I just noticed that I am now updating my blog only every third day. Strange. It doesn't feel like time is passing any quicker than when I update it daily. I feel like Riff: It's astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness. Takes it's toll.

Time has a way of smoothing everything out. Or muddling it into vague memories. For example, my first coherent memory is from when I was a little over one year old. I was sitting in the grass next to another toddler. This was on a farm of sorts just outside my hometown, where my uncle lived with his family. It was sunny. My parents were laughing. I felt good.

It doesn't come as a surprise to me that this is the first thing I remember vividly. Tears and rain do not make up a big portion of my memories. Maybe I just had such a wonderful childhood. I did. But I think I remember more laughing than crying because that's what my mind chooses to remember. I think it selects mundane, pleasant things to store in my memory so that I do not go insane. That's my explanation of why it was always sunny when I was a kid. It's just the warm and fuzzy blanket of time, which has been drawn over all things past.

And why do I mention this? Because of The War, of course. It's virtually over, the invasion stage of it, anyway. And I am afraid that I will see these times through some rose-tinted spectacles, when I'll look back on them, twenty or thirty years from now. "Do you remember?", I will ask my wife. "We were pregnant, had just bought our first house, and I was demonstrating against the invasion into Iraq. Those were the days."

I hope this will not happen. But deep down I know it will. I will forget the let-down, the desperation, the incredulity, the sorrow, the nausea, the indignation. The horror. The slaughter. It will all become somehow sugarcoated. And it will become about me. How these were my rebellious years. How this was the time when I stood up for what I believe. And nostalgia will follow. O, how foreseeably pathetic I will become. And probably am already. Pitiful. Sad, really.

But I digress. I was about to explain why I'm only posting every third day now: The thing is, thie blog is an outlet. A vent. And when there is nothing to vent, nothing interesting gets written.

Like now.

For a couple of weeks, our car has had this weird little noise coming from the engine part of it (can you tell I know nothing about car engines?). I took it to a mechanic, who basically scratched his head, changed some oils and gave me a bill.

The sound didn't go away, so I took it back today. The mechanic scratched his head again, changed some more oils and gave me a new bill. That was not reassuring. And the noise was still there. So I did something you should never do. I asked him to guess. That's like asking your doctor to guess. You don't want these people guessing what can be wrong with you. Or your car.

His best guess? "Slowly failing torque converter". His words. To fix that, if that is indeed what's wrong with it, it would be "best" to install another automatic transmission. A low-milage used one, plus labor, could cost a thousand dollars.

So my options are:

• Wait until it breaks (a week, a year), and then buy a used 'tranny'.
  
• Trade the car for another used one. More money, maybe less hazzle.
  
• Buy/lease a new car. Much more money, definetly less hazzle.
  

Fun. Fun. Fun.