The weekend is finally here, but that just means I switch from doing someone else’s necessary work to doing my own. I really do need some undisturbed time to begin posting the Mexico pictures. I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of months about how I could make my digital pictures better; stuff I wished I’d known before our trip. That will be the stuff of future posts.

photo credit: Jeffery Simpson

But to start the weekend, we’re going across the border to Bellingham. Karin has been trying to find jeans for some time up here now, and it seems that as she gets slimmer it’s getting harder to find any without going into the range of ridiculous. Neither of us is willing to pay $100 or more for jeans. So we’ll head down for some US shopping as that will give us cheaper prices and brands that we don’t get up here. We’ve done a few trips already in the past year, but it still seems strange to do US shopping trips; those are something from my youth and until the recent exchange rate changes we didnt’ even purchase items when visiting my grandparents in Idaho. But it’s finally worth going again, and even worth buying things mail order.

Speaking of which, I got a new GPS logger last week. It’s the same model as before, a RoyalTek 2300, as I managed to ruin the first one on our trip. I’ll give more details later, but suffice to say that I found that model to be very good for geotagging purposes and so I ordered the same one, had it shipped to Sumas, and ran across the border last weekend to pick it up. I’m now getting numerous enquires from people on Flickr since I made a comment about this model, and so I’ll take along the logger and my camera today and hopefully will get a chance between stores to shoot a few pictures and be able to post quickly about it to satisfy people’s curiosity.

I’m off now, we’re going to cross the border before the line-ups form and eat an American breakfast. I’m trying to convince Karin that we should have Mexican for dinner.

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On Friday, Karin and I celebrated our 5^th anniversary.  I had planned to write a post in honour of both the occasion and my gorgeous bride, but real life did not allow it thanks to time pressures last week.  I did start one in which I wanted to talk about all the ways Karin is special to me; but I just kept coming back to one thought…

One of my greatest friends had dated the same girl for almost eight years, with the three of us even backpacking Europe together; but after she decided to move on he was suddenly overrun by women who had been admiring him from afar until then.  One day he told me that he had met a girl that planned to go to Ireland in a month just as he was planning, and so they decided to go together.  When he got back, he told me they were engaged.  When I asked how you could date someone for years without proposing and then suddenly choose one girl that he hadn’t dated any longer than other recent pairings he had made, told me that, “When you meet the right one, you just know”.  I didn’t take him seriously at the time, as I had already been in love but had never felt anything like that; but then when I met Karin I “just knew”.  I have been happy ever since, and even years later I smile often whenever I think about that special feeling she invokes in me just as strongly now as back then.

Karin and I will be returning to Playa del Carmen, Mexico for our fifth anniversary, delaying our trip until after hurricane season just as we delayed our honeymoon there.  While many people take vacations regularly, our budget does not allow it and so we began saving for this trip years ago.  We will not be spending an extraordinary amount on the trip itself, but we have also budgeted for a number of new items to take along, most of which I will talk about soon.  Knowing that we have had this planned for a long time, we did not get anniversary presents for each other, and I had told Karin not to buy me a birthday present last month.  Karin’s birthday will be in Mexico.

So what did we do to actually mark the occasion?  We were together.  This might not seem like much, as we do most things together; but I made sure to leave the homework alone and stayed away from blogging so that I could pay even more attention to the most important person in my life.  I came home early from work on Friday and we went to the bluStone restaurant for dinner.  We spent the rest of the weekend just “hanging out”, for if you truly with your perfect match then you will never tire of being with the one you love even if you are not doing anything.

…saw puppies at the pet store today that were multipoo and poodle crosses.

Would one then be a multipoo-poo?

How did mutts suddenly become $600 items?

…overheard a flea market stall owner pitching to a skeptical customer, “I had tennis elbow and I wore one of these magnet bracelets for a year, and my tennis elbow went away!”

Amazing! Imagine what would have happened if she had allowed it to heal for a year without a magnet field. Good thing she had that bracelet!

