Car repairs Under a Green Sky

I took my car in for its inspection today. Things fell pretty much in the middle of the range of possibilities: I didn't breeze through, and I didn't walk out looking for a new car. The car needed new tires, plus several hundred dollars worth of repairs...and that was the good news. The bad news was: they didn't have the parts in stock. (WHY DOESN'T ANYONE STOCK PARTS FOR AN UNCOMMON VEHICLE THAT WENT OUT OF PRODUCTION TEN YEARS AGO? Oh, yeah, that's why.) So they've ordered them, and I'll have to take the car back again to get the repairs done and get my inspection sticker.

As for tires, I just swung down the road (well, highway) to the nearby Sam's Club, where I got four brand new ones. The car rides much better now.

BUT the guys installing the tires noticed some things. A knocking when you turn to the right. Ummmm...tell me that isn't an axle. I just had those replaced last year. (Oh, crap. I only had the left front axle replaced. The noise is coming from the right. Well, it's not too bad yet. It can wait.) A rattle from the cooling system. (Yes, I know. That's on the list of repairs.) And an oil leak.

Uh-oh.

I nearly ran out of oil a while back, and I've been very careful to keep an eye on my oil level since then. Everything looked fine until something like 2200 miles after the last oil change. Then the oil went dark, and the level started to drop. I was a little concerned this past weekend, but I decided to just keep an eye on it and get an oil change this coming weekend, maybe after my oil change. Yesterday I decided it would be more expedient to get that rolled into my state inspection, so I asked them to do that, too.

When I was leaving the dealership/service place where I had my car worked on today, I dropped my car into a conveniently-located trench about eight feet wide by one foot long by six or eight inches deep directly in front of one of their two entrances. It was actually deeper than the wheel clearance on my car, so there was a question of whether I would be able to get out again. Or whether I would, say, tear a hole in my oil pan getting out.

The guy doing the tire change said the oil spot he found was black. OK, check to make sure they actually changed the oil (I was supposed to do that anyway!) - and, yes, they had; the oil on the dipstick was high and clean. So maybe this was old oil residue somewhere? Or maybe some old oil in the system was - I dunno, leaking out?

Or maybe I had torn a hole in my oil pan.

So. Back up the highway on my nice new tires to officially complain about the business-generating trench in front of the driveway, and have them check the oil pan for leaks. And also get the exhaust system welded back in place - I should have had them do that before I left earlier.

It took about an hour or an hour and a half to do this stuff. In the end, they told me that my system had a lot of little leaks, but nothing major or new. A check of the still-vacant spot where my car had been parked did not reveal any fresh oil. Ehhh, I will be taking my car up again in a few days to get the rest of the repairs done, anyway.

* * * * *

There are few things worse for me than waiting. I am a very patient man, it is true, but this is mostly because I'm a big multitasker. Put me in a situation where I have absolutely nothing else to do but wait patiently and I will go nuts.

I knew I was in for an extended sitting session today. On the whole it was better that I was there rather than out gallivanting with my mom, because I was able to jump up and get the tires installed without having to invest time from some other day. But I expected I would be exposed to inane chatter from the multiple televisions in the waiting room, and I was.

During the morning session, which went on for some two and a half to three hours, I was subjected to endless chatter from some financial news channel (MSNBC? I have no idea) on one TV and something, Ellen, and The View on the other. (I don't mind Ellen DeGeneres that much, though I still disagree with her actions during the strike earlier this year.) I tried to focus on my book, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future by paleontologist Peter D. Ward. I have a feeling that the "Global Warming" part of the subtitle was tacked on at the publisher's request, since halfway through it has mostly been an exploration of the different varieties of mass extinctions that have taken place in Earth's history.

You've probably heard about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. But truth is, prior to Luis and Walter Alvarez's discovery in 1980 of the iridium layer that provides evidence of an extraterrestrial impact consistent with the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs, this was just another theory floating around. But it took off. And soon every mass extinction - and there have been a few, where a significant proportion of living things on Earth and under the oceans have died off - was being blamed on asteroid impacts. Even though there was no evidence for them, no telltale iridium layers or smoking craters, save the one that hit some 65 million years ago and within a few years or decades brought down the saurian rulers of the Earth.

Ward carefully presents the evidence for other causes, all sewn together in an exciting narrative that presents a behind-the-scenes look at the jealousy, pettiness, cutthroat competition, and downright danger experienced by those who would solve these mysteries. And he dispels the notion that this is a world made for us; indeed, he puts forth various evidence-backed versions of Earth's past environment that were inimical - and deadly - to almost all forms of life.

I'm not done yet. I only made it about halfway though, and the badly-written and -acted soap operas chattering over my shoulder this afternoon made it hard to focus.* But I think I'm just getting to the good parts, where various toxic gasses tied up in the oceans are belching forth and doing really bad things to the environment.

I found an interview with Peter Ward online, conducted by none other than astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson.** Give it a listen! And then check out his book.

*One of them, One Life to Live or The Guiding Light, I forget which, seems to be taking a stab at telenovella territory, with soft focus images and melodramatic storylines - a celebrity is on the run, framed for a bank robbery she didn't commit, and she, or somebody, wore a wire (the concept had to be explained for one of the slower villains) to record the bad girl taking credit for the whole thing, but the recorder - horrors - got fried! - and massive overacting. The other was a more conventional story of love, lust, and betrayal, involving a wine-tasting convention and some vague threats involving a waitress or something. I dunno. I was trying to read, dammit..

**I'm not a huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson - he always strikes me as too dismissive and flippant, whether he's stating "The stars in our night sky are only a few thousand dots of light" in a dismissal of Astrology in Skeptical Inquirer, or dismissing Orwell's 1984 ("Why I would believe it would be interesting beyond the date, I don't know,") in Newsweek, or unilaterally demoting Pluto from planethood (and sparking the debate that eventually led to Pluto's official delisting in 2006.) Some of that dismissiveness and flippancy comes through here, and I think it detracts from, rather than enhances, his role as chief popularizer of science since the death of Carl Sagan.