A little-known fact: I like muscle cars. Always have. I even know how to listen to & identify basic things that have gone wrong, the "old fashioned way" (i.e., with your ears and some knowledge!). I don't do much about liking muscle cars-- I have a lot of other priorities.

 However, I need to say...
 Whoa.

 I was idly surfing, and I think I'm in love...  Oh, where oh where is my winning lottery ticket?

I just don't think to look much... like I said, it's not a proirity, the whole getting into cars scene or "What's your dream car" bit. Never had one. No, really. The oldies are beautiful, but entirely unpractical for most of my needs (like feeling comfortable driving them anywhere, for fear of having it be destroyed somehow). But this... this! This I could really be happy with:

 A Dodge Charger SRT8 with a Hemi, and an HP E800 Twin Turbo 426 CID upgrade.
Dear Hannah and her bouncing bosoms, what the Sam Hill would I do with that kind of power? I have no idea. Move to somewhere I could drive it, I guess. What's the use of having 800 horsies and that kind of torque when there's nowhere to drive it?
 Holy crap, I feel the need to give birth to a ball of excitement. I was so excited, I may have peed my pants a little. Or not, but I certainly was overjoyed enough to do so.

 Just thought I'd say so.

  I love to make it MINE. I'm single and this day has been fantastic! I hit South St. Paul up for some breakfast (Black Sheep for mushroom & brie soup, chicken curry salad and a café miel) after doing some brief shopping for picnic baskets; I found two for super-cheap, hooray! 
  I motored around for a while for the heck of it, before heading over to Kowalski's. I bought a perfectly decadent amount of cheeses there, some goat milk-based butter, two seckel pears, a delicious rosemary-olive oil boule and a NY strip steak.  Kowalski's is a hop & a skip to Penzey's, so I stopped there as well. I bought some of their ultra-potent garlic powder, some California basil and a container of aleppo pepper (a Turkish chili pepper that's similar to an ancho, but with a bit of a snap to the pants).
  Soon I was in the mood for more driving. I got superbly lost while driving to Minneapolis (don't ask, it's skillz, I tell you) & drove around a battered 'hood, gazing at the broken beauty that is that particular part of the city. I didn't think to bring my camera, and I really wish I would have. I could have taken some great photos.

 I finally ended up at my original destination, Surdyk's, and was lost in the awe of cheese and booze. I bought a few more nibblets of cheese-- I haven't tried them yet. I also bought a bottle of booze based entirely on the shape of the bottle (and the fact that it was on sale, of course):Damiana liqeuer. The bottle is shaped like my goddess necklaces, and I blurted out "Holy Geez, it has boobs!" A smartly-dressed man who was standing nearby cocked an eyebrow, looked at me, looked the bottle over, and said "And so she does." Ooops! *blushes* That was pretty funny.
 Go figure, I read the company's webpage when I got home, and I could have whallopped myself over the head. Of course it's got something to do with damiana (a rather potent herb), fertility (bottle was modeled after an Incan goddess, according to the website) and all manner of things that are low-key erotic or sexual. Ahhh, I love being a dork. Dork dance, dork dance.

 Anyhoo.. Where there's a will, there's a way, and I am nothing if not persistent. I had to try twice, but I got my grill going. I seasoned the steak with Penzey's Chicago steak seasoning (if you try the same, be mindful that it's got sugar in it-- it makes the meat taste super-fantastic, but it burns quickly over searing heat), nuked a couple of small taters, cut some pieces of boule, spread  some goat butter on one slice (very very nice, if you're OK with goat milk products-- some people hate the stuff), had some brie with the rest, and nuked some baby carrots for veggies. Ahhh, good!  I also had a right-proper glass of the lovely wine A. & M. left for me on my birthday. It's a nearly overwhelmingly sweet Riesling produced by Snoqualmie (so of course I want to drink it all, like a ninny), and I hope that I can get more. I drank it out of a delicate-stemmed wine glass that has the word "joy" etched on it (I have many, many wine glasses, so it was great that I grabbed that one!), and I thought that it pretty much summed up my day that far. Well, if I'd had thought about it earlier, I would have bought myself flowers, but I was pretty happy with my cheeses and driving adventures. :-)
 Hmm. Although, someone please remind me that I need to get my car to a mechanic sometime soon-- I think that my muffler might be making a break for freedom. 

