The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: car

  • It’s All Fun and Games Until Some Fool Jumps Your Open Drawbridge in His Car

    It’s All Fun and Games Until Some Fool Jumps Your Open Drawbridge in His Car

    Bridgetending is very Zen, mostly. Until it isn’t.

  • The Very Model of a Modern Lemon

    When I drove up hill, a torrent of water would come out of the dashboard.

  • It All Turns on a Dime

    Everything can change in an instant.

  • “I Can Do It Myself!!!”

    According to family lore, that was one of the first full sentences I ever uttered. That does not surprise me in the least. I’ve always been very independent. I started working when I was 10 years old, growing house plants and selling them at the local flea market. My first major purchase was tickets to…

  • I Miss the Saturn Experience

    I’ve had a lot of cars in my lifetime, but I’ve only bought one that was brand new. It was a 1998 Saturn SL2. I loved that car. Not only because it got me from point A to point B, but at the time the Saturn folks were embarked on this radical new philosophy in…

  • The Great Plate Debate

    My coworker recently had his front license plate stolen off his car, which made me run out to my car and make sure mine was still there, because I never look. That got me thinking. And when I start thinking, it generally turns into a blog post. Sorry. That means there’s nowhere to hide. Having…

  • My Car Buying Experience

    For the first time in many years, I bought a new (to me) car. I had no choice, really. The old one was a death trap. There was no heat, no defrost, and no air conditioning. When it rained, the dash would fill with water and the electrical stuff would flicker on and off and…

  • My Brain on Cruise Control

    With an 8 hour drive ahead of me from Seattle, Washington to Missoula, Montana, I wondered what my brain would do with all that “down time”. So I decided to take a digital recorder with me and whenever I started to think about a new subject, I’d take note. I have no idea whether I’m…

  • Bring It On

    Without going into the gory details, let’s establish that I no longer have heat or defrost in my car, and after several reputable quotes, it would cost about 900 dollars to fix. Well, the vehicle isn’t worth 500 dollars, so that seems like a rather silly investment. Dandy. So I’m buying a portable defroster and…

  • “Tell Him Chuck Sent You.”

    So here I sit in the hot sun, on a greasy chair, in a greasy parking lot, in a really scary side of town, with an ominously sedate and extremely dirty pit bull lying at my feet. The prostitutes are staring at me. And I’ll be here for hours. Just one more curve on my…