Nothing like spending the morning in the auto shop…
Today was day two of the Vacation Overload Extravaganza, so naturally I spent half of it in the auto shop. There were a couple of things that the poor bug needed to have done to it:
- Find out why the brakes are making noise.
- Reattach the engine shield that came off in the heavy snow on Sunday.
- Figure out if the rattling noise at around 2500 rpm is the exhaust system coming loose.
- Fix the passenger side door so it closes tightly.
- Replace the burnt-out headlamp.
- Replace the rear-side turn indicator lens.
All of which are now done. The answers to 1 and 3 were cheaper than expected (“road salt” and “Yes, but it’s fixed now and we didn’t have to replace anything”) which balanced out the more expensive answer to number 2 (“We can’t reattach it, we’ll have to put on a new one”). Numbers 4-6 were fairly trivial too.
And while they were laboring away on the car, I got to hang out and read the newspapers and magazines in the waiting room. After finishing off today’s USA Today, last month’s National Geographic and an outdoorsy sporting goods catalog of indeterminate age, I discovered a two year old Reader’s Digest on the table.
That brought back some fond memories… It’s been ages since I’ve read one of those. My grandpa Q even got the large-type edition when his eyesight started to go. I used to read all the articles and laugh at the humor features. So I picked it up and breezed through it…
What a lousy rag.
Seriously, has the old RD taken a nosedive in quality in the last few years, or has it always been such a stinker and I’ve just now noticed? I mean, the jokes in the humor columns weren’t even funny. I swear I remember some of them (verbatim!) from the old large type books in grandpa’s house in the late 80’s.
I just hope whoever submitted those stale stories gets paid $300 each time they get recycled. That sort of money adds up over a couple of decades.