Stupid trees

I will again voice how much I hate not having a garage and therefore having to park on the street. If it's not some idiot backing their car into mine, it's some stupid tree sneezing its nasty tree snot sap ALL OVER it.

I spent all day Saturday and Sunday scrubbing the hood of my car with every type of sap remover/wax/horrible chemical I could get my hands on. And I can get most of the sap off, but now there are spots where the sap was. My dad said to try polishing compound. That of course was the one polishing wax remover thingy I had not bought off the AutoZone car care shelf.

The guy at the dealership said I could even use gasoline or kerosene to get the stuff off the car. That is true. Dad still laughed when I told him. "Yeah, it works, but if you use that measure you'll not want to smoke around the car." It's true, I imagine charred me might be harder to get off the hood than tree sap.

I used my friend Allan for his driveway on Saturday so I could wash the car. He saw me cursing the sap and said, "Wow, you actually really care about your car, don't you?" I do. I admit it. It's something else that was passed down from my dad: Car obsession. Yeah, sure, it's a 95 Saturn SC2, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't treat it like a human and baby it. I recently got the Chilton repair manual out of the library for that year and model of Saturn just so I could learn more about it's insides.

I know every sound it makes, how it handles, and where every scratch is. The scratches kill me. I don't understand why some people find it necessary to key cars. I lived in a rougher neighborhood recently and came out one morning to find a lovely scratch right on my driver's side door. And it wasn't some little nick in the paint - this was one of those "Let's take a stroll down the car door and then go WHHHHEEEEEEEE with the key at the end" scratches.

When I stopped by the Saturn dealership Saturday to ask their advice on the sap (and they had great advice -- I have never had a problem with them, they're always so helpful and friendly), the guy who was chatting with us noticed the scratches on my door. He goes, "Oh, I can help you get those out too." He brought out this other stuff, which I now know is rubbing compound (I bought some too), and really took the shock out of the scratches. You can still see them, but they're not nearly as horrible. I almost hugged him.

And I think he saw the gratitude in my eyes because we did that nod to each other. He too was a car obsessionist.

Now to just get the rest of that sap off there!