Transportation Woes

I have one roommate who has a regular 9 to 5 job. Which is to say that he's always long gone before I wake up in the morning. So this morning, when I stumble down at 8:30 and start to pull out pans to make my breakfast (which my cousins in Pennsylvania call breakfaxt), I notice that my roomie has left his water bottle on the kitchen counter. Now, this particular roommate is a bit crazy about his water bottle. I remember last Thanksgiving, there were wine glasses on the table, pop cans littering the kitchen counter, even some little shot glasses here and there, but right there, hanging in, was the blue Nalgene bottle.

Jeez, he's going to be sad today. That's all I thought. Until I saw him come in the back door.

He had not forgotten the water bottle. His car wouldn't start. He was annoyed. He was waiting for a tow truck and a loaner. When he entered the kitchen, his first response was to question if I was just getting out of bed (yes, I am - you, too, can be a grad student if you don't want to have money to be able to afford a "loaner car" when your car breaks down) and his second response was to go into a tirade about how American made cars suck.

Now, when you start talking to a woman who openly roots for the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Lions and admits, admits to being from MICHIGAN, this is a throw down. "Your car is ten years old. You have aver 150,000 miles on it. And you get mad when there's a slight electrical problem that will take a mechanic a day to fix. Pardon me if I don't agree with your non-American cars standard."

Then, on the way home from school today, my bike got a flat tire (that's an odd phrase, isn't it? Like my bike said, "today I will acquire a flat. I want a flat. I will get it."). I immediately began muttering, "stupid Canadian manufacturing."