My car! It lives!

Hey hey hey hey hey hey hey.

How's that for an opening, huh? It really says something. Specifically, it says "hey."

And what brings on this torrent of hey-ness? Well, just that my car is working again. That's all. Just the simple fact that I'm once more empowered to flit hither and yon on my errands of the day, no longer restricted to the range of a bicycle. And how about hills?

When my main transportation was a bicycle (which was only five hours ago, really), I had to carefully plan each route, taking care not to plan any steep uphills. Now that my car is back, I still have to do that. Because let's face it, it's still a car I bought three years ago for $500, so who knows when the next car-related emergency will occur. But I *can* go up hills without undergoing physical exertion, and that's just fine with me.

Because this is, after all, a web page, I believe I am required to be properly self-absorbed. Therefore, I am pleased to report that my few weeks carless taught me a number of important lessons. Lessons like "It's raining a lot harder when there isn't a windshield between you and the water." And "It's a lot of fun to be riding a bicycle past a traffic jam, but it's not a good idea to make eye contact with the frustrated drivers."

So anyway. Not to dwell on the bicycle. Which I have to find some more convenient place to store now that it's not going to live in my living room. This is a time for looking forward, and trying not to look too gleeful every time I get in my car and it actually starts. Because I bet I'd look pretty silly, giggling like a schoolgirl just because my car runs.

Do schoolgirls still giggle? I ask because, judging from the career of Britney Spears, what they do is not so much "giggle" as "skank". And not in the cool "dancing-to-ska-music" way, either. I don't mean to belittle schoolgirls, incidentally. From what I can tell, they're a very industrious and enterprising group of people. I mean, they send me more advertisements for web sites than almost any other group!

Whoops. I got a little distracted there, didn't I? That's what we technically call "filler", because all I really wanted to say was that I'm glad my car fixed. And by itself, that wouldn't really convey my depth of feeling about this. And more importantly, it wouldn't fill up a screen.