Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Last year on the day after Thanksgiving, I found myself at Target at about 7 a.m. doing some bargain shopping. That's early enough on its own, but I think I'd been up for about three hours already, including waiting in line for an hour in the cold Utah rain to squeeze into a cramped Toys-R-Us (is it just me, or was that store not a lot more spacious about 25-30 years ago?). Being that tired and in that sort of atmosphere will cause some irrational behavior - it's sort of like a shark feeding frenzy, where you'll bite on anything not tied down. Somehow I ended up with a bunch of $5 DVDs, most of which are unwatched nearly a year later.
One of those is Gremlins, which I still think is a bit of a classic (but apparently not enough of one to cause me to crack the case). If I remember correctly, though, the creatures in Gremlins were based loosely on little monsters that were blamed for causing mechanical failures during WWII. I may have to watch the movie to remember how they got rid of them (I think sunlight is involved - should be easy in Arizona), because I'm pretty sure there are a few hanging around my house.
Last night I took an emergency trip to the store (to get chocolate syrup), and my car ran without a hitch, just as it has for about the past 8 years. This morning when I got in and turned the key, it was idling high, and the "check engine" light was on. I'm probably missing something obvious, but how else (besides gremlins) do you explain my car breaking while sitting in a garage all night?
When they are not digging around in my engine block, they're apparently digging around in my neighbor's yard. The other day our neighbor warned us about some flooding on one side of our house, but I figured out pretty quickly that it was coming from their side of the wall. A guy came and fixed it the other day, but apparently the gremlins aren't letting him off that easy, because yesterday the water was back.
It's no accident, then, that these things tend to hit in waves. The problem is that no one has watched that movie for a while, so my pest control company (who were just here the other day) spray for scorpions and ants but don't deal with gremlins at all. I'd call the people at Monsterquest to check this out, but I stopped watching that a while ago when I realized that they never find anything (shocker!).
While I'm on the subject of Monsterquest, I think the reason I like stuff like that in the first place is that I'm intrigued by the unknown. What I've also learned recently, though, is that in some cases I prefer the unknown to stay that way. For example, a week ago I was happy in my ignorance regarding what happens behind the closed doors of an airplane cockpit. I think I'd prefer assuming there are gremlins on board to knowing that the pilots are probably up there playing Minesweeper.
