Lord, I'm Crazy 'bout a Mercury

With the impending return of my parents this weekend, I continued on the errand path today. After returning the steam cleaner, fresh from yesterday's stain debacle, I turned to another cleaning project: the company car.

It took me some time in San Diego to find a quarter carwash, but I did. Or, rather, I found a coin-operated carwash. While it would certainly accept 25-cent pieces, it would be a reach to call this thing a quarter car wash as it required 9 of the coins ($2.25) to start up, offering only 4 minutes of wash time. Once again, less and less costs more and more. Because someone was waiting ahead of me for a bay to empty, I began rather than ended with vacuuming the interior.

I emptied my pockets and coin purse of parking meter money to pay for this 5-coin ($1.25) extravagance and almost immediately regretted it. Four months of driving in Nashville would have left my van littered with snack crumbs and cigarette ash, but my San Diego life had left the company car quite pristine. That's the second time this week that a rented machine has pointed out my lifestyle changes. In fact, I attribute the few crumbs the suction tube found to the air-freshener-leavin', makeup-forgettin' driver who borrowed the car in April.

It was quite a different story once I moved to washing the exterior, however. The Mercury was quite a mess. For one, California smog had settled on it. Given time, I'm sure one might forget that the car is registered as "white." A white car in San Diego... madness, I tell you. For another, my apartment-assigned parking spot is conveniently placed beneath three sap-dripping trees. An internet search tells me that the drip might instead be insect honeydew, but I don't really care. Whatever it is, this stuff is sticky, tough, and all over the car. The soft foam brush at the multi-quarter carwash is no match for it. Long after the rinse water stopped flowing, I was scraping yellow-beige spots from the surface with a thumbnail. Once satisfied with the results, I crossed the street to pick up a sandwich at Subway: my lunch and dinner for the day. Inside the restaurant, Alan Jackson crooned "Well if I had money, I tell you what I’d do; I’d go downtown and buy a Mercury or two.” I must have done a good job.

Parked again under its familiar trees, the freshly-cleaned car is now beckoning rain. I hope today's dark clouds answer the call, because it hasn't rained out here in some time. That's something I'm starting to miss.

Tonight, I'll be rehearsing the second act of Move Over, Mrs. Markham (yes, we've finally found a quorum there). Tomorrow, I'll develop a roll of film and tell you about a show's upcoming season premiere that is near and dear to my life right now, even though I've never seen an episode.