Automotive Grievances

...here in my car/ I feel safest of all/ I can lock all my doors/ it's the only way to live....

It's my fault. I'll get that out of the way right now. 

Look, he needed a better car, HAS been needing one for several years, but the stupid old Mitsubishi Lancer just refused to flat out die. 

It leaks oil from almost literally everywhere, the engine mounts are cracked, it can't pass emissions inspection... but it still runs. It gets up to speed pretty quickly. The heat and the air conditioner both work GREAT. The radio gets the sports station. 

My mechanic said it would be $5K to fix it "...and that's just what we can see. Once we get into it, it could be more than that. MUCH more than that." It was marked on the paperwork as Unsafe To Drive, and they didn't even deem it worth an oil change. Still, I drove it twice that week to DC and back for gigs, and have been driving it around town carefully since then, with "You're about twelve good potholes away from that engine being on the highway" ringing in my mind as I do so. 

It's a 2006 that his mother bought used, beat to hell because she's a terrible driver, and then gave to him when she moved to Arizona. It continues to get better than 25 miles to the gallon and has 291,000 (and change) miles on it right now, so it doesn't owe us a dime.

So I started shopping. I shopped for the thing he said he wanted. I shopped for things I hoped he would accept as acceptable, or even pleasant. For some reason, he has a bias against Toyotas. He's similarly biased against Hondas, though slightly less so. Never mind, they're running very high right now anyway. Car scarcity, resale value, perceived worth and so on. 

What I want for him is something safe, with low miles on it, high fuel efficiency, good sightlines, that he won't resent driving, that he feels is NICE. "I'm tired of driving crap cars," he said. Dude, you bought cars without consulting me several times. You bought a Jeep from some shady folk just because the AC ran real cold. And were surprised when it suddenly died. Come ON. 

I researched the HELL out of Honda CRV before choosing one that had a moderate price tag, was seven years old, with only 26K on it. That is a great car. I could find another- but he says he hates the sightlines. So we won't be a 2 CRV family. He doesn't really want an SUV. He wants a sedan. And he wants leather interior. Mine's leather, so I get that. 

He agreed to drive the Mazda CX5 in addition to Mazda 6 that he had decided was the best match. The Mazda CX5 he agreed was solid and not terrible, and also not really so much an SUV as a pregnant hatchback. It was a decent car. We drove a Mazda 6, low miles, leather interior, stickshift. Very nice. But, stickshift. He CAN. But his knees.... he'd rather not.

I surprised him by showing him a Lexus ES 350. I did this because Consumer Reports LOVES the Lexus. Almost every model, almost every year, from 2005 through 2020, almost without exception. They're pricey. Possibly too pricey. But a test drive isn't a commitment, right? RIGHT? 

Well. He flat out LOVES the Lexus ES. The moonroof. The leather seats. The little joystick near the gear shifter that moves the cursor on the interactive screen. He drove also a Lexus RX (another a pregnant hatchback) and likes it fine, only not as much as the sedan. He tried an IS, but it was too small. He bumped his head getting into it, and once he was in, his head touched the ceiling. He's not particularly large, but he's too big for an IS.

We've found a Mazda 6 that checks ALL the boxes, in the price range we were targeting. WITH leather interior, AND a moonroof. He hesitates. He really wants the Lexus ES. Our insurance company was NO help, coming in with similar numbers to insure each of the models he likes best. He's only just barely considering that the Mazda 6 gets nearly 10 miles per gallon more than the ES, because he likes the poshness of the Lexus. He feels he deserves a car with a certain amount of poshness, at his age. I'm not arguing that, not at all.  But ...ten miles. Per gallon. 

Several months ago, he and I jointly managed to talk Pugsley out of a Dodge Charger (not widely available, poor mileage, overpriced and THE most stolen car in the United States right now) and into a Mazda 3. Which Pugsley agreed, after awhile and several test drives of different makes/ models, was a better fit for him, and he kind of fell in love with it. He's very happy with mileage around 28/36, and it has a pretty good sound system.

I felt like we were making headway towards replacing the Mitsu, then early Saturday morning, when I had another gig in DC, the CRV started up with a horrible, no-muffler blast. I went to the gig, did 3 hours on stilts, drove home in DC traffic, and investigated after I parked. 