After work on Wednesday, I was cruising along the freeway towards home. I’m fairly good about checking my mirrors and instrument panel regularly, and I having just done a scan I found myself thinking that it is nice to finally have the car running half decently after investing money twice recently for a tune-up/repair followed by a repair of a broken timing belt. Sure, it creaks and groans when I’m not traveling on a straight, flat road; crying out that it’s going to need new ball joints or some similar costly repair very soon. Yes, it’s probably almost time for new brakes again. OK, maybe the transmission has been seeming to slip as of late, making me wonder what that is going to cost. But at least the engine is running fine now that I dished out a bunch of cash I didn’t have. But as I scanned the panel I thought about the fact that it was nice that I didn’t hear noises from the engine that shouldn’t be there.

Then I scanned a minute later, and noticed that there was no needle on my temperature gauge!

Looking closer, the needle was hidden as it had shot straight up. I looked ahead and saw the Whatcom Road exit, and I immediately slowed down and signaled to get off the freeway. Coming up the exit ramp, I shifted into neutral to try and save my engine.

It promptly died.

I now was coasting up the ramp with no power. You only get about four pumps of the brakes when there is no power to recirculate the brake fluid, and so I turned right at the top of the ramp, which was thankfully a yield rather than a stop sign, and pulled to the side of Whatcom Road. Even though it was down hill to a gas station, there was a light just before the gas station that was red with traffic waiting, and I would have no brakes to slow me enough to allow the light to change.  Once stopped, I shifted into Park and tried to start it again, but it just cranked and didn’t turn over.

Steam started to come out from under my hood. For some time there had been a very slow loss of radiator fluid, meaning that I needed to regularly top the car up. My mechanic had located a minor leak during the last service, it could not have been much since there has never been drops of fluid in my parking spot and he had said it could wait until the next servicing. I knew that somehow it had suddenly become worse just now, and doubted that I had much fluid left in the radiator. Once I could pop of the rad cap and check, it was confirmed.

After a couple of trips back and forth to the gas station with some empty pop bottles, I had refilled the rad with water. Pumping the hoses by hand revealed that the engine was still full of antifreeze. However, the car was still too hot to start it when I tried, and the car was quickly draining the little battery. Once the engine was finally cool enough and the rad was fully topped off I should have been able to start the car, but now I needed a boost. After borrowing cables from the gas station, I waited for someone to stop and boost me. A kind motorist did stop, and we tried to get it going. It seemed very close to turning over, but just wouldn’t quite do so. That is when my new helper suggested I might want to see what’s going on under the hood while he cranked it for me.

As he cranked, I watched antifreeze squirt out from under the heat shield in the front of the engine. The car had a blown head gasket.

I thanked him and let him go on his way, and walked down to the PetroCan to return their jumper cables. While I was very tired and wanted to get home, I knew I didn’t need the expense of a taxi with the bills I was about to face. I asked if the bus ran this late, and was assured that it came by every 20 minutes and that since they hadn’t seen it for a while, it must be about due.  I walked across the street to the bus stop in front of the Shell station and sat on the bench.  I was the worst stop I’ve been at, as they situated it at the one spot where the road narrowed and there was no shoulder, but with a ditch behind.  As I did some homework on the bench, semi went by within two feet of my knees.

After 40 minutes of waiting, I went into the Shell station and asked them about the bus.  They stated that this stop was hardly used, and no buses came by past 4pm!  The were a lot more helpful, going online to confirm the schedule and to tell me that the closest bus would be 2 kilometers away and wouldn’t come for over an hour.  Since it was already 8:45pm, I gave in and called a cab.

A call to my mechanic in the morning confirmed my diagnosis and that he believed the same as me, that it was time to quit putting money into this car.  The repair costs were becoming more than a payment on a replacement car, and so even if I hadn’t budgeted to buy a car it would still be cheaper than continuing to pay for repairs on this car.  I would need to search for a car, and quickly as I was already missing work and definitely needed a replacement by Tuesday morning.

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