchase my Dex-Cool engine coolant and then it’s back home. Jenge says, “You’ve done this before?”

“Nope!” I reply, “But I read the book.” And here are my instructions if you want to do it too!!

1. After ensuring engine is cool (okay, I ensured it wasn’t hot, I mean I drove home 2 hrs ago so it was warm but not hot), remove the lid of your coolant tank while being careful not to get sprayed in the eyes by liquid burning fire!! The burning the burning!! (this was according to the picture in the book of what could happen if you did it wrong – so not helpful)
2. My coolant (and I think everyone else’s) has to go in a half and half mixture with water. Why they don’t sell it diluted when everything else in the world is a rip-off, I have no idea, so step 2 – Fill pickle jar with water (I used a standard Vlasic pickle jar – Baby Dill with garlic)
3. Empty pickle jar into coolant tank
4. Fill pickle jar with coolant (thus ensuring my 50-50 mixture, plus my coolant tank was empty with a capital E so I knew I’d be adding lots!)
5. If still not full, fill pickle jar half way with water, the rest with coolant.
6. Add to tank.
7. Peer into cavernous dark hole and wonder if it’s working. (This step optional)
8. Screw lid on tightly. Remind self not to wipe hands clean on cream sweater.
9. Close hood.
10. Check nails for breakage. No breaks, we’re good!
11. Start car

And no coolant light!! I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to make sure it doesn’t pop on at some point since it was on 80% of the time, but off for 20%. Wish me luck!

So the running tally of things I can do for myself regarding my car is now:
1. Change windshield wipers
2. Change tire (Shut it Donna, I can so!)
3. Add washer fluid
4. Add Coolant
5. Check oil
6. Add oil (I haven’ t changed it yet, but I have added it after the light came on!)
7. Jump start with cables
8. Check battery
9. Know when the alternator is about to blow and why the alternator is a VERY IMPORTANT part of your car!!

Yea me!