Three

A letter came in the mail a week or so ago, alerting me to the Honda airbag recall. It said hey, not to alarm you, but the airbag in your car may have a defect which can cause it to explode upon deployment, spraying you and your passengers with metal fragments and possibly killing everyone. Don't worry, though, we'll have replacement parts ready by the end of summer! My first thought was, holy shit, how many times did this have to happen before they realized the cause? Hopefully once...but probably not. And second, holy shit, I'm supposed to drive around until the end of summer just hoping we don't have an accident? I mean, sure, odds are we won't. But do I want to bet my kids' lives on those odds? No, thank you. I called the national hotline number, and got a recording instructing me to call my local dealer to arrange a rental. That sounded promising. But then when I called my local dealer, the service guy I always talk to basically blew me off. Don't worry about it, you'll get a letter later IF your car is included in the recall, and then we'll worry about fixing it. So...in the meantime I just hope for the best? Gah.

Then today a friend tweeted that she'd been offered a rental already, and I got pissed. Are rentals available or not? I called again and got the same brush-off -- letter will come IF needed, just wait and see, blah blah. Then when I asked, well, why is my friend getting a rental then...it was like a switch flipped. He was all, Oh, you want a rental? Okay. I'll set that up. So I guess I get what I wanted, but damn. Why should I have to ask? Why so much effort to get me to shut up and go away? And when he called back later to say the rental will be ready tomorrow, he said they'd run out of Honda rentals and moved on to Nissans, they'd handed out so many. SO WHY DID I HAVE TO CALL TWICE AND BASICALLY DEMAND ONE? And it's super awkward because this is the guy I have to talk to every time I schedule an oil change, so I don't want to make a big stink over it. UGH. We'll see how the rental thing turns out. I hope they don't give me some tiny car with a minuscule trunk to haul around my kids and all their crap. Or what if they give me a minivan, and I end up...liking it? The new parts are supposed to be ready by mid-April instead of the end of summer, so that's better than all summer. Probably the kids will be excited, if a little bit confused. I suspect I will miss my car.


We unknowingly drove our (possible) deathtrap car to St. Louis last Sunday for a quick trip with the kids, since our hoped-for week away in Memphis didn't pan out. It was a nice visit, and the boys had a lot of fun. We went to the Museum of Transportation and the Magic House on Sunday and the zoo on Monday. The kids loved the transportation museum. So many trains! The Magic House was so crowded that it was more stressful than fun a lot of the time for the grownups, but I think the boys had a good time. The zoo was nice, but we were tired and barely made it through half. Our hotel was right next to the Arch, and Elliott especially was enamored of it. He kept calling it something that sounded like the Arch and the C, which we couldn't figure out until he finally pointed to a photo of it and we realized all the pictures everywhere show it with the Mississippi River in front, looking quite like the ocean. The Arch in the sea! Unfortunately the Arch was closed for renovation and we couldn't actually go inside. We'll have to go back in the next year or so to check it out.

We had a pleasant if short Easter visit with family. Bubbles and an egg hunt with cousins, then dinner, then home to get to bed on time for our post-Spring-Break re-entry. I'm quite fond of holiday traditions that are just for children, things that adults do solely so that kids can have fun.

Reading:  (just finished) Bone Gap by Laura Ruby

Playing:  still Led Zeppelin