Lunch with Dad

It seems our new vehicle has developed some new quirks, which is to be expected when you get it ultra cheap. These are the things that we had already established are quirky and weird about it:

The open door light never turns off no matter how many times you slam all the doors.

The seatbelts don't retract and get jammed in the doors.

The windshield wipers seem to be a bit out of alignment. They don't seem to go up enough, and then they come down in a violent thwack! None of this seems to clear much of the water from the windshield.

It has a very large vocabulary of different random beeps and noises. Noone's sure what they all mean.

The radio is stuck on crappy radio stations like JACK, which plays too much Phil Collins. Oh wait, that's not the van, that's my dad. Too much Phil Collins!

So now all of a sudden there is something new. Now if you take the keys out of the ignition, the cabin lights turn on. Then they don't turn off until the battery has died.

There are two workarounds for this. One is to disconnect the battery every time you park, and the other is to just leave the thing running. Since he had a lot of schools to visit today, dad opted for the latter and took me along because it's not a good idea to leave your car empty and running in front of a school.

The trip took us through his old neighbourhood, and as always he had a lot of stories to tell, but because we're nearing the anniversary of Grandma's death, the stories were unusually morbid, full of deaths and suicides. He's started the orphan talk again too. I hope it passes because it makes me kind of uncomfortable. The more he wallows, the more he begins to realize that I'm not doing the same, which I'd rather not have to justify again.