Someone had cut out my catalytic converter overnight. The police came, made a report. The insurance company said it would be covered, minus my deductible. It's even considered "no fault" since it was vandalism. I hope that means my rates won't go up because of it. 

 In any case, our search is more fraught than it was last week, because not only do we have the deductible to pay, no insurance adjuster is even available to inspect the car and approve the repairs. They'll get back to me with an update within 5 business days. NOT get to the inspection in 5 days, no. Just... an UPDATE. Which, since Honda is running 3 months lead time on parts anyway is a drop in the bucket, right? So Gomez was going to put a temporary pipe on for me, to quiet the noise. 

The thief not only cut but also damaged the pipe, so it's not round anymore. The fix Gomez planned to do won't work. I'll be driving that thing with noise and fumes assaulting me for... well, who even knows how long? 

Our car search now has an edge of desperation- at least for me- while he merrily drives the quiet Mitzu with the wobbly engine, blithely confident that it will hold up for him until the perfect car magically appears and makes everyone happy. It'll be a Lexus that has about 72,000 miles on it, and, by some dark magic, gets 25 miles per gallon. It'll be in his price range, he'll be approved for a loan and can afford the payments. 

Please, I beg you, for the love of everything you and I both hold dear...

...do NOT tell him it's a Toyota.

Gary Numan; Cars

Vintage Sandwich

...I have a pen, I have pineapple/ Uh! Pineapple-pen....[ Now where he at, where he at/ where he at, where he at/ Now there he go, there he go/ there he go, there he go...]

Because I had occasion to be with my Dad recently (he turned 80 and looks GREAT), I also had occasion to nudge him into eating one of 'his' sandwiches with me. This is something I remember from my childhood, like Mother's special instant Tea Mixture, which I recently reintroduced into the life of my friend MonKe. She'd forgotten about the existence of this ambrosia, but was instantly transported at one whiff of the stuff.

Aaaanyway, this story is about my Dad's special sandwich. No one I know has heard of it. 

It's an open-faced grilled peanut butter pineapple and cheddar cheese sandwich, cooked on the Broiler setting in a Toaster Oven.

Flash back to nineteen seventy something, and my Dad, and a Toaster Oven. We have wheat bread in the house, because we are crunchy granola hippies. We have Colby cheese in the house because cheese is a good snack for small children. We have pineapple rings- well, I'm guessing Dad would've needed to purchase these especially for the sandwich. Maybe a dented can at the grocery, I dunno. 

So here's my Dad, spreading all natural peanut butter on whole wheat bread, probably that he or Mother had baked themselves, (they had a bakery for a bit, which is itself a story), topping that with a pineapple ring and slicing cheese on top of it before putting it into the Toaster Oven to bake or grill or whatever. I think I watched him prepare these on several occasions spanning a couple of years, thinking the ingredient combination slightly revolting, before eventually asking whether it was good. "I like them. Do you want me to make one for you?" I think I demurred, worried about wasting food. He probably said something along the lines of finishing it if I didn't like it. 

As I remember, I DID like it. 

Not enough to ask for it, but I'd thereafter have one whenever he was making one.

I liked it enough that I REMEMBER it, remember liking it. Remember sharing them with my Dad.

I've never attempted make it for my own kids. I've described it, and they made faces, so I didn't. It was a Dad thing. 

But jeeze, I don't get to hang with my Dad and have food often. So I hadn't had that sandwich in... well, as long as my offspring have been alive, and probably longer than that. 

And it offended me to think of making one WITHOUT Daddy, so while I was with him in Minneapolis, (recovering from Covid, poor thing, so really not up to a Great Big Birthday Deal for his 80th), I said I wanted to have those sandwiches. I procured pineapple rings when Nance and I went round to shops picking up his cake and scallops and so on for his birthday dinner. The next day, we made sandwiches. Well, HE made sandwiches, as always, and I helped eat them. 

I learned something new about the recipe that I hadn't known before. 

He likes it made with AMERICAN cheese. 

In our house when I was growing up, we had Colby cheese almost exclusively, until us kids were sophisticated enough to prefer cheddar. So I only ever had this sandwich topped with Colby cheese. 

I did not hate it with American cheese, though I expected to. 

Whole grain bread. All natural peanut butter. A pineapple ring. One slice of American cheese. He has a pop up type toaster now, and that obviously won't work for this sort of sandwich. Instead, he put them on a cookie sheet into the preheated oven for no more than five minutes, and probably less. 

