No Angel disks this week. Long story why. I spent some time catching up on EURO2004 tapes. What happened to all my teams? Italy=out. England=out. Germany=out. France=out. Pretty much the only team left for me is Netherlands and I'm afraid to care -- they'll get out too.

Bob is on his way back from New Orleans tonight and his plane is delayed. He said if it was after 11pm he would take a shuttle home but I told him I knew I wouldn't be able to fall asleep if I was waiting for him to get home so I'd just come get him. Of course, now I'm sleepy.

I have a bunch of random unrelated notes and I'm going to stick them here in one un-thematically linked entry.

This morning on my walk I came up the hill on Walnut and looked up and there was a buck. Well, I guess actually it's called a spike. I'm not exactly a hunter person. It didn't have actual antlers yet but little nubbins and it stopped and I stopped and we stared at each other. It was huge and just standing in someone's driveway. After a minute it took a half dozen slow steps and then jogged out of my sight and probably down the hill more towards the train tracks where there aren't any houses. As I walked the rest of the way up the hill a woman came out of her house and asked if I saw the deer and pointed up the street and said she saw it come from there.

So what is the proper method to style bangs? When Cha does my hair she flicks her wrist and my bangs look perfect. She could be using a pitchfork and a blowtorch and flick: perfect. I use products and hair dryers and round brushes and they end up looking like stunt bangs from Something About Mary every time.

I know I'm not a parent but I don't understand parents and kids sometimes. I saw some lady walking out of the market tonight and her kid looked perfectly normal except a bit fidgety but it was a boy, maybe 8 years old so not outside of what you might expect and here goes the mom hauling off smacking the poor kid in front of the store where God and everyone (me) could watch. And the kid was kind of big so extra humiliation factor. Then I'm inside the store and the most obnoxious, not-cute, whiny girl is screeching at her Dad to push the cart faster and buy this or that -- clearly a moment where a good smack might have come in handy and the Dad does nothing and for next fifteen minutes everyone in the store gets to listen to this. Can he at least try to quiet her?

Bleu cheese -- I though I hated it. I associate it with this nasty smelling salad dressing my mom made on Saturday nights. But when Bob and I were in Tacoma we had this asparagus dish with a sauce of balsamic vinegar and bleu cheese -- try this at home, seriously, it's the best thing ever. So we've been buying bleu cheese and I've been eating it on crackers and crumbling it on salads and this is like the best food discover since brown betty.

I have some more stuff to write about Angel, because I've watched at least three more episodes since I wrote last. But I'll spare you. But really, it's so painful to watch, knowing where they're going, especially Wesley, and again, knowing how they all end up.

I cleaned out my closet yesterday. I desperately need to buy some summer clothes. Too bad I hate shopping and have spent a bunch of money on other things like writing conferences and facials and car repairs and computer carts and very soon, Seattle Opera: Ring tickets. I usually don't get rid of stuff (clothes) until I have new stuff to replace it but some of the stuff in there was so old and ratty I put it in the recycle bag for Goodwill. I found a skirt I forgot I had and wore it today. It's a sort of weird cut and a teensy bit awkward fitting but otherwise, it works just fine and will stand in one day a week. On the top shelf I found a box with a pair of shoes that I had no idea existed. I guess I can't call them running shoes since they've never seen any running but I guess they are my old walking shoes that I never tossed. I wore them today to see how worn down they are and I think they need to be chucked and now that I think of it, my current walking shoes could probably stand to be replaced, too.

It's almost 10pm and I've been running around since I got home -- watering front and back and catching up on some computer things, tidying up a few things, putting some stuff together for lunch tomorrow. Oh, and in the interest of complete honesty: I watched another Angel. I'm almost done with Season 3 so the craziness will stop soon. I've got the France v. Switzerland game on in the background (taped it earlier today) and I run in when I hear something happening. I think there's one more free game tomorrow and then we go to 3 day delay. I'll have to check FoxSports and see what the deal is.

I know, I've been meaning to get this updated and haven't managed to get my act together.

#1 - TOYOTA UPDATE. I take back almost everything bad I said about Toyota. We got my car fixed. I think it is running better and they managed to knock another $100 or so from the estimate so I'm going to just be happy with that.

