295 - I have been remiss

I've had a lot going on. Stepping outside the box really keeps you busy!

So I guess first off... I'm seeing someone. Since we talk for several hours each night, I've been neglecting my blog... and... I'm not really sorry... soooo... sorry for not being sorry but I'm not sorry! LOL He's amaaaaaaaazing and I'm really happy about the way things are going. No one has ever treated me better, and I've never felt so in synch before. He's been in Iraq for the past several months and is slooooooooowly making his way home. But... I will get to see him on Sunday and I'm over the moon about that.

It almost feels too good to be true, but instead of looking at it that way and waiting for the other shoe to drop as I normally would, I'm taking it day by day and looking at it as an 'I can't believe how lucky I am' type of thing... It feels very comfortable to me, not uncertain or scary. I feel like we're pages from the same book, so I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Enough mushy stuff. Stay out of my personal life, nosies... ;)

So... let's see, a friend and I are headed to Dallas on Saturday to see Joan Jett, then Sunday we'll travel to Waco to visit the Texas Ranger's Museum (not the baseball team, the police force) and then she's dropping me off at my... boyfriend's (?) house (sorry, it's a weird word...) and he's bringing me back home on Monday.  So I have a full weekend ahead of me! I've been making good on trying to be more social...

Birthday party was awesome. Had about 30+ people at the house. And then there was a hit and run in front of my house, involving a friend's truck and two of my neighbor's cars. The policeman was a complete a-hole and kept trying to insinuate that my friend backed his truck into my neighbor's car, then... um... came back in my house and just left it there? Then a neighbor mentioned that another car rammed into my friend's truck THREE TIMES and sped off, pushing it into my neighbor's car and sideswiping the other neighbor's car. But they kept saying my friend's truck was in the middle of the street to begin with, and then it got rammed. Bullshit. I thought and thought about it and here's what happened:

My friend parked his truck across the street and down from my house. When the last people left my house at 2, his truck was parked where he left it, and he remained inside my house, talking to me and my friend Debra for the rest of the night. He lives about an hour or so away, so he came with the intention of staying the night and I made the guest bed for him. About 2:15 we heard a series of three engine revs and the screeching of brakes -- but I live next to the main drag so I hear crap like that all the time. 3:15 the cops knock on my door and ask him to step outside.

My friend has a standard. When he parks, he leaves it in neutral and engages the parking brake. If the parking brake wasn't fully functional (1996 lightweight truck) or wasn't fully engaged, the lunatic who hit him would have been able to push him into the street if his wheels were angled out. My neighbor, hearing the noise, looks out the window and YES my friend's truck is indeed in the middle of the street... now... then the lunatic revs his engine and pushes the truck again, repeats it once more and it's pushed into my neighbor's car, then squeezes between the vehicles and flees the scene.

I tried my theory on a cop and he said it sounded plausible except that there would have been more damage to my friend's car. Bullshit. In neutral there doesn't have to be a lot of force exerted to move a truck that size. So we're still ironing that out...

And I'm waiting for a call about my car... my Trixie... Took her to get an oil change last night and some a-hole spilled oil ALL OVER everything under the hood. No one bothered to tell me though. So I get in my car, I'm headed home and I smell something. I'm thinking the car in front of me is really stinking up the place, until I get to a stoplight and see that smoke is coming from under my hood. I figured maybe it was starting to overheat, because she was driving fine... well, there was a moment when I felt my heart drop to my toes because Trixie might have been on fire, but the smoke was light grey and not black so I decided that (probably) wasn't the case. My house was only 3-5 minutes further up the road so I rolled the windows down, turned the A/C off and cranked the heater to draw heat off the engine. Temp gauge was fine though...

Get home, park in the garage, all of a sudden there is smoke pouring in through my vents and my garage is smokey. That happened in under a minute. So I back out... in case she did catch on fire I didn't want to burn the house down, too. I was LIVID.

Popped the hood. Everything under there looked clean. Too clean. Wasn't nearly that clean when I took her in... Talked to (we'll call him Bob instead of boyfriend...) and he asked if the oil cap was on. I love guys who know things about cars... It was on, but I told him everything looked too clean, and a little greasy. Looked like someone took Armor All and wiped it down. He asked me to look at the belts and hoses, maybe they were frayed and that would explain the burning rubber smell. In the course of looking for those I noticed that there were some metal plates that had little beads of motor oil on them (see below). Think I found the problem....

Long story short, I got up this morning at 5:30... ask me how happy I am about that... and had her towed in. Rode in a tow truck so frickin' hot I melted. Waited at the dealership from 6:15 to 7:00 AM, killing mosquitos and getting rained on, until they opened. They said they'd get it cleaned up. I said, "You're gonna do a lot more than that." and slammed my list on the desk:

1. Clean up the oil. Do not burn it off. Clean it up.
2. Your dealership covers the cost of replacing the defective coolant sensor I requested to have replaced in November
3. Full tank of gas
4. Detail it like it's going out on the showroom floor (no fruity, flowery or spicy deodorizers)
5. Top off the fluids like they should have been in the first place (windshield wiper fluid was about 2/3 full)
6. Make sure nothing else was half-assed while in your service bay
7. Disciplinary action against anyone who was involved in attempting to cover up the spill
8. Mazda pays for all future oil changes
9. Loaner car

When I called to check on things (which I shouldn't have had to do... manager was supposed to call me but he apparently has no balls), they said they're doing everything on the list but they didn't mention items 7 or 8. We'll discuss 'em when I pick Trixie up this afternoon... They just don't know me yet...

So... pics of the catastrophe...

Right under the plastic reservoir, next to the black wire you can see oil.

Suspiciously clean and shiny... that's my rotary engine next to the yellow oil cap. There's a plastic cover that normally goes over it and that pulls air over the engine to help keep things cool.

My garage floor didn't used to have oil on it...

Hope everyone has a great weekend!