Carpinteria October 10

Birthday Dinner and Blog Idas

My mother requested a birthday dinner at Clementine's in Carpinteria. It's a very good and locally famous restaurant, but the request was out of character so I decided to ask her about it. Turned out the owner of the restaurant owed her $22 and she wanted to press her for it.

The dinner was delightful. Dad made a very nice Happy Birthday banner that we hung on the wall. Evan came in from UCSB and my sister's always-good-natured family was there, too. One of Clementine's dinner features is that homemade pie comes with the dinner. If there's one thing Bauers and Van Zeyls enjoy it's a good homemade pie. And Clementine's pie turned out to be quite tasty. So all in all, a grand feast.



During the course of our dinner conversation Evan insisted I had no idea what a blog was. Oh, foolish genius young physicist. He even refused to believe I had one...until he was introduced to your humble blogger's own blog on the nephew's iPhone, which you, devoted reader, are viewing yourself right now. Mega-Toastation Burn Idas!

The downside of this Epic Victory Over Evan was that he now knows I have a blog and he knows how to find it. Uh-oh.

Before we left for Dinner Evan decided to split wood. I guess it's a tradition with him or something. He went to the woodpile, which seems to get bigger every year,  and to attract piles of discarded ranch materials, but he couldn't find the sledge hammer. So no wood got split.



Running Errands

"They're very educational."
 

Cees makes his own bungee cords from worn out bicycle tires.



 

Helped the parents run errands today: Delivered frozen birds (!) to the museo, picked up the mail for a hospitalized friend, etc.

The story of the Mercedes is slowly coming out. It's a 1999 E320 that my father saw in an AutoTrader magazine. He bought it immediately, thinking the Check Engine light was unimportant. The day after he bought it he couldn't get it started. But that's not important, either, because he discovered that he can just charge up the battery whenever he wants to drive it, which is now never because the DMV took his license away. But he says he intends to drive it up and down the driveway because nobody can tell him what to do on his own property (!). Before the suspension he took it to a local mechanic who just happened to be a friend of my Sister, so we got the story backchannel: the Check Engine light revealed seven problems. Five of them were fixed and when Dad got the estimate on the other two he lost his temper and stomped off.

While driving to the Museum of Natural History today I asked him about the Check Engine light without him knowing I already had part of the history. He explained that it was for California emission controls so not only was it completely unnecessary, it wasn't important. And also the mechanic refused to fix it because it was too expensive and he couldn't change the mechanic's mind not matter what. He doesn't even know how much it was! The mechanic just wouldn't tell him!

Dad also showed me the letters from DMV informing him his license had been suspended. Bottom line: extensive written documentation of how he failed his test and describing an incident in which he "exhibited hostility" toward the evaluator after it was complete. Thankfully, he appears to be slowly coming around to the idea that his driving days are over. But he still wants to keep his "new" Mercedes.