Horribly boring day at work... played chess with someone who also doesn't know how to play. Now I'm sitting around "intercoursing the canine". Is the weekend here yet? At least I'm fifteen minutes away from punching out at work. ...Art

I'm currently 95 percent approved for a new engine. Yay!

I need a weekend. One filled with booze and weed. Sleeping in. Munchies. Like salted cashews, sourcream and onion Pringles. Those cupcakes. Doritos in any flavour. And those spicey twisty things. And some swimming. I want to go swimming. In warm water. That would be good. I want all of that peppered with sex, and movies. And a quad ride. That would be nice. Instead, I'm in the middle of a work week, my cell phone's acting up, I still don't have my car, I'm tired and nauseous, and blogging for no good reason. I hate work. I hate this phone too, it's screwing up words. ...I need a good weekend. Wish me luck. ...Art

WHOOO!!!

In another blog milestone, this is... as far as I can tell... my 100th post! *fanfare*
 
Thanks to the few of you who took it upon themselves to offer me drugs to get my mind off things.  Keep it coming!  ...though, having said that, I'm pretty sure the fact that they offered me drugs had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I wrote that in the blog.  I'm not even convinced anyone actually READS this thing.
 
Oh well, whatever.  My car's still not sorted out, and it's been a month.  Good times.  No, wait, they're not.  I'm constantly tired, I'm suffering from random body pain, this car thing is driving me up the wall... please, continue offering me sex, drugs, and booze.  Your help has been invaluable.  ...unless you've offered me nothing, and no help.  In that event, you're a blog-lurking scum bag, and I hope you have a miserable day.
 
Yeah.  I'm just about all pooped out.  Not nearly as fantastic as my 100th post should be, but whatever.  Deal with it.
 
I'm going to take a nap, I think.

We have a winner, and I'm a loser.

Well, first's first. We have a winner for the Guess Why July 2nd's an Anniversary contest. The $10 booze-tab goes to JD who submitted:

: hey art .. july 2nd of last year is the day you started your online diaries .. let me know when i can cash in on that drink!

Those of you who didn't get that, well, you all suck.

I was thinking of being a dink and disallowing the entry since I did say the answer should be emailed to me while JD's answer was shoved in that chatterbox thing, but hey. Whatever. So, congrats JD on being able to click through the archives.

Strange how time seems inconsistent though. It seems like the blog's been around forever, yet it's only been a year. But that camping trip to the island which was exactly twice as long ago, seems like it happened FAR more recently. Kids, don't do drugs.

You'll want to skip the rest of this if you don't care to hear me rant about my car. It's kind of long. If you DO read it though, I expect offers of doing stuff to get my mind off of stuff. I'd like to suggest sex, booze, and drugs. That leaves two options if you're not Iza, unless you want to get creative and come up with your own alternatives.

Let's see. Funny story. Only it's not. On the 19th, my car started making some sounds. Sort of a growly-clank. Almost like a diesel engine. It's currently the 14th of another month, and my car is still making that sound. Only louder.

The car's covered under warranty, which is good. Getting it fixed however, not so much. Why? I don't fucking know. Here's the story so far though...

I brought it to the dealer and left it with them. I picked up a rental car, a Toyota Camry. I drove the Camry around a little while, then decided to bump down to something smaller to try and cut down on the amount I'd be shelling out while I wait for my car to get fixed. $210 later, I grabbed a Chevy Cavalier.

...can I just say that not only is the Cavalier an ugly car, inside and out, but it handles like a piece of shit? The car was brand new, it had some 4000km on it when I was done, and the door panel on the back door right behind the driver's seat rattled. All the time. It annoyed the hell out of me. Even so, that annoyance and the sheer FUGLY factor of that car was overshadowed by my hate of the way it drove. The steering was sloppy and slow, the suspension mushy. It felt like a much heavier car, but not in the way the Camry felt like a heavier car than my Acura. While the Camry wasn't a nimble little car, it certainly was responsive enough and fun enough to drive. A "family car". The Cavalier, sweet mother o' crap, was about as exciting to drive as a late 80's minivan.

