This is not a car on fire.
I stayed a little late at school today in order to get ahead on reading poetry for the literary magazine. I parked on a hill so that the car was crooked; should you look at it from the front, it would be at an angle. Usually when I park over there and I come from the English building, I notice a smallish metal box hanging out from under the car. Today too I noticed it-it was practically falling off. I called my mom, but she was neither home nor answering her cell phone. Dad was otherwise unavailable, so I was left to my own devices. After dithering a little bit, I decided that it didn't look too important and I'd notice if it fell off, so I drove home, a little more slowly than usual.
I pottered around at home for a little while, and then Mom and I played with ramps and jacks to try to figure out exactly what was going on with my car. Mom said it was the heat shield, and a screw probably fell out or something. Turns out, it was held on by brackets, and 3.95 of the 4 connections holding it on had rusted out. So I pulled it off, and Mom's going to try to find replacement brackets for it. In the meantime, I will be a wheeled hazard to brush and small animals that wind up under my car after many minutes of driving (but hopefully not much of one). And I smell like car.
In other news, my laptop screen decided to turn greenish-yellow (or maybe it was yellowish-green) and not show me anything as I was writing this entry. Fortunately Firefox remembered what tabs I had open and LiveJournal remembered what I'd written, so I didn't have to go through the annoying rewrite process. But still, I hope this is not a recurring phenomenon.
And I am very much a fan of the userpic above the journal entry. I might actually remember to give myself a different icon once and a while. The new Rich text tab is handy, and the bottom bar utilizes space much better than it did before. +5 for LiveJournal. The carriage returns disappear if you go from HTML to Rich text, though. They should fix that soon.
I pottered around at home for a little while, and then Mom and I played with ramps and jacks to try to figure out exactly what was going on with my car. Mom said it was the heat shield, and a screw probably fell out or something. Turns out, it was held on by brackets, and 3.95 of the 4 connections holding it on had rusted out. So I pulled it off, and Mom's going to try to find replacement brackets for it. In the meantime, I will be a wheeled hazard to brush and small animals that wind up under my car after many minutes of driving (but hopefully not much of one). And I smell like car.
In other news, my laptop screen decided to turn greenish-yellow (or maybe it was yellowish-green) and not show me anything as I was writing this entry. Fortunately Firefox remembered what tabs I had open and LiveJournal remembered what I'd written, so I didn't have to go through the annoying rewrite process. But still, I hope this is not a recurring phenomenon.
And I am very much a fan of the userpic above the journal entry. I might actually remember to give myself a different icon once and a while. The new Rich text tab is handy, and the bottom bar utilizes space much better than it did before. +5 for LiveJournal. The carriage returns disappear if you go from HTML to Rich text, though. They should fix that soon.