#2 - Euro2004 (European soccer championships) are going on right now. I could have paid $179 and watched the whole tournament but that seemed a little excessive and I would have felt obligated to watch every single game and I don't want to be chained to the couch for a month. But FoxSportsWorld is showing 5 games from the first round for free and I think the rest of it on a 3 day delay - which is good enough for me. I watched the France v. Croatia game last night and it was fantastic.

I forget what #3, #4 and possible #5 were ... I'll come back if anything develops.

Okay, now what you were waiting for ... a post about rhubarb. When I started my garden several years ago, I mentioned to Auntie that I had a bunch of random chard growing in my yard and she said it sounded like rhubarb, she’d never see chard volunteer before. Thank God I never tried to eat it since it is rhubarb and the leaves are totally toxic. Every year my little rhubarb has sprouted out and every year I’ve ignored it. This year it was huge and I harvested some and made rhubarb brown betty. Turns out rhubarb comes from a rhizome, which I learned from rhubarb info.com and I can divide my root mass and get lots more rhubarb. Billy says in Wyoming rhubarb grows like weeds. I’m going to divide my rhubarb and grow tons until people are stopping by, begging for my rhubarb and the brown betty recipe.

[Sinead, if you're reading this ... cover your eyes.]

So, I thought you should know the result of my Toyota woes and if you're not in the mood to hear me rant you might want to reread the last post or check out my second cousins and come back later. Let me just post the actual words: Toyota Sucks, here so that all those folks plugging the words into their search engines can read my story. Yes, Toyota bites big wiener.

To recap -- the problem in my untechnical explanation is that the engine computer and the fuel injectors aren't speaking and all need to be replaced. Warranty covers the computer but fuel injectors expired about 15K miles ago and the extended warranty covers just about everything except fuel injectors. It's a known service issue, I have a copy of the bulletin and according to my helpful service advisor at Toyota --she's seen lots of Camrys with this problem. Toyota offered to split the $940 part of the repair not covered by warranty w/ me and I said I thought Toyota should pay for the parts, we'd pay for the labor. It's a known problem for crying out loud. Doesn't Toyota want to stand behind their very own parts? I had to call the Toyota “Customer Service Experience” (their words) line and this time I spoke to Gary and if I may be candid, he was a real prick. Not because he didn’t want to help me with my problem but because he made me feel like an asshole for asking. Like I should be doing back flips because Toyota offered to pay for half the cost of replacing its shitty parts. I’m going to do the repair because at least I can get half from ooh, their good will. And for the record, I was unhappy with Toyota before this all happened. Its customer service sucks and its car service sucks. I had a miserable experience at Vancouver Toyota and Beaverton was mediocre and I don’t know what to think about Broadway. I mean, hey, its got gobs of good will and everything. Also, and I realized this the second day I was driving the car, and it's not Toyota's fault but what the hell am I doing driving the most boring middle-aged suburban housewife car of all time? As soon as I scrape together some extra money I'm buying something convertible with two seats.

Dramatic baby racoon rescue in our own backyard. Apparently I deleted the dramatic photos and story. SORRY.

BTW -- I'm not going to ignore the service issue ... if that's what you're thinking.

This is a true story. I had to wait for my computer cart to be delivered before I could run a couple of errands. The delivery came around noon and I wrapped up what I was doing here and headed out. I am driving the Toyota, still not fixed and engine light still twinkling merrily on the dash. First stop Bank of America in downtown Vancouver. As I turn onto Main Street my car starts making a horrible racket which feels like it's coming from the tires: 'you've got to be kidding me,' I think to myself as I pull into an all reserved dinky parking lot to see what's going on. Can this be true that now I get to have a flat tire? Tires look fine so I get back in the car and as I sit down my cell rings and it's Toyota: they're offering to split the fix with me. I say we're willing to pay for the labor but we don't think we should pay for the parts and she says she can't make that deal so I have to go back to Toyota HQ. Meanwhile, I tell her about this new noise and she says maybe something is stuck in the tire and as I pull out the racket continues so I park illegally, check the tires again and sure enough there is an industrial sized razor thing stuck in the rear, driver's side tire. I yank it out and prepare to go to Les Schwab. When I get back in the car: I KID YOU NOT. The engine light was out. And it hasn't come back on since.