Man, it was good. I didn't think to take a picture. 

I don't know if he buttered the bread before spreading peanut butter on, because I was arguing with the can opener while he was spreading stuff. I hope he eats more of them- there were several slices of pineapple in a plastic container when I left last Monday.

But here's the other thing I learned about this sandwich. He didn't invent it.

Dad recalls Grammy making these sandwiches when he was in high school. My guess is that it was possibly a '50s recipe created by a food manufacturer. Could I find this sandwich on the internet, though? It took several tries, over the course of several days.  

According to Vintage Food Disaster  from November of 2010, this sandwich was supposed to have been made with Velveeta cheese product. Described by the intrepid blogger, Adrienne in Wisconsin, as

"...a Hawaiian open faced sandwich that was born in the depths of hell,"

 it was peanut butter on halves of hamburger bun, spread with peanut butter, crowned with pineapple rings, covered with a slice of Velveeta Cheese Food, and topped with half a maraschino cherry each.

AHA. This sounds like something my Grammy would have made to use up the rest of the hamburger buns before they got too stale. I don't know if she'd've kept maraschino cherries in her house on the regular. I remember them on her hams, but for Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving was a Happening. Daddy never mentioned cherries, and I think would balk at them.  

 The Vintage Food Disasters blogger Adrienne says nothing of the time it took to bake or broil this sandwich, but here was her reaction:

"...although they certainly had the look of something indigestible, they turned out to be a complete let down.  I was shocked to watch more than one guest willingly take multiple bites." 

There's no date given, (though after the invention of Velveeta in 1930something) that particular ersatz Hawaiian Velveeta sandwich earned a mention in this history of Velveeta. 

Grammy may have found the recipe in McCall's. The timeline puzzles me, though, since that McCall's page seems to be dated May 1962, and Daddy would've been 20, or nearly 20, in '62. At any rate, probably not in high school. Maybe college?

Timeline aside, should you doubt the edibility of such a creation, I refer you again to Adrienne's blog:

"My friend Laura described it in the most glowing terms, praising it for "juiciness" and making an argument for it as a passable snack."

 It absolutely is a passable snack, or light lunch. 

Hmm, I think I have pineapple rings in the kitchen right now.

Piko-Taro; Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen [ Buckwheat Boyz; It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time]

Cool Cats

...Indians send signals from the rocks above the pass...

I haven't stopped writing. I've just been writing elsewhere, sometimes even for money.

It became less fun when my friends stopped blogging sometime between 2010 and 2012, some of them sooner than that. I was screaming, whispering, sobbing into a void, mostly capturing my mother's descent into madness, or amusing myself with how clever I think I sometimes am. 

So here I am, and already complaining. What is it now, you may ask. (Let's pretend you did.)

Blogger refuses to tell me how to add new links to my sidebar, and it's been so long I can't remember how to do it from memory. Popular wisdom is to play around and figure it out, which I guess I will do, eventually. I thought, though, that I would do that with my new laptop (in July; it's still NEW, seriously) which came with no Owner's Manual or User Guide, and I went online, looking for a video or PDF or something, ANYthing, which would tell me how to use this nice new Pavilion 360, but all I got was unboxing videos and and advertising trailer. And I so far haven't. Played around and figured it out, that is. Only, just the other day, I noticed, right beneath my left wrist, a sticker with one of those QVR thingies and in tiny letters beneath that it says "Scan for reviews, videos, features, specs, support**" which clearly I haven't done yet, (I refuse to count that as a failing on my part, as my phone doesn't have the QVR scanny function; I need to download A Dreaded App), because I'm complaining about this shiny new gadget that I'm underusing, I suspect, fairly significantly. 

And that's not particularly cute anymore. Even though I still think of myself as Primarily Decorative, the mirror tells me that really, I'm NOT. Which forces me to become, I suppose, a Woman Of Substance. Which, you know, I've always been, but that wasn't what people saw first. Remind me to write a post about people confusing beauty with talent, which happens to me pretty regularly, but it's a whole separate thing than this here. 

The point being that at least some of my cool blog friends (Dan Tobin, Totcetera) from the peak of blogginess have returned to blogging- though not on Blogger, on another platform, substack, which someone will need to explain to me why I should be there instead of here- and I'd love to link to their new sites and stop getting the 404 Not Found on my screen.  

