I keep meaning to write, but when I look up from whatever it is I am currently working on so I can cross it off my to-do list, it’s after 10 and I need to go to bed. I keep meaning to read, but that darn to-do list squeezes out new items when I’m not looking and grows again. I keep meaning to get things done, but first I have to do this, and before this, I have to do that, and before that, well, let’s just say that it squeezes in both directions.
Every time I looked out the windows today it was snowing. Swirling, flurrying, white whirling in the air. Mostly, after it was actually down, out of the air, it looked like those tiny tiny plastic pellets that fill Beanie Babies and suchlike. As if God was a big dog that had grrrred and grrrooowwwled and ripped the head off his stuffie and now it was trailing tiny white pellets EVERYWHERE. Those suckers are a pain to clean up.
It’s been a tough week for reasons I can’t talk about here. A week that has had me flailing about, trying to figure out how to fix things that ultimately I can do nothing about. In addition to that, my car decided it was time to sproing problems out left and right, like springs popping out of a really worn mattress…even though the car is not that old and in really decent shape, thanks to my husband’s high level of care. I asked Anders to fill the windshield wiper fluid up a couple of weeks ago and it turned out that it WAS full…but the pump was broken. Which wasn’t THAT big a deal when it was clear weather, but come snow and slush and salt, and the fact that I drive 3 kids to school every day and home again every evening, and couldn’t see for the life of me, out of the big streaky smear that was my windshield, it kinda took over my life for a few days there.
On Monday, I drove 4 colleagues and myself to a Christmas lunch at one of our vendors. 40 minutes there and though it was clear skies, it was slush-city and for the first 10 minutes as the windshield grew more and more dim and spattered with tiny tiny particles of sludge, I was afraid to use the windshield wipers because I knew the moment I did, it would be a total white-out. And I was right. I actually had to drive right up behind a truck as close as I could (within reason) to get enough liquified mudslush slopped up on my windshield to be able to actually use the wipers to wipe enough off to see again…for 5 minutes before things starting clouding over again. We had to stop at a gas station halfway there and buy a squirt bottle and wiper-fluid, and my co-worker cleaned the windshield thoroughly before we started off again. Sigh. And then we discovered that the interior lights wouldn’t go off when I closed and locked the car. We had to turn them off manually. But we made it there, and back again.
SO, the part for the pump came yesterday and when I drove home in the gloaming, Anders was ready to trade cars and take mine into the garage while I bogarted his and drove to Malmö for an AWC julbord dinner. And when I returned home, he had fixed the lights and the pump, but had to inform me that one of my tires was completely flat when he moved the car to start working on it. “Flat?” I exclaimed, like I didn’t know the meaning of the word. I was boggled. I had driven home and not noticed anything at all. “Totally flat,” he replied. He found a rivet in it. He put the summer tire spare on so I could get the kids to school this morning and then I dropped off the tire at a mechanic and went to work and they called not even an hour later to say it was fixed and I picked it up at lunch and when I got home Anders swapped the tires back. He’s awesome. Truly.