I survived ChristChristmasChrist and got cool stuff!

[pseydtonne]

Short version of the long weekend: my girlfriend met my parents and likes them. I met her brother and I want to hang out with him more.

I'm very lucky my office gave me today off as well as Friday because I didn't have to think about what southern New Englanders call a blizzard (eighteen inches). We had started driving back from her parents' place in Burlington VT at 11:30 am yesterday. There was no snow all the way to her place, near where I-495 meets route 2 (the perimeter of Eastern Massachusetts), which we reached at 3 o'clock. Then we took time for her to unpack and play with the cat, Jupiter. The snow began as she headed to work and I home around 3:45. By the time I got to route 128 (about half an hour), the roads were getting miserable. This may not have been a huge snowfall but it got going amazingly quickly.

The rest of the drive was just my normal commute home. Normally this piece should take 25 minutes, but it was more like 45. I stopped to get some groceries and gas, got home at 5:30 and gave up any concept of going outside until the next day.

Christmas had been food and toys but not much sleep; today I slept a dang lot. My overnight sleep was something close to ten hours, then I took two naps of ninety minutes each after that. I also cleared off the car twice even though it didn't snow between cleanings, got the car inspected, had a really nice lunch and confirmed that one more motherboard I own is too dead to keep.

Here is today's tale of People Are Putzim. I spent nearly half an hour cleaning the snow off my car. Even though I had pulled up my wipers from the windshield (something I only learned about when I moved here), my wipers were still deeply encrusted with ice that was hard to remove. The snow was fluffy, so it slid off easily but left lots of remnants. The windows were clean and the major snow removed when I pulled up to the closest garage to get inspected.

"Do you have any snow on your car?" the guy at the desk asked. I wasn't sure he was serious.

"Yes, I have snow on my car. Today, absolutely."

"There must not be any snow on the car, then pull around," he replied. I went back to my car with a lungful of invectives and started another twenty minutes of cleaning.

My feet were getting very cold. I detailed as much as I could. I only had my gloves and a brush/scraper, so work was difficult. I had several more lungsful of invectives for the open air as I worked.

Then it dawned on me: this putz doesn't want to inspect my car. I had been thinking this lightly but it didn't sink in until I had taken as much ice out of the wiper wells and off the grill as possible. He just hoped I'd go away. By this point the car was as clean as I could get it but still had snow on it.

Because it's a few hours after a snow storm and the lot around the garage is a mess! Because there isn't a car wash nearby! Because it's frickin' winter!

I don't know how few pennies the garage gets from the $29 state inspection, but I knew he wasn't getting them. I drove into Newton Center (another mile or so) and got inspected without a problem. There wasn't even a "is it clean?" question.

Unfortunately it was still cold in that shop, so my feet weren't warming up while I read. They also didn't warm up at my late lunch. I had a fabulous salad and good pancetta in the main dish but the eggplant had not been leached correctly. The waitress rocked so immensely with the service that I didn't mind. I tipped well -- besides, I was the only person in the place at what should have been the beginning of dinner rush. I had also found parking right out front, a rarity in Boston.

Now I'm fighting with machinery. Someone needs a basic Windows box to play a game. I needed to clean out useless machinery. I came so close to making a nine-year-old motherboard get one last life over the last couple weeks. Tonight I realized it can pretend that it has the specs but it cannot run a processor fast enough. Oh, it claimed to be a board for overclocking but it couldn't even deal with regular speeds, even with double the power. I reviewed previous notes I'd taken about testing that mobo and understood that it was born with problems it could not see until processors got better.

Now I have a micro ATX motherboard in a giant beige tower and no problems going on. Christmas went well: I gave and received. Soon I shall give a little more.

-hope you had a fine Kugichagulia, Ps/d

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Tell us which garage it was, so we know not to get our cars inspected there.

[adaptively.livejournal.com]

Better yet: tell us which garages will inspect cars that are covered in snow. (It's going to be a very short list.)

[adaptively.livejournal.com]

(Other than Newton Center, obvs. The garages near me won't even inspect mopeds with dirt over the decals.)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

*eyebrow* I think pseydtonne made it clear that his car was not "covered in snow", it simply wasn't kept-in-a-closed-garage-during-a-blizzard clean. Insisting that a car not have a bit of snow on it on a day like yesterday in order to get inspected means you're a lazy bastard who doesn't want to work, and I have no desire to go to a garage that hires such individuals.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

The evil joint was the Gulf station where route 9 meets Hammond Street in Chestnut Hill. Note that there are two Gulf stations at this intersection: one has a garage and the other calls itself a Cumby's but simply has a CVS next door.

The good joint was... possibly another Gulf station? I can't recall... on Beacon Street in Newton Center. It's the most obvious gas station on the Boston side of the center.