Anyway, the dealership wanted me to fax in invoices for maintenance performed on the car before they'd submit a claim in to Acura Plus (the Acura extended warranty group). Okay, fine, whatever. In the meantime, I second guessed leaving the car there 'cuz of a previous repair issue at that dealership where I returned it three times after an initial repair because various body parts weren't aligned with other body parts, interior trim pieces like airbag covers were raised on one edge and flush on another... it was a really sloppy job. I decided to tow my car out to another dealership in Brampton.

I brought it in on Saturday the 26th. All the nonsense with faxing was covered in a previous blog entry, so I won't duplicate it here. But I WILL continue it here... All that faxing effort to get shit done before the long weekend went to waste as I called back to see what was going on and was told that I needed to fax them some invoices. Wait, what? I *did* that. I have the fax confirmation to prove it. I was put on hold while the guy went off to try and find stuff, but he came back and said he didn't have anything. I refaxed, and called back to make sure he got it. He did. That was a week ago today.

Previously, I'd asked how long it should take to fix the car once things got rolling, and I was told about two to three days if all goes well with parts and such. So I called back on Friday to see how things were coming along. I was told they were still waiting for a response from Acura Plus.

Oh.

How long's it normally take for a reply? "It can take a couple of weeks..." WHAT? How the fuck does it take a couple of weeks for someone to approve a vehicle repair? What the hell happens if you're out of town and blow an engine? Are you and your travel partners expected to shack up in a foreign town while some jackass shuffles paper around for "a couple of weeks"?! That's fucking retarded! I remember making a claim under Toyota's extended warranty program and after submitting the claim, the dealership got a call back a couple of hours later, and they started ripping the truck apart the same fucking day!

A couple of weeks? What IS this shit?

Anyway, Rhys has offered up his Mazda as a loaner for me while he's off in Greece (thanks bud, you've been a god-send), so I should be okay for a couple of weeks... I was going to call the dealership today but I rushed out of the house and forgot my cell. I talked to the dealership last Friday and they said they'd call Acura Plus on my behalf and give me a call back, they never did. It's Wednesday... Five days later.

When *I* called Acura Plus, they said they didn't have an open claim for my car. I dunno if that means they haven't gotten anything from the dealership, or if that's where the "couple of weeks" delay kicks in... Is my shit sitting in a stack of faxes several meters high?

I can't begin to tell you how enraged I am at the way Acura Plus runs shit. Heads will roll. I'll also keep you posted on my court plans for this bullshit... I don't see why I should be on the hook for all this car rental nonsense.

Incidentally, I've been having chest pains the last little while.

And I've wrecked my foot. Makes work difficult seeing as how I spend eight hours walking around a warehouse. Monday was horrible, today I didn't really limp around too much though the pain was still there.

Yay.

Ah, blogger. Thanks for a year's worth of free bitch-therapy.

If things don't sort themselves out soon, I might have to go on a killing spree. Blog-readers spared.

Take care, all.

...Art

Can anyone tell me why there's a guy standing in the median on Winston Churchill leaning towards cars as they drive by waving a Greek flag at them? Like that was done with yesterday. Get over it. Maybe he's just now walked over from Danforth in Toronto? Or watched it on video tape cuz he was busy yesterday and spilled out into traffic in belated celebration? I'll never understand the soccer world. Okay, I'm back to focusing on driving. Later all... Art

Oops.

Okay, I screwed up. I blame technical issues though. That message from the 2nd regarding various Canada Day crap and how it was a bit of an anniversary for myself and Iza was originally typed on the 1st, when it was actually Canada Day. I tried throughout the evening and early morning the next day to actually post that, and it finally worked some time after 11am on the 2nd. Here's something that should have been typed on the 2nd, but was missed 'cuz things were all screwy with Blogger...

July 2nd was yet another aniversary. First person to email me with the answer gets a $10 drinkin' tab with me.

