Amazingly, It Wasn't A Scam

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published February 20, 2019] ©2019

When the service garage manager told me my car failed its smog test because I don’t drive on freeways enough, I was sure I was being scammed.  I’d had this experience once before years ago at the now-defunct service station on Pearl and Eads who told me my five-year-old Camry would need $800 in repairs to pass.  Dubious, I took it to another garage and it passed without a hitch. 

This time, the service manager tried to explain to me that their test machine had failed my car on something called OBDII.  As best as I could understand – and frankly, I couldn’t understand it at all – when I’d had my battery replaced 18 months earlier, it had re-set a thingamagiggy (not its technical name) that was now causing this problem. 

The solution, he said, was that I needed to get the car out on the freeway and drive it around for a while (20-100 miles, he guessed) then bring it back in for a re-test. It sounded so ludicrous that I may have said unkind things.  In my mind, I could hear these guys laughing hysterically and saying, “She actually fell for it!”  I made a mental note to AARP: Alert seniors to the new Elder Battery/Smog Test Scam!

A minor detail with this solution is that I do not drive on freeways.  As in ever.  Hence, my car doesn’t either.  I was a reluctant freeway driver even before a seriously impaired driver slammed his Mercedes into our car at 85 miles per hour. A blow-out at 70 miles per hour on I-5 on Christmas Eve in 2015 clinched it.  My 6’3” husband avoids driving my car as well as no matter how low and far back the driver’s seat is set, his head is wedged against the roof.

But Olof looked up this OBDII thing and amazingly, it’s a real thing.  The internet was replete with minutely-detailed instructions on how exactly you should drive your car to fix this problem.  But being the internet, absolutely none of those instructions agreed.   It reminded me a lot of recipes for perfect popovers, none of which agree either. 

But just so you don’t think I’m making this all up, Olof has complied with my request to explain it to us: 

Inga, my understanding of your smog certificate fiasco follows:

As you are well aware, the state of California has grown concerned about smog, particularly in Southern California.  In response they set limits as to the amount of pollutants that a car can emit and still be licensed. Hence the requirement to periodically take your car to an inspection station and have its exhaust analyzed.

However, our government friends determined that these stations could not economically test the car in all operating modes, so they forced car manufacturers to put in sensors that measure pollutants at speeds and operating conditions that the inspection stations can't observe.  These sensors connect to an onboard computer which stores their results; probably average values for a past period of time, or perhaps the latest values.

This computer is an electronic device and needs electrical power to maintain its memory.  Normally that's not a problem as the car's battery provides more than enough power.  But you had the battery replaced which momentarily deprived the computer of power and wiped its memory clean.  This would also not normally be a problem, but the sensors aren't active at all times.  Some apparently only work in specific driving regimes (e.g. speeds above 55 mph).  Still not a problem normally because after a day or so of driving, all of those regimes should have been experienced, the sensors reactivated, and the computer updated with data.  Only neither the State of California, nor the automobile manufacturers, anticipated granny driving during which the car never exceeds 25 MPH (except on La Jolla Boulevard, where speeds have been observed which, by all rights, should have activated the sensors).

The day after you berated the poor service station guys for not being willing to violate state law, I took the car for a spin up Highway 52 and drove it around near Convoy at various speeds. This was apparently sufficient to re-enable all the sensors and cause them to once again report data to the on-board computer. The next morning the car was issued its anti-smog certificate with no problems.

OK, so Olof fixed it.  But on behalf of all the little old ladies and freeway phobics in America, I protest.  Or maybe it’s just on behalf of little old ladies and freeway phobics in California.  As the washer repair guy said about the pathetically low water levels in my new washer, “It’s a California washing machine.” I’ve already written about our California toilets, the mandated low-flow ones you have to flush six times. Now I have a California car which failed its smog test because I don’t drive on freeways enough.

Seriously, California. 