 I am currently waiting for my chocolate truffles to come to room temperature; one of my coworkers at my other job makes them by hand. I swapped them for booze that I knew I wasn't going to drink any time soon, heh! I have a cup of fragrant Jamaican Blue coffee in front of me (of course I liberate it from evil with err, liberal cream and sugar) to "wash" the chocolates down with (yummy!), and I'm more content today than I have been in a long while.

 I am also listening to Calogero's self-titled cd (thank you, Amazon MP3 downloader!), with "En Apesanteur" just starting, and  I'm singing along with it, loudly... but don't tell anyone. I can only get away with it when I'm alone. Yes, even Weasel has quit the room, with me howling away... hee hee hee.... Anyhoo.

 Happy Valentine's Day, beautiful people. Don't let your hearts be sad... find something, anything, to make this day yours...

Your Raineth
 

 My car's side mirror is now fixed, I got some interesting photos of an enormous olive tree while waiting for ABRA to fix my car, I picked up necessary replacement dryer tubing & elbows and aluminuminuminum oooh, beg pardon, aluminum tape (I didn't know it existed-- I really must learn more about applications for it, since I have a bunch left) and fixed the problem with my dryer. I hope. I don't have enough time to see if it works before I go to work. Cross Your Fingas!

 Next week I should be able to get my contacts fitted & see if they'll work (they might not, since LASIK surgery took away some of my cornea & made it flatter, which affects how the lens will lie-- lay? whatever). I have to re-schedule the appointment for my foot again, since my stupid schedule changed. Well, I've gone 3 months, I guess I can wait until NoRemember. Sumbitch, doesn't make me any less pissed that I have to wait, though. Grrrr, arrrgh. Anyway. Shit, gotta get ready for work.

 Where does the time go??

 Cheers & All

Bleah.

 The past couple of days have been nothing but massively stressful. I have to ignore some of what's going on for the time being, or I else have no way to cope. 

 On the upside, sort-of, I no longer have to worry about ending up ass over teakettle due to front-end brake failure; the rotors & pads were replaced by one of my co-worker's Significant today. You would have shuddered very hard to see the condition of my old rotors & brake pads. Ooops. Apparently they possibly may have been the original pads. Holy schmitt, people. I have just over 141,000 miles on my car--  80,000 of which were put on by me... and I am not exactly the best driver on the road. Urk.
 Significant will be tearing apart my rear end (oh ha ha, that sounded funny) to see about those rotors & pads... hopefully they'll be in better shape. It seems I also have some mischief going on with the passenger side of my front end axle-- there's an inner/outer "knuckle" involved, and  according to Significant, the inner part is in need of replacement (hey, do I look like I know a damned thing??). My starter is on its way out (but I could have told you that, so I actually do know something), my window is still loose on its track, and the motor for the automatic lock on my back passenger side is still not functioning properly. The car is also having some peculiar shifting issues... *sigh* My poor car is on its way out. Ughhh, I shudder to think that I may need to resort to taking the bus. Ewwww. What a complete waste of time & a terrible loss of freedom.

 Anyhoo... I'm off to bed. For the first time in a year, I  get to have my teeth cleaned tomorrow morning! I am super excited!

Cheers & All

 One nice thing about having friends with the enviable skill of making things work in a Rube Goldberg/redneck fashion is that if you have a problem & whine about it enough, they might try to fix it for you just so that you will shut up.

 THE STORY
 My car's lighter thingy died a long time ago. Dead dead deadsky. I was quoted many exorbitant dollars to have it be repairedsky, to which I replied "Screw yousky."  Ahem, pardon. I've really missed being able to rig my portable cd player to it. And being able use my GPS thingy without fear of low batteries. And being able to charge my cell phone. And using it to plug in my portable tire inflator. One more incomplete sentence, and someone is going to throw something at their monitor. Bummersky.
 Anyway. While I was Up Yonder visiting A. & M. (celebrating our collective January birthdays), I was complaining about how I hated it when the inevitable "little things" that go wrong with cars-- that always seem to cost a fortune to be fixed-- drove me nuts. Like having my lighter thingy die. 
 Lo & Behold, when I returned from a jaunt with M., I had a newly hot-wired, professionally jeery-rigged lighter thingy. It runs "hot" all the time though, so if I'm a dork & leave something plugged in for a few days without running my car, I could have a deadsky battery. 

 But now? Now I get to play my cd's again. Now I am the happiest citizen ever. Because even if my stoopid water lines freeze again, or my house collapses onto its own arse, I can still drive away to the tune of "Coconuts."