The Upsetting News Thread

[Reanok]

I heard about Connor being in the hospital. get well soon Connor.

[Aikiweezie]

CT Tweeted that he has been released, but is now addicted to Jello!

[WarpGirl]

What not the pudding?! I never got addicted to the jello, pudding is another matter.

[Elessar]

oh no! what was wrong, has he said?

[Aikiweezie]

He had knee surgery about a week or so ago and then developed a blood clot and had to be hospitalized. (all from his Twitter)

[Cogito]

Without wanting to pry, has he said what the surgery was for? I know somebody who had a 'bucket handle tear' that left him incapacitated for a long time and left him with severely reduced mobility. Hopefully Connor's injury is nothing like that and he will be back on his feet very quickly.

[Aikiweezie]

He didn't say. He must be pretty immobile. Isn't that what causes blood clots? I know people who had arthroscopic surgery who were back to normal very quickly, so I'm guessing it was more involved than that.

[WarpGirl]

They usually put some things on your legs that "massage" and keep the blood circulating. Actually I can't use them because they set off my spasams and for me hurt worse than a broken bone. And they also give blood thiners like Hepryn (sp?) to prevent blood clots. Now of course nothing is 100% still, I am surprised. When I had my bone surgery on my pelvis I was immobile for over a month. They took great care in watching for any sign of a clot.

[Cogito]

It's small change compared to some of the bad news here, but I had a bit of a blow today.

I should set the scene. I own two cars. The first one is a perfectly ordinary family saloon that quietly and efficiently and boringly gets me from A to B and back again. The other one is a little two-seater sports car. It has the leather seats and the burr walnut and what have you, and at one time it was a perfectly practical weekend fun car, but it has had absurd amounts of time and money spent on it over the years and now it has a big supercharged V8 in the front and suspension that will shake your fillings out unless you're on a race track. Although it's road legal, it's designed for sprint racing and barely practical for road use. But it is road legal, and needs to stay road legal for various reasons.

In the UK, cars over three years old have to go through a Ministry of Transport test every year to make sure the wheels aren't falling off and the exhaust emissions are within limits and so on. And as you can imagine, a highly tuned V8 with emissions up to here is exactly the sort of thing they'd like to get off the roads. So, today my little TVR went for its MOT test, and failed - bigtime.

On the way to the MOT station, one of the indicators stopped working. No big deal and easily fixed, but there's no time before the appointment so of course instant fail. Then the HC emissions were a few percent over the limit for precat cars like mine. But since the MOT test man decided this year that it needs to pass the more stringent cat emissions test, it's failed by about a factor of ten on every count. MOT test man also didn't like the instrument pod on top of the dashboard although it was fine last year and the year before that. And the idle speed is 'too high'. And the exhaust is 'too loud' in his opinion, which is all it takes to fail it. And the handbrake isn't quite good enough, in his opinion. There's quite a long list of problems ranging from 'trivial' to 'throw the car away and start again'.

Then, while I was talking to the MOT man one of his colleagues helpfully started it to back it out of the test bay for me and it back-fired so violently that it blew one of the induction pipes off which made a hell of a racket and meant I had to put it back together before I could drive home. And to top it all, the front bumper mount, which has been on the car for the past twenty years hidden inside the bonnet, decided that today was the day it was going to corrode through and fall off in all the excitement. Right there, while Mr MOT was explaining why he wasn't going to give me an MOT.

So, that sucks. I've got a hell of a lot of work to do in the next couple of weeks if I'm going to keep it on the road.

And, do you know what?

I don't care.

I wrote my first TnT fanfic story yesterday, and eK put it up on the main page last night, and people have been reading and saying nice things about it. You authors will know what a thrill that is. Today has been a great day.

Oops, wrong thread, sorry.

[WarpGirl]

Awwwwwwww you deserve every bit of it! You know we have car inspections here in the USA too, and my father hates them. Sorry about the car. But glad you are so happy. Keep it up!

[enterprikayak]

lol no mandatory car inspections here...we live on an island! so we don't care about emissions! hoo boy if that guy saw ANY of my vehicles (esp my big brown chevy pickup) he'd bust a nut. lololol poor thing. but it made a good story! ur a heck of a writer! (hey, haven't i heard that somewhere recently?)

today a little old lady rear-ended me at about 6 km/hour as I was waiting to turn right onto the highway. I pull over and get out and my big thigh-high chevy bumper is untouched. And she pulls in behind me and her nice powder blue honda logo has crunched itself into its own radiator and the whole front looks like, well, like it tried to mess with Jen's big brown fuken chevy. lololol I sat her down on the cement barrier at the side of the road and patted her shoulder and made her feel better while she shakily wrung her hands over her insurance and whether or no they'd take her lic away. poor biddy.

[Silverbullet]

EK, good thing you had that big Truck.

I was once rear ended in London on King's road. Woman was driving a mini morris. She was also window shopping while driving. Ran in to my 65 Mustang. Nothing wrong with my car (Detroit still built decent cars then) but her poor morris was all stove in. She tearfully admitted she had been window shoppng. Wonder what she told the insurance adjuster.

SB

[CX]

I'm glad we don't have such tests here. You pretty much just have to make sure the lights and the horn all work and that the windows aren't cracked up too bad and that's about it. Other than that, you just have to make sure you pay the registration fee every year and put your tags on, and to make sure the insurance is up to date.

[justTripn]

When my son C. had his drivers test, he was using a car that looked good, but had all these strange problems with it's computer components. For one 6 month period, I couldn't get the window wipers to go off. Later I discovered this secret formula for getting the window wipers off: Put in on low for two minutes then flick it up to high and back. The heating and airconditioning did it's own thing, sometimes giving me heat in the summer and airconditioning in the winter. Sometimes the car wouldn't let us take the key out of the ignition until 5 to 10 minutes after turning off the car. Well C. was taking the test and had just successfully finished the parallel park. The driving instructer was sitting in the car with him saying "Well, everything looks good! when there was a little a pfff! sound and a puff of smoke rose out of the armrest of C.'s door. The instructor didn't see it and Chris kept smiling and laid his hand on the armrest to hide the smoke. lol . . . It was the button to raise and lower that window and that button never worked again.

[enterprikayak]

my car did that too! all that stuff! lol, except the vapor that rose at the end was from my radiator (which it did if you didn't refill it with fresh water every 10 km or so, which we kept in the trunk). The teacher was like, "What`s wrong with your engine?" And I sat there at the red light in the blistering heat, watching the steam go up and said in my best sweet-innocent-thang voice, "I don't know! It never did that before!" By time we got back to the MVB you coulda fried bacon on that hood. Ahhhh our good old 1981 Omega. Sweet riiiiide.

failed the test too. lol