Droning On

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published February 13, 2019] ©2019

I’ve already written about the slide rule I bought Olof for Christmas that has warmed his geeky heart, and also the birthstone stud earrings I bought for my 8-year-old granddaughter - the first jewelry gift I’ve ever bought for a child or grandchild.  (As previously noted, my sons and nephews weren’t that interested in jewelry gifts.)

But there was one more successful Christmas gift this year.

For his seventh birthday, our grandson had asked his other grandparents for a drone.  Seemed kind of cool and you could do all sorts of fun things with it, like spy on the neighbors.  The other grandparents, being as doting as we, provided one.

Cleverly, the other grandparents live in Connecticut so they merely shipped the drone out to Los Angeles thanking their lucky stars that they wouldn’t have to be the ones to actually read the directions and get the thing airborne.  But I think they also thought:  how hard could it be? 

I am presuming they thought their daughter would be the one to tackle this task as my son, despite more talents than any human being ought to be allowed to have, cannot change a light bulb.  Seriously.  When they first married, we would buy our daughter-in-law new tools that she coveted for her tool box.

But she is a busy woman.  In addition to three young children, she has a YouTube channel that gets 60 million hits a month.  Nope, not a typo.  But it doesn’t leave her a whole lot of time to be assembling drones.

So my son and daughter-in-law hit upon the perfect solution: at Thanksgiving, they brought it down to our house.  Our grandson had had what was turning out to be an expensive paperweight for three months by then and was giving up hope that it would ever see sky.  But his parents assured him that Baba Olof, an engineer, was the man for the job. 

While the drone made it down to our house, the instructions didn’t.  Such was their faith in Olof that I’m sure they thought he didn’t need them. And normally, like most men, and certainly most engineers, Olof eschews directions as the prerogative of men who wear women’s underwear.  But as it turns out, you needed to be a nuclear physicist to operate this drone.

Wait.  Olof IS a nuclear physicist. Well, okay, his degree is in reactor physics. But he quickly realized this was going to take some serious study and practice which wasn’t going to happen before the end of the hectic Thanksgiving weekend.  But it was definitely in the realm of possibility for Christmas up in L.A. 

So he did the only decent thing: he bought the identical drone for himself. It was a sacrifice, but somebody had to do it. 

I would point out that he did not do this for our granddaughter’s Barbie Camper which had totally thwarted him the year before.  He just let Barbie pitch a tent.

Every day in early December, Olof would be checking the steady supply of packages arriving from Amazon.  Is it here yet?  Despite Olof’s altruistic motives, I wasn’t fooled that there wasn’t a element of Engineer-and-Shiny-New-Toy involved here. 

Meanwhile, I was placing bets on how fast it would take the L.A. neighbors to shoot both drones out of the sky.  But Olof was careful to take ours out for practice in suitably unpopulated areas here in San Diego and sent advance notice to our son and daughter-in-law that given their proximity to LAX, they might pre-screen a suitable flying zone.  The Gatwick thing didn’t exactly promote any good will toward small unmanned aircraft. 

And finally, when all systems were go, he sent a missive to our grandson via his parents’ email: 

It looks like we’re all set for drone flying at Christmas. The drone actually flies itself, based on onboard software and sensors.  What you do with the controls is simply tell it where you want it to go.  If you let go of all of the controls, it doesn't crash.  It stops and hovers in mid-air.  I'm confident that if I can learn to do this, a master of video game soccer like yourself will have no problems.  (Your father will no doubt confirm this, having watched me struggle with Nintendo games.  But don't believe his story that he once beat me 135 to 0 in Nintendo Football.  In reality, his team barely broke 100,)

And sure enough, on Christmas Eve day, Olof, our son, and our grandsons went to the designated Suitable For Flying Drones Without Being Blown Out of the Sky by Federal Agents Location, and launched them. It was really fun.  But then came Christmas morning and a new bunch of Exciting New  Toys showed up.  So that may be these drones’ short but exciting lives. Maybe we can see if Amazon is in the market for some like-new delivery vehicles. 

