noisesome

but first a word from my stomach
which reminds us that forgetting the mere 2oz of milk for your morning weight control oatmeal changes "breakfast" to "slightly cinnamon flavored wallpaper paste eating event"

we now return to normal programming
maybe I shouldn't have asked during a football game. maybe i should have just decided to do it myself all along... i'm fairly adept at most things mechanical if i set my mind to it. whatever maybe i should have listened to, i should have listened.

last week my dad changed the utterly mankified air filter on my car (when i took elliot for an oil change earlier in the month, the guy at my favorite oil change place demonstrated how filthy it was by shaking the leaves and debris all over the floor of his nicely maintained shop). my car is new. the engine is full of wonderful new-fangled contraptions, devices, and otherwise stated - booby traps.

the last two days i have been driving around in a car that sounds like it has a muffler crack in the engine block. (my original thought was to say that it sounded like an old man on a cabbage and chili diet, but i thought it was too graphic - then i changed my mind, cos i sort of like graphic sometimes)

loud.

noisesome.

utterly painful for me, as i could actually hear my fuel efficiency slipping away as i drove the 50 or so mile route to and from work. i put two and two together yesterday and decided to check on the air filter contraption.

sure - changing an air filter is one of those wonderful few things you can generally do on your own with a little patience (evil evil evil clippy things) and only the tiniest bit of mechanical ability. but getting the lid back on has almost always (except in the BIG old cars when/where it was nothing more than the flippity flip spinning of a wing nut) been something of a trick.

elliot is very tricky... and quite frankly, a little tough.

i'll spare you the gory details - short story - dad didn't put the lid back on correctly. i spent about a half an hour, in the cold and wet struggling with figuring out how to eliminate the gap between the cover and the base, and then, once i got that squared away, another 10 minutes romancing the clips into seating themselves properly.

at least i don't have any bruises from the endeavour.

and wonderful elliot is purring down the road once again.