The Slow, Whimpery Death of the Monte Carlo, Part II

Fall semester: day five


I am beginning to think that my Monte Carlo is just old, tired, and getting ready to really fall apart, instead of constantly being figuratively falling apart. This afternoon she tried to stall out on me twice at two different stoplights, and alternated between running normally and running rough.

Please note that this could be any number of issues, obviously, but as I told Zedral earlier, the intermittence of it all denotes that it is not something "broken," but a part(s) of the car that "just wants to be an asshole."

Yes, those are the exact terms I used.

The fact that it's intermittent, however, does narrow some things down. It's either something as simple as a clogged fuel filter or fuel injectors, or it could be another spark plug going out or something along those lines -- I mentioned the O2 sensor in my last post, for example. Regardless, while the car may be running and driving fine for the most part right now, I don't know how long that's going to last before it won't start and/or run at all, so it is imperative that I get it into the shop as soon as I possibly can to see what's wrong.

With that in mind, of course, I called the shop this afternoon when I got home from teaching.

"Well, we don't have any open spots today," the guy on the phone told me, "but we might tomorrow. We're not going to have you bring the car over and drop it off when we don't know when we'll get to it, though, so call back in the morning and we'll see what we can do."

Okay, fair enough.

In the meantime, I emailed my colleagues and told them I wouldn't be able to make it to tomorrow's (read: today's) meetings; the car will either be in the shop or it won't, and if it's not I'll be driving it as little as possible and trying to perform a bit of maintenance on it myself -- which means I'll be checking/adding fluids and looking over the engine to see if anything looks amiss. Regardless of whether I can drop it off tomorrow or Saturday or what-have-you (Saturday would be about the last day I could do it, as I need the car on Monday again), I'll be driving gingerly to the Walmart two miles away and getting some fuel injector/carb cleaner to stick in it to see if that helps anything. It is, after all, quite possible that those things are just gummed up. Even little things on that car act like big problems sometimes simply because it's so old and beat-up.

On the off-chance that I can't get it into the shop this weekend, I guess I just have to press my luck with it for another week -- it can't be avoided. The place I take it to is the only place in Newton which works on engines, and they're relatively inexpensive. I'll need the car all four days next week, so there's not much else that can be done. If I have to drive, I have to drive. I'd originally planned -- when the car wasn't acting up, of course -- to get it in to the shop once Lady arrived back in the midwest, as when she visits, transportation would still be possible around town with her car if necessary, at least while she's here in town with me. If I can't do it this weekend, I'll have to do that anyway and hope my luck (and the car itself) holds out until then. She's making her drive back out here for school over this weekend, and starts her classes on Wednesday. If the car doesn't get into the shop this weekend...well, essentially I'll be doing the same thing doctors do to patients in hospitals when they don't know what's wrong, except my car isn't human -- I'll pump it full of new fluids, monitor it for a while, and then let it go back out into the world, cautiously. Again, it's all I can do for the moment.

As for any fuse issues it may be having, as mentioned in my last post? Yeah, the shop guys will have to figure that out. I can only do so much, really.

In other news, with some help from my bosses I've rectified the book situation for my classes; I've been able to look at the table of contents for both books, and the newer edition has the same stuff in it as the old edition (as expected) with different page numbers and a few additions of articles I used to distribute as handouts. I told my students that they can use whatever edition they want or need to use, depending on what price they want to pay for a book based on their financial situation, but we'll still be covering the same stuff regardless. I also let my bosses know that I'll fully switch over to the new edition in the spring and will adjust my syllabus and lesson plans accordingly -- but for now, all of those things have already been printed and distributed. A large chunk of my class has the new book one way or the other, while some have the older version and some were waiting to see what I could find out. Their first reading assignment won't be covered until Thursday anyhow, so they have time to get it. Everything will smooth itself out, I assume. No real worries.

Tonight, for the first time in about ten years, I bought a printer for my computer. I had little choice; entering my last year of graduate school and dealing with the new rule that we can no longer print in the department means that I had to suck it up and bite ye olde printer bullet. I bought this one, a Brother printer with full Linux support, on Amazon. I've used Brother printers before. I like them. This is also a laser printer and it had a $50 instant rebate. So, yeah, those were big selling points as well. I'll be printing more this year than I've ever printed before -- I have a ton of my own work to print, including stage plays and at least two copies of my thesis, and that's just in the next two months or so -- and I'm not paying 7 cents a page at the library. I'll also be printing out a fair amount of handouts for my students as well, when necessary, and while I can get those copied at school, they apparently don't want us to print even student stuff there. So, yeah, having a printer is sort of necessary now.

I say "for the first time in ten years" because when I got my old, old HP desktop (which died in about a year and a half) it came with a printer. That printer also died very quickly. Old technology, inkjet, expensive ink, etc. I'm happy to have any sort of printer again, really. It arrives on Tuesday -- just in time for me to be able to print out my reading assignments for Wednesday night's classes.

So yeah, folks, that's what's going on right now. This weekend I'll be dealing with the car and my nose will be buried in several books as an attempt to get back into the groove of graduate school, though I'm not sure how successful I will be in said attempt. Really, more than anything else, I'm just tired. Really tired. Yet life and responsibilities press forward.