I can't believe it was a week ago that my left ankle buckled and I fell, because mentally, due to the car situation, it's felt like weeks ago, even though I am still wearing the ankle brace for walks. Weirdly, the right knee I bruised badly in that fall hurts again now, even though the swelling has gone and the marks have faded to yellow-green.

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I drove Civic home, one final time. The first time I tried at the service station lot I couldn't get Drive to engage at all. I had to restart the car and this time it worked. Fortunately for me, I didn't have to stop driving at red lights for long because I could feel the fluctuations if the car didn't keep going forward at a steady pace. (My Drive ( Read more... )

The transmission is dead. A new transmission is very expensive and my car has some other very expensive problems that need to be addressed in the near future. My mechanic told me he couldn’t in good conscience-

Civic is dead. She was with me for about 19 and a half years. In a way, she's been my second home, the single stable one I've had since 2001 ( Read more... )

Today was such a bad day.

It started out pretty well. Weather reports said it was supposed to snow for several hours at a time when I had to drive to a doctor's office in Long Island and then drive back, but there was no snow. I had some transmission glitches right before I arrived at the office. This would become important later.

The women at the ( Read more... )

One of my favorite new YouTube creators is Behind the Seams, which looks at costume design in movies, the good, the bad, and the "huh?" It's by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of Hello, Tailor.

From
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Since gasoline has gone up 20¢ a gallon in Queens and Long Island in the last two weeks, I filled up Friday in the worry that it might continue rising. I hope prices calm down a bit once people realize white supremacists haven't taken over the country by force and that Biden isn't extreme left on fossil fuels because if prices keep up like this it' ( Read more... )

Going out this afternoon I had to dig my car out a bit again because everything my car had softened down last time had turned to ice and it couldn't find the traction to pull itself out. So there I am, disabled me chopping away and down at ice with my little shovel and using my body weight.

I'll probably have to do it again the next time I want to ( Read more... )

I had to dig my car out of the snow twice: first time the evening after the snowfall and the second time today when I reached my car literally just in time for a plow truck to push a ton of icy crap back onto and under my car. Somebody took my parking spot when I came back home but since it was a minivan that needed a large spot more than I did and ( Read more... )

The New York Post writes, "In a tough year, NYC’s holiday windows are a glittering homage to hope," but when my roommate saw a representative Bergdorf Goodman window photo and Saks window photo from me, her words were "This is insulting" and "Fuck off." She speaks for me too.

I guess they really, really didn't want any crowds forming to look at ( Read more... )

Saturday night, around 9:30 pm, I decided to take a drive into Manhattan to see if any cool window displays had gone up. I should have realized from the start that the trip was ill-fated when it began with 25 minutes of bumper to bumper traffic for two miles on the L.I.E. that my phone didn't warn me about that turned out to be caused by a three- ( Read more... )