The Mistress Lives

Zorak *drum roll, please* got The Mistress working again! (Aw, heck, throw in the Hallelujah Chorus, too, he worked for it.) Yes, Chris, The Mistress is a BMW. She's an eccentric 1980 R65 with random parts issues and a sneaky gremlin. She's been intermittently earning her keep since Charles hooked up with her in August. Well, no, that's not entirely fair. She came with an entire herd of gremlins (what would that be? Gaggle? Flock?) Zorak has steadfastly eradicated them from her person, but just as he'd get two out, a new one would reach maturity and thwart his dreams of Mobility For All. From what I can tell, she has a number of oddities that are fairly specific to the R65 series, and to that year, in particular. (Like the coils, which all the specs say require one X type coil, and yet if you look, she clearly has two Y type coils. When you push enough to get a technician on hand, the tech will happily tell the sales rep that you are not an insane freak trying to drive the entire sales division into despair, and yes, it really does require something like that. It's nice to be able to get that confirmation from someone else who has actually touched the model year you're referring to. She sounds good tonight, and yet, I don't trust her yet. She has shifty eyes... so, can we take you up on a brain-picking session in the future? Charles, he is attached to her, and he has this thing about keeping her around.

The Chevy thang doesn't concern me so much. A 350 is a 350 and disk brakes are disk brakes. Nothing under the hood or the chassis on the Suburban that scares me. (And believe me, the next time the tranny goes out after the warranty is up, I'm rebuilding the thing myself. In my garage, on my time, and it's gonna be done right.)

You know, it's funny. Zorak and I do the good cop/bad cop thing when we need to, and it works well, naturally even. Except that, well, I scare the piss out of them and he's just really nice. I mean it, he is nice on a cellular level. So they hide from me and he can't bring himself to make them deal with me if he feels they've been sufficiently shamed. Meanwhile, I'm foaming at the mouth and just ready to do an Ozzy Osbourne show right there on the sales counter with the first bat, er, salesman who tries to blow smoke in my ear. *shrug* It's good that God gave me Zorak. Otherwise, I'd probably have restraining orders against me with Midas, AAMCO, and that guy in San Middle Of Nada near the AZ/NM border.

So, it looks like we are relatively mobile. If we can wrangle a truck tomorrow (which we've heard, through the rumor mill, is a distinct possibility!), we're set. Yay!

Dy