Random Ramblings
What happens when for the first time you lend your car, which has served you well for nigh on five years and 90.000 miles, to your wife, who has always been apprehensive about driving your car for fear of getting into a car crash with it? Right, she has a crash. Fortunately, both she and the other driver are OK with nothing more serious than a minor bruise here and there. Unfortunately, with repair costs of EUR 3.500 versus a remaining value of EUR 2.200, my car has been totalled in the process, which means that we're in the market for a new car ASAP.
Our car mechanic knows a few people and phoned around, and it looks like we'll be the new owners of a two year old Ford Focus by the end of the week. Because of that, I have been browsing both the
German and
US web sites of Ford and have found a few surprising or at least noteworthy differences between those two sites.
For one thing, Ford US isn't shy about mentioning all the different manufacturers like Volvo, Jaguar, or Mazda, that belong to it. There's not a peep about that on the German Ford site. Also, the naming of the different models is far saner on the US site than on the German site. Around here, different trim levels go by nice-sounding but meaningless names like "Ghia" or "Ambiente" with the latter being the entry level "four seats, four wheels, and a steering wheel" package, and the former being the top of the line "air conditioning, electric everything but the kitchen sink" model. Ford US handles this distinction using equally meaningless two or three letter combinations which by virtue of being reminiscent of other manufacturer's similar schemes gives you at least a pasing chance if guessing at what you may get with each one.
The most interesting difference though, is in the completely different model lineup: The two smallest Ford EU models, the Small Car class Ka and Fiesta, simply don't exist on the US site, where the lineup only starts with the Golf/Compact Class Focus. Which gets me wondering wether there really isn't a market over on that side of the Pond for those small, nimble city cars with their low fuel consumption.
On a completely different note, Maja is showing the first signs that the joy of teething may not be too far off: she's fiercely chewing on her small fists from time to time, and she loved chewing on the fridge-cooled teething ring on Saturday, when nothing else would console her. Of course, her colicky evenings have
not stopped happening, which gives me horror visions of the two of us running out of both hands and sanity while trying to stroke and comfort all the different parts of our lovely baby daughter that may be hurting at any given moment. But then, she lights up the room with that radiant, irresistible, as yet toothless, baby smile of hers, and all is forgiven and forgotten.
And we may need that wonderful ablity of hers to make us forget everything around us in the coming days - we just got a phone call from the in-laws: my wife's uncle has ceased suffering an hour ago. He will be sorely missed, but while I'm sad, I'm also glad that he didn't have to suffer for long. Rest in peace, S.
Death Approaching
While Maja is still and will be the new center of our lives, and I would like nothing more than to regale you with tales and pictures of her devastating cuteness, there are other, sadder things going on around casa Gudy which need mentioning. And I'm not talking about the terrible flooding in South-East Asia and how the stories and pictures of that destruction and of lives lost, and very rarely found again, combined with the hormone overdose resulting from being surrounded by that much cuteness all day have brought me to tears more than once.
No, things are happening much, much closer to home.
Almost four years ago on my birthday, my wife's favourite aunt lost her fight against leukemia and died after one and a half years of suffering. The whole family was badly shaken by that early death of what had seemed a healthy woman only two years previously, and everyone had hoped that the next death in the family would be at least two decades in the future.
When the in-laws together with a few other aunts and uncles of my wife made a holiday trip to Italy last September, S - the brother of the above-mentioned aunt - complained about persistent pain in his shoulders for which no-one seems to have found a cure or even a cause yet. When he went for another thorough check-up, some of his blood values looked unhealthy, and after much unnecessary back and forth between doctors and hospitals, he was finally diagnosed with an aggressively growing liver tumor.
Chemotherapy was scheduled and begun. But S's condition declined so rapidly, that it was soon called off, and the cancer, which had been found to have metastasized all over his body in the mean time, was pronounced uncurable.
When we came to visit S and his wife over the Christmas holidays, I was shocked. S had always been a strong, burly guy with a ready laugh, a pronounced beer belly, and a full, round face. The man who greeted us from out of his armchair when we arrived was gaunt, weak, had a hard time walking and talking, and looked twenty years older than when I had last seen him. I hardly recognized the jovial S in that husk of a man.
When we called S's son, my wife's favourite cousin, today to wish him a happy birthday, he informed us with a tear-choked voice that the pastor had been there and had prayed with S, who hadn't been in a church for decades, and that he probably won't live much longer. With my birthday next week, I have the odd feeling that for our family, the first half of January will soon come to be associated with the death of another loved one.
And let's not even begin talking about what all this is doing to the mental state of the remaining two siblings, among them my slightly hypochondriac father-in-law...