I went to Les Schwab and he said the tire was fine. So then I was stuck going to the BofA on Hwy 99 which is the purgatory BofA. There was a man standing in the middle of the driveway and I politely waved thinking he would get out of the way, but no. He wanted to stand there blocking the way and being a pain in the ass. (He was probably a few beers short of a 6-pack but he looked halfway normal, although a little sweaty). I had to drive over the curb to get into the bank parking lot. And when I say bank parking lot, I'm being generous because it's this postage stamp sized plot with one entrance and about 10 parking spaces 1 inch smaller than any actual car. Inside was even more fun. There were about 10 people in line and all the people at the tellers were engaged in complex transactions like exchanging pesos for yen and depositing their tips in singles and change in some sort of complicated arrangement so that took forever. Then I had to get a few things at Freddie's and I didn't realize that I needed to turn in the first entrance because the second one was blocked by a left turn lane so I had to go through the intersection at 72nd and turn around but the parking lot I chose to turn around in had some guy in the driveway that was trying to cross Hwy 99 not make a right so it took another 10 minutes. So basically it took me about 1 hr and 1/2 to go the bank and buy 3 things at Freddies. Now it's not even three o'clock and I feel like I need to lay down with a washcloth on my forehead. Luckily, my netflix arrived: 2 Angel disks with 8 episodes. So, I'm breaking out a refreshing adult beverage or two and putting my feet up.

In other news, I was going to bake a rhubarb strawberry pie but I found a recipe for rhubarb strawberry crisp aka rhubarb strawberry brown betty and brown betty is my middle name so screw the pie.

You know when I saw the engine light on in my car I expected the very worst and then chided myself for overreacting. Any number of things can cause that light to go on. It doesn't have to spell doom. Generally if I have to take my car in for a problem I expect it to cost $800. That way if it actually does cost $800 I can think: "I knew it." And if it's less, I can be relieved: "at least it's not $800." Also I bought an extended warranty so even in a worst case scenario, I figured I'd probably only have to pay the deductible and/or the testing fee. So after my initial panic attack I realized that really there was very little chance that this was going to be a disaster, which I why I did one of those laughs that sounds like crying when I found out that it was a $2,000 repair, only half of which was covered under warranty. The other half wasn’t even covered under the extended warranty. I won’t get into all the details of the doohickeys and whatsits that are haywire and all the phone calls that went back and forth between service-Pam-husband-service-husband-Pam. Toyota may still come through for me. The excellent folks at Broadway Toyota are helping me plead my case to Toyota to see if they will pick up the rest of the repair as a good faith gesture. The car only has 50K on it and it’s a known service issue. At the moment it’s unresolved but I think it’s all going to work out okay.

Meanwhile, I ordered a very cool Anthro computer cart for my eMac which I have needed since forever and never dealt with and finally decided that being miserably uncomfortable while doing something that I often do for hours a day was not a good thing. Here's a picture close to what I ordered. I have to assemble it myself and it's being delivered tomorrow so phone tomorrow afternoon if you want to hear me say bad words. 'Easy to assemble' is a euphemism for 'will cause frustration and despair.' Anthro sent me their print catalog and I noticed this in the photo and later found the picture on line. There's a Karuk basket on the right side of the cart. Cool, eh?

I noticed the car dummy engine light was on when I was about 4 blocks from the office and I remember being flogged without mercy when I drove with the engine light on once as a teenager so I turned around and went back and after doing some basic diagnostic stuff (you know, looking for the book that comes with the car) I decided to leave the car at the office and take MAX to the Expo Center and have Bob pick me up and deal with it tomorrow.

Bob knew a place close by so we got fairly bad Mexican takeout and when we got home VH1 had the 50 most awesomely bad songs on. We both agreed with most of them but the Bette Midler song got the loudest howls of agreement.

Yesterday started the 100 most metal moments and this is probably the greatest show on TV. I’m taping part 2 (80-61) tonight.