Weblog

Today or yesterday¹ was Canada Day. Canada Day is something like Independence Day in the United States. It celebrates when Canada was formed.² However, this isn't a history lesson; this is a story.

For Canada Day, we decided to go to Canada. Supposedly, the Winnipeg Zoo was offering free admission, and there was a jazz festival there as well.³ So, after church, we had lunch, and we took off.

In short, Canada didn't happen. We took two cars to Canada: mine and a car that belonged to another women who didn't come along.⁴ We practised the time-honoured, American tradition of segregation and had all the females in one car and all of the men in mine. We were about forty miles north of Grand Forks when we got a call saying that the ladies' car had broken down. We had to turn around and go rescue the damsels in distress despite the fact that none of us men knew anything about vehicles. We opened the hood to discover green-blue coolant splattered all over the underside of the hood. While we really didn't know what we were doing, I noticed that a hose had come completely loose going from the radiator to the reserve tank. We reattached it, and I took my car into town to purchase some coolant. We got back and mixed half of a litre of coolant with half of a litre of water into the radiator.⁵

Just as we thought that we had fixed the car, a gentlemen stopped to lend us a hand, and this guy really knew what he was doing when it came to automobiles. He looked at the radiator and discovered that it was more substantial than a simple hose coming loose: the entire radiator exploded which caused the top of it to crack apart. So, there was no way that we were going to Canada.

Fortunately, the car broke down right at an exit, so we didn't have to drive even more than a mile before we were at a gas station. We waited there while one of us called AAA to have the car towed back to Grand Forks. Ironically, the tow man happened to be the same good samaritan who determined that the radiator had exploded in the first place. I got to drive a car onto a tow truck, and that was pretty sweet. After that, we all piled into my car and made the trip back down to Grand Forks. When I got back, I was feeling really disappointed and depressed, but I had work to do, so I did the work instead of doing the things that I normally do while disappointed and depressed like watching pointless television, reading Ecclesiastes or writing masterpiece philosophy.⁶ I finally finished, and I'm ready to sleep, but I felt the need to recount the story to you here. Enjoy!

1. Depending on whether you want to consider yesterday to be the time before your last period of sleep or the last period before midnight.
2. Some would say that it celebrates when Canada became independent. I would say that celebrates when Canada formed. From my studies of history, I would say that Canada did not achieve its independence until the Statute of Westminster of 1931, but some people would argue with that.
3. Of course, if you truly know who I am, you would know that I love jazz.
4. Ironically, both cars had Colorado plates.
5. I happen to be the shiznit when it comes to eyeballing a perfect mixture of fifty percent of water and fifty percent of coolant. Congratulate me when you see me.
6. Well, I think that it's masterpiece philosophy.