Tidying: The Inga Method (ja)

[Let Inga Tell You, La Jolla Light, published February 6, 2019] ©2019

You can hardly pick up a magazine these days without reading about the Japanese uber-organizer Marie Kondo whose best-selling book about tidying advises only keeping things that “spark joy.” 

Does that include husbands and children?

Now, I’m hugely happy/joyful with my second husband.  And as for the kids, they live out of town.  But should there be a new box on divorce petitions that says, “No longer sparks joy”?

Apparently, Ms. Kondo is also a precision folder of clothes,  creating perfect rectangles that stand up on edge where everything can be easily seen rather than the traditional stacking method.  I’m sure you get faster with practice, but that’s still gotta suck up a lot of time. My bigger concern:

You can fold clothes into perfect rectangles to your OCD-heart’s content. But good luck getting toddlers, teens, and even more problematic, husbands to buy into – and maintain – your work. There was nothing my kids enjoyed more as tots than throwing everything off the shelves of the changing table or sitting in their father’s sock drawer hurling socks in every direction.  If I had just spent an hour precision-folding all that stuff, I might find myself homicidally annoyed. 

In fact, I still remember a day some 40 years ago that I took it upon myself to organize a whole drawer full of miscellaneous nails and screws into a plastic hardware store container with an insertable divider.  When I was done five hours later, I confess that it did spark joy.  Who knew we had so many rubber faucet washers? But if we never needed one again, we’d know just where to find it! Days later, my (now former) husband took out the box looking for a specific size nail, couldn’t get the lid closed, so he pulled out the plastic divider insert.  I mean seriously, if I could have listed that on our divorce application, I would have because I was so profoundly furious.  And that’s when I realized:  Give it up, sister.  If you want order, live alone with your cats.

The number one question that people have about Marie Kondo: does she have kids?  Well, now she does, but not when she wrote the book.  I’m guessing she has a secret folder/tidyer who works after dark.

Ms. Kondo advises that as you get rid of all that joy-less baggage in your home, you should thank it for its service. I agree that would make it emotionally easier to be a ruthless discarder but what about the discardee? “Thanks for the good times! In return, you’re going to a Goodwill bin where you will soon be worn by a homeless person!” I foresee karmic consequences.

I know that thousands (millions?) of people have bought into this whole “tidying” craze and I can definitely see the potential parallels of a tidier closet equaling a tidier mind.  Personally, however, if I met someone whose drawers all looked like the ones Marie Kondo espouses, I’d be worried there were dead people under their house.

But let’s get back to the whole concept of only keeping things, especially clothes, that “spark joy.”   I have several cashmere sweaters that truly bring me joy.  However, I can say as a 70-year-old woman that my underwear definitely does not spark joy.  But I really think I need to keep it anyway.  And even wear it.

It’s not nearly as catchy a slogan as “spark joy” but I think what Ms. Kondo meant was to keep stuff that “sparks joy, or you just plain need it.”  Or “sparks joy, or the IRS will come after you if you didn’t keep it.”  Or even, “sparks joy, or the divorce is just too expensive.” 

As it turns out, this whole fanatic tidying thing has become an international fad.  The Swedes have a similar thing called “Swedish Death Cleaning” a title so characteristic of the ever-practical no-nonsense Swedes that I almost can’t bear it.  In their version, one should start giving away things in middle age not only to simplify one’s life but to not create a burden on one’s kids later. Never too early to get ready for death! 

My tiny garage-less cottage could fit in the living rooms of a lot of La Jolla homes so I try to keep it as uncluttered as possible.  I just don’t have any place to store anything.  Unloading all the stuff that the kids were storing at our place for ten long years after they graduated from college probably reduced our household inventory by 50%.  And let me say, that truly WAS joyful. It was like the ultimate garage sale!  In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that no matter how successful Marie Kondo and the Swedish death-cleaning lady have been with their books, just wait for my best seller, “How to Get your Kids to Take their S—t.”  No folding required.

 There's nothing my kids enjoyed more than playing

"dump all the nice folded stuff off the changing table"

Well, except maybe "empty out Dad's sock drawer"