All this to say, now I have a bit more impetus to write regularly, which is good for me, and also now I've just uncovered the secret of why it takes me a coon's age (what is that, exactly?) to write my reviews. I've been approaching them like a blog post, with research and links, except no links, so I need to explain everything. 

Anyway, if you've made it this far, and I don't blame you if you haven't, thank you for reading. It's more fun for me to do if I think it amuses someone else as well. 

You can pretend to be amused. Humor me.

Squeeze; Cool For Cats

Ear Memory

...I shall never see/a poem lovely as a tree....

Oscar Rasbach is a name I've hunted for quite some time, though I didn't know it. 

How do you find a thing if you don't know its name?

Right, you describe it. That's hard to do for music on YouTube, and just as hard on eBay. I had this music box, you see. It had a strange rattle inside as though there was a bit of the mechanism that was loose or had broken off. But the tune was lovely, and I've never forgotten it. I can hear it in my head, complete with the tik-tik-tik noise that wasn't really part of the song.

It was a brown plastic box, a little smaller than a Brownie Box camera. It had a picture on it of a little girl holding perhaps a pussy willow branch. There was a gold-wrapped hanging cord at the top, and a round plastic ball attached to a pull-string at the bottom. On the back, at the bottom, was the word Japan in raised letters. My sister's music box was more or less identical to mine, but it played a different tune and had a different picture. The sticker on my sister's music box said Talk To The Animals. I recognized the tune my sister's music box played, but I liked my tune better. My sticker said Trees, but was a little bit torn, so the song could have been '_____ Trees'.

I remember all of these details, but can't recall if I took my pills or not. Memory is such a bastard.

A YouTube hunt of 'tune Trees' turned up Marty Casey & Lovehammers, 21 Pilots, a woman playing a Koto in what turns out to be a clip from a Netflix movie called Our Shining Days, Flatbush Zombies, Senbonzakura (One Thousand Cherry Trees) and Hatsune Miku, who seems to be a pop star and also a Vocaloid, and Rush. But not my music box. It also turned up videos demonstrating many music box songs which were promotional material for music box makers, and synthesized "music box" covers of 21 Pilots' Trees. But not my music box.

Off to eBay, then, entering 'music box trees.' That got me Christmas music boxes, musical stuffed Christmas trees, musical porcelain Christmas trees, musical china Christmas trees and music boxes playing 'O Christmas Tree.' I added 'Japan' and then, though I wasn't sure, I added 'Hummel'.

I was never really a fan of the Hummel figurines which were cloyingly ubiquitous in the late '70s, but also got them confused with the Love Is naked cartoon people and the W R Berries big eyed statuettes. Not to be confused with the Keane paintings of big eyed sad children, which is a Whole 'Nother Story But Hummel drawings are a different thing. I'm never going to be a collector of Hummel anything, okay? but Hummel drawings are quite nice, really. And that, along with "pull string," turned out to be the right keyword.

The things eBay showed me were either "i dont know what tune it play but its pritty" or Eidlewiese, Brahms' Lullaby, Hi Lily Hi Lo, Lara's Theme (also listed as Dr Zhivago), It's A Small World, Smile Make Someone Happy, and a whole bunch of listings where the tune wasn't specified. I used the Ask Seller A Question function and inquired of a few sellers. I took a chance buying one that the seller responded that they didn't recognize the tune. It turned out to be "It's A Small World."

Back to YouTube, searching for 'Song Trees' and this time, there were useful subtitles on some of the results. This result, featuring Patty Page, sounded ALMOST like what I was seeking, but so drawn out and kind of pompous. But okay, it was based on a 1913 Joyce Kilmer poem. Which I hunted awhile, discovering that Kilmer was killed 5 years later in WWII. It was THIS tune, featuring vocalist Bob McGrath, that provided the very important name of Oscar Rasbach, who set the poem to music in 1922. 

After listening to several vocal renditions of the song, including this illustrated one, which probably inspired the tune's inclusion in the line of music boxes, I concluded that I didn't like the vocals. Searching 'Instrumental Trees' unveiled this pretty little song, and other weirder results, and it was only by adding the name Rasbach that I finally found Phillip Sear on piano and that was what I'd wanted all along.

Did this prevent me from continuing to hunt for my Hummel music box on eBay? One would think.

Alas, it did not. 

Haven't found it yet. 

(Trees, poem by Joyce Kilmer, 1913)