Send your answers to Art's Cell (only make it without a space and without the apostrophe) at GTO dot net. Hopefully those email harvesters that crawl the 'net looking for addresses aren't good enough to catch that.

Take care...

...Art

Meh.

I had a conversation with someone last week where we both used "meh" a little too often. Unfortunately it was all justified. I smashed this line into the messenger window, and after sending it thought I'd keep it as the screen name in MSN messenger: "If neither throwing star nor sword hath felled your opponent, utter a crippling "meh" to herald their demise."

I went to go change it just now, and realized how appropriate it was to things today. Since lunch time Wednesday I was "free". It should have been a really long weekend, and it should have rocked. Alas, not so much.

I left work around noon as I needed to do some faxing and stuff to get my car fixed. Well, wouldn't you know I ran into problems with that almost immediately? Problems that resulted in me sitting in a public library with two disks of documents to print, one of which didn't work. Good times. All the running around and stress of that early afternoon was punctuated by a zip off to the airport to pick Iza up, and I was running late.

My hands were shaking, most of the excitement of seeing her again overshadowed by my seemingly unending problems with my car. I mean, shit, I started having problems on June 19th. It's now July 4th (happy 4th o' July if it happens to pertain to you), and I'm still without car and no word on what's going on with it.

All I know is that I'm WAY outside of my car rental allowance, assuming they're even going to honour it.

That rocky start carried on through the entire weekend; things were a far cry from what they should have been. It was nice having Iza back, I just couldn't cash in on it. Seems like I was right about the way her parents feel about me after-all, and that put a damper on what should have been a great time.

One thing that sort of almost worked out well happened after Iza left... I watched soccer. That whole Euro 2004 thing. It was the first time I'd ever watched a whole game. Well, sort of watched. I spent the game reading news and surfing around for information on programming a remote control on my phone. Soccer's a rather lame game, and it showed even in the voices of the people giving the play-by-play. I mean, there were some incredibly uncomfortable pauses where nothing was being said, 'cuz well... not much was going on. It's all like 1/4 the pace and fury of hockey, and this was it; the final game in a large scale event. God, how dull.

People actually get all worked up over this?



Anyway, like I'd said earlier, this soccer thing worked out rather well. It's unfortunate that I resorted to watching the game, but it turned out as I'd hoped. I didn't care who won the tournament, really, as long as Poland, Italy, and Portugal didn't. Poland didn't qualify; they're a nation of super-strength highly-refined and concentrated irrelevance anyway. Italy got booted out and bitched and whined about conspiracies and other nonsense... sorry, Italy, if you were as good as every hairy chested grease-ball gino in a lowered Civic seems to think you are, you would have moved on. And Portugal... don't even get me started. So... yaaayy, Greece! As much as that Greek Wedding flick left me hating that nation, and those fucking runts stomping around upstairs when I drop by The Cave... Jesus... truth is they're a whole lot better than the alternative. Hope Rhys is enjoying all the Greek-nonsense that must be going on there now during his visit to his motherland.

Hmm, that much worked out fine.

So yeah. I struggled with this one for four days, and now I'm officially giving the extra long weekend a "meh". Help me dig a hole, boys. Let's get rid of this one before it really starts smelling.

...Art
(meh.)

So then. Hope you all had a happy Canada Day and such. Hope none of you blog readers of mine had to work today... oh, wait, my condolences to those of you who aren't Canadian. Just another July 1st for you guys, huh? Anyway, I'm currently up north, Iza made it back just fine and things are going well. Damn good to see her again. Also, it just occurred to me that today's something of an anniversary for us as we kind of met on Canada Day two years ago. Camping. On the island. A few of you readers were there even, but were probably too ... "unsober" to remember. Heh, who knew that camping trip'd turn out to be the start of this mess? Anyway, I'm sleepy and should probably get on to fixing that. This blog's also much longer than any other I've posted from the mobile and I dunno that I trust this program to not fuck it up. ...that, and I don't know if there's a way to make a new paragraph with this thing and nobody likes reading run-on paragraphs, right? So. Have yourselves a good day... Art