Safety Fork, the

…I promise: by the time you’re done eating it, you’ll feel right as rain.

It probably seems as though I only write about my car these days, but you, o hapless reader, will have to suffer through at least this one more post because this news is the best yet.

The repair guy at the dealer called me at work today to tell me that this morning he finally had all the parts he needed and got my engine taken apart, only to find that the rogue replacement glow plug had banged around in the cylinder for a while before settling down in a nice snug relationship with the exhaust valve. In short, the cylinder walls, the cylinder head, and the piston are all chewed up…so he has to replace the whole engine.

At that point in the conversation, I could have been a lot more upset, but I was mostly thinking, New car purchase: good choice; warranty equals double plus good. And that on one hand, I’ll have an engine with sixteen thousand fewer miles on it, but on the other hand, it would have been a much bigger windfall for this to happen at, say, fifty-seven-or-so thousand miles—in other words, just before the warranty will expire.

I was told that I should be able to get my car back on Friday, although at the rate things are going, I’m not counting on having it until next week. Either way, it can’t come soon enough; the loaner I have makes me an unsafe driver. In the year I’ve had my car, I’ve come close—close enough to be memorable—to causing an accident maybe twice. In the week I’ve had this car, I’ve come close to causing an accident as many times. I ran a red light last week, and I don’t mean I snuck through; it was red and probably had been for some time. And on Saturday, but for Tess wanting to go scanner-shopping with me and shouting, “Stop, stop!” I would have rear-ended—at fifty miles per hour—someone who had decided to stop rather than merge at the end of an onramp. This is not like me, and I don’t want to die.

I just want to ride my motorcy…

…cle.

Almost every time people find out that I have a diesel-powered car, they will ask why I would want—why I would pay more—for such a thing. I usually start by describing the fuel mileage I get, and how I like the extra torque at low RPM it affords me; this explanation satisfies most inquisitors. Even more, however, diesel engines appeal to my aesthetic sense: I like things that are elegant.

In a gasoline engine, fuel and air are mixed before they are injected into the cylinder, compressed, and ignited by the spark plug. A diesel engine compresses only air; when the piston reaches its highest point, fuel is injected and spontaneously combusts because compression has raised the temperature of the air above the flash point of the fuel. Put another way, a gasoline engine uses the physical relationship of temperature and pressure in a gas in one direction: to push the piston down after ignition. A diesel engine uses that relationship twice: once to heat the air enough to ignite the fuel, and again to push the piston down, producing power.

So I hope the dealer finishes fixing my car today; the one they lent me is nice, but the sound of it starting just doesn’t bring me the same thermodynamically-inspired smile.

I realized on Friday that I haven’t made a release of Same OSX in a year (the last one was November 20, 2005), which isn’t particularly fair to the fifteen hundred people who have downloaded it from the SourceForge site—especially since most of the version 0.8 changes have been languishing on my hard disk for the last six months or so. If you’re one of the two or three people who I know both read this ‘blog and play the game from time to time, accept my apologies and go grab the new version. It’s a universal binary for your shiny new Intel Macs, I’ve made a few odd visual improvements, and in anticipation of every Mac lover’s favorite application complaint, I’ve made it respond intelligently to the caption bar zoom button. Knock yourselves out.

As I was driving my borrowed car north from Mankato tonight, I turned off public radio’s syndication of the BBC News World Service—I couldn’t care less about Tom Cruise’s wedding. Instead of listening, I entertained myself by singing, trying to recall the lyrics and melodies of different songs. I managed The Motorcycle Song, a couple of verses of Built on a Rock, part of The Story of Lawrence Welk, and one other song.

I first saw Man of La Mancha while I was still in high school, and it has since been my favorite musical. I listened to my parents’ vinyl copy of the soundtrack so many times that—as I recall—there are a couple of places where it skips. Of course my early favorite songs were the more entertaining and accessible: the title song, Man of La Mancha, The Barber’s Song, and The Impossible Dream. But since some point when I was in college, my favorite song from the musical—and the one I remembered tonight—has been To Each His Dulcinea:

To each his Dulcinea,
that he alone can name.
To each a secret hiding place
where he can find the haunting face
to light his secret flame.

For with his Dulcinea,
beside him so to stand,
a man can do quite anything:
outfly the bird upon the wing,
hold moonlight in his hand!

But if you build your life on dreams,
it’s prudent to recall:
a man with moonlight in his hand
has nothing there at all.

There is no Dulcinea,
she’s made of flame and air.
And yet, how lovely life would seem
if every man could weave a dream
to keep him from despair.

To each his Dulcinea,
‘though she’s only flame and air.

I’m not sure why I like that song so much, but when I don’t have time to listen to the whole soundtrack, it’s always the one I make sure to hear.

Rudolf is on vacation for the weekend. I took him to the shop in the morning because the check engine light was on, and cold starts seemed rougher than they should be. My suspicion was right: after waiting about an hour for them to investigate, the mechanic found me and told me that they’d replaced the glow plug in cylinder 1. Then he told me that after they started up the engine, the tip of the new plug broke off in the cylinder, that they’d have to take off the cylinder head to find and remove the wayward heating element. I’m glad this is under warranty; it’s the sort of work that would otherwise rack up an awful lot of labor charges.

In the meantime, I’ve been given a substitute Beetle, which is actually newer and fancier than mine; it has leather seats, although it’s not really sufficiently manual or diesel-powered for my tastes.

While checking on the status of my bedsheets, I noticed that the dryer has set up a standing wave in the bottle of windex sitting atop it. If I didn’t need to go to bed, I’d try to compute the wavelength and find out what is the frequency of the vibration my dryer generates.

If you haven’t noticed, I am, in fact, a dork.

I listened to the last senatorial and gubenatorial debates tonight on public radio, and they made me really agitated. The senatorial candidates seemed particularly vindictive—they weren’t yelling per se, but I have the same knot in my stomach now that I used to get when the people who lived downstairs would have fights loud enough for me to hear. I hope I can calm down enough to get to sleep in an hour and a half.

At least I know for whom I’ll vote on Tuesday.

As much as I like my bicycle, I don’t enjoy riding it in chilly weather; if my fingers would get cold on the handlebars, the bicycle is likely to stay parked. Needless to say, I didn’t ride it to work much in October.

After a few of weeks of sitting around in my apartment after work, restless, on Friday I finally broke down and bought a fixture so that I can bring my bicycle indoors as a stationary bicycle this winter. I tried it out Friday evening after I bought it, and again this afternoon. I forsee it getting a lot of use before warm weather returns to these Northern climes.

Also, in my second-story apartment, there’s very little chance I’ll get run over by a car while riding.