Story time. I own a white 2003 Toyota Land Cruiser, a great vehicle for many reasons. When Bill and I first worked together to explore this strange world view, we discovered after several months that he and I drove the exact same vehicle. Same color and body style, but I think his was a year or two older than mine.
It was a very strange coincidence, one that I recall unsettled him a tad. I mean let’s face it, there are coincidences and then there are coincidences that hit too close to home or something, so I get it. What are the odds? As fate would have it, Bill later hit a deer with his that totaled his LC and he replaced it w a GMC truck. My kids got older and needed a vehicle so I gave them my LC and bought a Ford truck. Different vehicles. Phew!
My LC is still kicking (knocks on wood), although it has had some trouble lately. The water pump went out which meant I had to do the timing belt, tensioner, idler pulley, etc. Not a cheap fix but with only 220k miles, we should still get a lot of life out of the LC.
The LC isn’t the only car breaking lately. My wife’s car left a pool of oil on our garage floor yesterday. Not good, but it looks like it was an easy fix (fingers crossed). And it ain’t just cars! On Saturday one of my daughters called to report that her computer was dead and she was under the gun with school. It’s not an old or cheap computer so it surprised me. I turned on my own laptop to research and to my utter shock, it would not turn on. In the end we were able to resuscitate her dead computer be reinstalling the OS. Mine somehow had a tiny crack in the screen and the repair was too costly to justify. What are the odds that two computers from the same family would die on the same Saturday morning? Or that two of my cars would vex me at the same time? Or that Bill and I used to drive the exact same car?
Strange coincidences, all, coming in pairs.
Back to the LC saga, my normal mechanic is old and pretty far behind but he agreed to take on the repair job. It took way too long, 5 weeks. The old man got sick and he also made a mistake that forced him to do the work twice. He didn’t charge me extra but it just took him forever. I got the LC back and within an hour it was throwing engine codes. Ugh.
But he didn’t want the vehicle back. He was certain the codes were not from his work. He was thorough, he said. He did extra work like replacing the clamps on all the hoses. And besides that, the LC was “bad juju”, vehicula non grata, as it were. He said he’d take a look if I really wanted, but he had a lot of other work to get to so it would be a while.
Shoot.
We’ve got 6 drivers and 4 cars and I really didn’t want another 5-week repair keeping us down a car. Plus I was a little concerned about his work quality now. I decided to take it somewhere else. Spoiler: that has proven to be a good move.
The morning of my appointment w the new mechanic I did a quick scan of headlines. Google News is pretty poor quality, in my opinion, but this headline about two lions caught my eye:
I don’t follow basketball at all, much less a specific team like the Warriors, so I have no idea why Google News served me that article, but how could I resist taking a screenshot given all the talk of the two lions on the Animalia L page recently? As lazy as they are, they keep popping up.
Well, I did save the image and moved on with my day. My wife and I dropped off the LC at the new mechanic’s place. That afternoon he called to say it was A-OK and ready to take home so my son and I drove over. Google had another curveball for me, though. The Maps app took me down a different road than that very morning. I asked my son what could possibly have changed in Google’s algorithm from 8 hours prior. He guessed it had to do with traffic. Maybe, but these are windy back roads w very little traffic.
Coming back I decided to take this new route since it was fresh in mind. As I came up over a small ridge I saw, what else, two lions:
I hadn’t noticed them on the way over. I got a picture of each one:
What can the odds be that I’d see them the same day as that headline?
These are, I think, called sentry lions. There is another type of lion statue with a ball called medici lions but I believe those lions are standing whereas these two (lazy?) lions are sitting. Even if they aren’t standing, at least they didn’t lose their ball. This homeowner apparently agrees with the Warriors coach that two lions are better than one.
That’s not true of everything, of course. Car trouble and computer trouble are definitely better as single incidents than pairs.
William James Tychonievich
My school has two lions in its logo.
LEE
Ha, how did I not notice that before? They look like they are going at that shield pretty hard.
WW
This is a timely post, as I literally said to my wife yesterday that if one more mechanical or electrical thing breaks, I am going to lose it. It is just non stop this last little bit.
What precipitated my comment yesterday was our computer monitor in our basement office stopped working for no apparent reason. My wife wanted me to fix it and nothing was working – a little while later, however, the gremlin departed and the monitor just turned on again by itself, for no apparent reason.
And our problems have also included significant car issues, all just in the last few weeks. My wife’s car door lock stopped working, followed by her power window. She asked if we could take it in to get fixed. Before I could call our mechanic, another issue came up in which the air compressor for air shocks that I didn’t even know her car had, was making a continuously loud, unbearable noise. So, I call the mechanic up, and he said he could get us in this past Monday (this was on Friday before the weekend). Over the weekend, my wife drove home and said her car wasn’t getting up to operating temperature and giving her error messages. And when she shut off the car, the cooling fan would just keep running as if the car was still on. It just wouldn’t shut off, and was so loud that at the yoga studio she went to on Saturday someone came in and asked who left their car running in the parking lot. So we added that to the list of what the mechanic checked out.
Anyway, you know it is bad when the mechanic calls you to give you an update on what he checked out and starts with a big sigh while saying “You got a few minutes?” Several thousand dollars of repairs that just spontaneously came on in the last couple weeks.
Then, to top it off, we get the car back, and two days later all of her brakes are grinding, so I have to take it back in on Tuesday to get those replaced. Which, you know, happens with wear and tear, but the timing was not helpful. The real awesome thing is that simultaneously my own breaks are now grinding, so it goes in right after they do hers.
The mechanic better send us a Christmas card this year.
I naturally blame Saruman, god of this Earth and all things mechanical, for all of this.
LEE
Man that is rough. You definitely have it worse on the car front.