John borrowed Cowboy Bebop: The Movie<\/i> last night and I got drawn into watching it. The animation is really stellar, very textured and nuanced, with quite a bit more motion than typical anime fare (which I’m not overly into, I just grew up watching badly dubbed Japanese cartoons after school in France).<\/p>\n
I got new glasses today. I’m going to have a good hard look for my digicam when I get back to the apartment, and if I can’t find it I’ll just borrow Donald’s. It’s nice to not have to squint at the screen or while driving any more.<\/p>\n
I had a moment of automotive providence in the parking lot of the optometrist’s office over lunch. My car (the Audi) has a peculiar quirk to the fuel system that if you let the car die by itself (bogging accelerating from a standstill, etc), it won’t start for another hour or two. It will crank strongly, but it won’t catch, not even trying. It’s something to do with the fuel pressure in the lines–I have a couple of theories but haven’t ventured to fix it yet. In any case, I walked out of the eye doctor’s office with my new specs on, hopped in the car, and started it. It caught, revved, but died soon thereafter, since I didn’t feather the throttle to “clear the car’s throat” so to speak. So of course it wouldn’t start again and I was stranded in the parking lot, half an hour away from the work I needed to get back to. I tried starting it for a few more minutes but wasn’t making headway, so not (yet) being the owner of a cell phone, I went back inside and called about five people to inquire about the possibility of a ride. Obviously no one picked up, and I didn’t want to leave a message and sit there. I asked the receptionist if I could come back in in five minutes and use the phone again; she generously agreed. I futzed around the car for a minute, tapping the fuel pump and checking the wiring, to no avail. In desperation I consulted the owner’s manual (WITH the car–I didn’t pay $1200 for nothing). There weren’t any troubleshooting procedures that would be of any use, I thought, but the section detailing the fuse box did catch my eye. I decided to try it. Popped the hood, found the fuel pump fuse, and pulled it. Got back in the car, cranked it… It started, but died immediately. I was elated. I got out again, reinserted the fuse, and the car fired right up and settled down to a nice idle. I prayed a quick prayer of thanks and told the receptionist that I wouldn’t be needing to use the phone, and drove back here to work.<\/p>\n
It’s nice when things work out like that for a change, instead of the constant automotive frustration that seems to accompany me like a cloud of tailpipe smoke. I thought about the incident on the way home, and how if someone had been with me I probably would have looked like I knew what I was doing when it came to cars… But then I thought, no–If I really knew what I was doing that wouldn’t have happened in the first place, since I would have fixed it weeks ago, and the car wouldn’t be emanating smoke from an over-rich condition and cutting out momentarily around the turns, among other things… So I resigned myself to the fact that my little automotive victory just evened things out and I returned to parity on the scoreboard of mechanical struggles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
John borrowed Cowboy Bebop: The Movie last night and I got drawn into watching it. The animation is really stellar, very textured and nuanced, with quite a bit more motion than typical anime fare (which I’m not overly into, I just grew up watching badly dubbed Japanese cartoons after school in France). I got new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}