Back in the Pleistocene period or whenever it was that we were crawling out of the sea and growing legs and things… A childhood BFF and I were in junior high and when we wanted to go skiing somewhere we couldn’t walk to, her older sister Grace Anne (high school) was often our driver. Her family owned a work van (TV repair) and a 13-year-old Buick, which was available to Grace Anne largely because their mother had not learned to drive at that point and the older brothers were out of the house.

So if we wanted to go to Mission Hill to ski, Grace Anne was often willing to drive us, along with various friends of hers. I can’t remember what the heck we did with the skis. I don’t remember there being a ski rack. Maybe they fit in the trunk? Or maybe we sat in the car with them? Whatever.

Once, at the end of a ski day, we had the car all packed up to head back to town and… It. Wouldn’t. Start. We didn’t know anything about cars but it was a nice sunny afternoon and a whole bunch of skiers crowded around us trying to help. One person said, “It must be the lug nuts.” We (being young and silly) totally cracked up! What the bloody hell is a lug nut? (Of course we didn’t say “bloody hell”.) If I remember anywhere near accurately, there were a couple of folks with the last name [something like] “Hudnut” in the crowd and of course we latched on to that coincidence to escalate our hilarity.

I don’t remember how we got the car started but we did and we drove back to Sault Ste. Siberia without incident except I don’t think we could stop laughing to save our lives. I am pretty sure the problem had nothing to do with the lug nuts…

Today Nikio went out for lunch as she usually does when she comes into Cubelandia to work. A while later she texted to say that she’d had a flat taaaaar and was cooling her heels at a tire store. When she got back, she was a bit disgruntled and wondering if she had been “taken”. Because. They sold her some new lug nuts. Their pitch was that Ford had outfitted a bunch of cars with badly designed lug nuts. She went for it and I won’t describe the conversation she and I and Amazon Woman had about being a woman and not particularly savvy about the actual mechanics of cars and wondering if we’re being sold a bill of goods.

Actually, Amazon Woman is an engineer and is very savvy about cars, having worked on and toured with the UMich solar car – in the Australian outback where you take a toilet seat with you if you have to find a place to go. She does not take any crapola from automotive sales or mechanical professionals. And I do hope that FZ (who was just over the wall) wasn’t offended when I said something about “mansplainin'” because he would be the LAST male to ever mansplain. But it’s prob’ly okay because I mentioned a couple of identical twinz in my life who have been known to mansplain 😉 I love them ANYWAY.

The tortoise is living happily in Colorado. I did not take the photoooo.

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