Girassol

MIT Weblog Survey 2005

Fun with Google! II: Electric Boogaloo

I get a lot of Google hits from people in Australia and New Zealand looking for a passionfruit cheesecake recipe.  That's by far the most popular query that brings people here.  The second most common search is for The Deal Pickle.

However, last night somebody found me by googling  civil war beef jerky.  I am baffled by this.  I don't recall ever having written ANYTHING about beef jerky.

Fun with Google!

Jerilyn, I thought you might like to know that someone out there found my site yesterday by googling Jerilyn is breathtaking.  Interestingly, neither your site nor the CGB show up at all in that search.  Something must be done!

In related news, I am the number one Google hit for "Audrey is a dork."  Try it, it's fun!

A Chubby Girl Begins Her Sojourn Into the World of Blogging

Ever since last summer's first official meeting of the Chubby Girl Brigade when everyone was talking about their blogs and asking me when I was going to get a blog, and I was feeling left out since I didn't have a blog and therefore had nothing to contribute to the conversation aside from expressing concern that I had a lesbian haircut, I've been thinking about getting a blog.  Well, today is the day.

Why today?  Because my car is cursed and broken and I can't go anywhere until it gets fixed.  Clearly, the best thing I can be doing with my time tonight while clostered in my apartment is starting a blog.

Allow me to share the Saga of the Corolla for your amusement.  It's been a great little car and has never given me a problem at all, until two Sundays ago when I headed outside to go to Church and discovered that I had a flat tire.  Normally this would be an inconvenient discovery, but on this particular morning the inconvenience was compounded by the fact that Church started in five minutes and my roommates were already there.  Plus, it was raining.  Naturally, the one day of the year that it rains in Utah is the day I get a flat tire.  I called my roommates' cell phones to let them know what was going on and one of them came to rescue me from the certain death and destruction that would befall me if I missed Church.

The next day, I took the dear little car over to Devil*Mart, where I originally bought the tires, and they needed to replace the tire because apparently I had run over a nail with the old one.  I had them go ahead and rotate the tires since it was free and I was due for a rotation anyway.  When this was complete, they told me that I had bent the rim on the flat tire from driving around on it the night before I noticed it was flat, and also that all the lug nuts on the car were stripped.  (Thank you, ex-boyfriend, for your overzealousness with the torque gun when you replaced my brake pads last summer.)

So, I decided to go over to Pep Boys to see about replacing the stripped lug nuts.  I asked the guy behind the service counter if someone could do that for me, and he suggested that I ask for a free brake inspection since that would require them to remove all the lug nuts anyway, and then I could just casually add, "Oh yeah, and can you replace the lug nuts?" once they were off the car.  That way I wouldn't be charged anything for the labor.  Since I absolutely adore free things and had been noticing a slight squealing in my brakes anyway, this sounded like a great idea to me!

Of course, there is no such thing as "free" when dealing with mechanics.  "Sure, we'll check your brakes for free," they say.  "Oh, what the [swear word] is that?  Holy [swear word], it looks like your transmission is draggin' on the ground and is gonna explode any minute!  And there is a nest of ferrets livin' under your hood and danged if they didn't eat up all your spark plugs!  Lady, you are lucky you came in here when you did!  That'll cost you fourteen million dollars and your firstborn child for that transmission and them spark plugs.  And your brakes suck too, by the way."

Turns out I needed new rear brakes, which would cost me $138.  Of course, they wanted to fix them RIGHT THEN, because it was just too dangerous to be driving around on bad brakes like that.  I informed Mr. Pep Boys that it was even more dangerous for me to be spending money I didn't have, and that the brakes would just have to wait.  Oh yeah, and the lug nuts didn't get replaced either.

So while I'm mustering up the courage to pay for new brakes, I go out to my car yesterday afternoon and IT WON'T START.  It's done this a couple of times lately, on cold mornings, where the radio and dashboard lights turn on, but the engine just clicks.  When I try again, it has always started right up so I assumed it was just a cold weather thing... until yesterday. I tested out the wipers and they were running slower than normal which, I've been told, is a sign that the battery is dead.  Curiously enough, my roommate has the exact same car as I have -- a '99 Corolla -- and about a month ago her car did the exact same thing.  She got a new battery and the problem was solved, so I planned to do the same thing. 

We went outside to see if we could jump start the car so I could drive it over to Pep Boys to get a new battery, but first I had to try and push it out of its space while she steered it to a more open location.  Evidently I am not strong enough to push a car alone, because at the moment I yelled, "I AM pushing, it's just not moving!", a guy came out of absolutely nowhere and helped me push the car across the street.  He then ran inside the building to grab a neighbor who, it turns out, is a mechanic.  He tried to give us a jump and my car was not responding at all, so he started banging on something under the hood with what turned out to be a tympani mallet that he apparently keeps in his car for such occasions.  Wouldn't you know, that tympani mallet did the trick and knocked the starter into place and the car started right up!

I was lucky to find out that the battery is fine, but unlucky to find out that the starter needs to be replaced, which is more expensive than a battery.  I was lucky to find out that Neighbor Mechanic Boy will replace the starter AND fix the brakes for less than I would pay at a shop!  Unluckily, this means that until he can fix it on Monday afternoon, I will be taking the bus.

Either that, or cloistering myself at home and writing in my brand new blog.


Here with me are the Chubby Bloggers who piqued my interest in this whole blogging thing: Eric D. Snider, Zannah, Susannah, and Miss Laura Llew.  I'm the one with the questionably lesbionic hair.