Thank You, Have A Good Night
I don't know what I remember most from dinner at
Santa Ramen...the hot bowl of yummy soy sauce flavored roasted pork ramen or the waitresses saying "Thank you, have a good night" five times in the 20 feet that Shirley and I walked from the table to the door.
The best part...all three of them said it
exactly the same way.
Too bad they ran out of the soybean flavor soup.
Oh well, next time. If the lines aren't too long.
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Houston, wii have a problem...
Whatever you do,
don't let go...
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Manual Labor
I love working on the car.
I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly what it is. Maybe it's the getting down and dirty part of it -- laying on the garage floor, having bits of grease & dirt fall on your face, having blackened fingernails, breathing in the carcinogenic fuel and oil fumes that are spilled everywhere, and that black dirty bathwater that always manages to impress me whenever I take a shower. Or maybe it's the cool toy factor -- playing with air tools, open end wrenches, ratchets & 6 point sockets, pickle forks and manual-advance timing lights. And then there's the problem-solving part of it; trying to figure out why the !@#^%$& someone would use a torx bit sunken in a plastic well (so you can't get a bit driver on it) to secure a microfilter cover behind the mass of wires behind the dashboard hidden behind the 3 layers of interior trim; or how to remove an oil return pipe that's buried way up in there between the (huge) header secondaries, the firewall, and the back of the engine block (I gave up on that one, by the way).
No...I think what it is all about is that wonderful quiet "alone time". Just you, the garage, your baby, and the challenge: something needs to be done on your car, and it's up to you (and only you) to figure it out. And so you apply all the knowledge you've gleaned over years of watching Dad scream and yell over busted knuckles & broken bolts; you summon up all those myriad hours of bench talk with other car guys over bottles of beer. You spend hours scouring forums and Ef-Aye-Kyewes on the web, read shop manuals, and formulate a game plan. You get your errands done early, and make sure everyone knows that you'll be incommunicado for the entire day. And while you're in there, diving into it full-on, you methodically keep mental notes of every nut and bolt you pull, snap mental pictures of every plastic cover and removed part so that you can reassemble properly later on. You find yourself immersed. No e-mails. No conference calls. No deadlines...
Just you, your car, and your wits.
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I Love Japan
Where else would you have the opportunity to use a
beer dispensing machine?
Needless to say, I had to go back and get another beer from this thing. :)
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Chicken Noodle Soup...
...with a soda on the side.Chicken noodle soup, with a soda on the side.Chicken noodle soup, with a soda on the side.Chicken noodle soup, with a soda on the side.Chicken noodle soup, with a soda on the side.Chicken noodle soup, with a soda on the side.
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Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup
Woo hoo!!
A
local place that sells a pretty good rendition of the stuff! (Although I would love it even more if it had the hand-cut noodles).
And for the authentic Taiwanese experience, order the Stinky Tofu. Just make sure to prepare the olfactories for a wonderfully accurate depiction of street food in Taipei.
Now to continue the quest for some place closer than downtown Oakland...
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Car Wash
Do-overs. As a naïve child in elementary school, I used to take advantage of this rule, like some God-given right to appease for mistakes I made. Bad kickball pitch? “Do-over!” Bad four-square bounce? “Do-over!” And those that were smart enough wisely set the ground rules before the game: “No do-overs!” But as the years moved on, the reality immediately sank in that life has no do-overs. As much as I wished that I could invoke that magical rule like a secret weapon out of my back pocket, the harsh reality is that you have to own up to your decisions and live with your mistakes.
Instead, a do-over lives in concept only, relegated to only those most simplistic things like an overcooked dinner (eat out); an erased file (undelete); an ugly dress (go get a refund). But those big things in life, with far-reaching consequences…those are permanent. And you have to live with them for the rest of your lives.
Sitting here on this yellow bench outside Ducky's Car Wash in San Carlos, underneath grey clouds on a chilly Wednesday morning, I revel in the thought that for fifteen bucks I can cleanse my car of a month's worth of grit and grime, and start fresh - anew...shiny and sparkling for another month's worth of duty.
If only life were as convenient as a fifteen dollar car wash.
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