OK, so as you all know I’m a Mechanics daughter and very proud of it. And no, I don’t know how to do an oil change, but I can change your battery, check the radiator and jump start a car with ignition spray. My dad is an honest guy that made a very good living for himself and his family. Although all my life I have heard what a bad rap mechanics get, heck I don’t even trust them myself. Now that I live far-a-way from my family its a nightmare every time I need to get my car fixed. The dealership is legalized rape and the independent shops are a hit and miss form over charging to just pain incompetence…I think I am more paranoid then the average consumer because I know enough not to trust anyone that will pull your time belt and hold it hostage until you pay the $800 ransom, that’s if you ever want to drive your car again. My dad’s business was solely word of mouth, he had a great reputation for high quality work and he always backed his work with 100% satisfaction and a guarantee that if it did not work as it should he would keep fixing it until it did…no extra charge.
So now I just need to pass on the favor as so many that helped my dad’s business grow enough to send all four of his kids to college, pay for his home and have enough for a nice retirement. Last week we took our poor little car Sabino (its a Saab and I named him Sabino) for a much needed tune-up to Babbitt’s Tune Up and Brake Service in Berkley, Mack (although some call him Max) is the bomb. He reminds me a lot of my dad, honest, hard working and respectable that runs his shop along side his son Novato. He has a same day work system, you drop our car off in the morning and he guarantees that you will get it that same day even if he needs to stay late (my dad was the same, I waited may nights for him as late as 10pm until we could all go home, including the client). He originally quotes us $250 and when Matt went to pick it up he charges us less…yes folks he charges us less…yes you heard it form me…the man is damn honest and did not charge us the original estimate even though he could have…heck other places end up charging you more. Not Mack, you see why he is the bomb. There are a few folk just like my pops and I am proud to include Mack among them. So if you live in the area and need your car fixed, Babbitt’s Tune Up and Brake Service is the place to go. Oh, and Sabino is one happy car…dirty but happy.
Do you change your oil every 3,000 or every 5,000 mile?
Love:
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I don’t know how you all feel about your siblings, but my siblings rock. They are all very talented and creative and could turn just about anything to look good or make anything work. My older sister Glafira can draw anything and is great at scrap-booking although she stopped a few years ago. She is always drawing things for my nice and nephew. Then there is my brother Sergio, he is the inventor in the family he took after our dad. He has a load of ideas and a few that I know will make him rich. All his inventions have to do with the auto industry primarily. See he just wanted to be a mechanic just like dad, but dad made him go to college so now he is an Architect. Even though he is very good at his job, he just loves to have his hands in the grease as much of the time as possible. Finally there is Julie, the one I have not stopped bragging about on Facebook and everyone I have encountered this whole weekend. She just has the hands of Midas, she can convert a turd (excuse the expression) into a centerpiece that you would proudly display at your next Thanksgiving dinner table. This weekend Julie did the most amazing cake ever for my nephews 7th birthday party, it was a 3D Sponge Bob cake and it was freaking beautiful…I have no idea how my sister-in-law was able to cut it, knowing her she may have sent my brother to Costo to buy another. One year she kept a cake topper my sister made of Winnie-the-Pooh for about 4 months. A few years back Julie recreated the tow truck Master from the cartoon Cars out of fondet and my sister-in-law may still have it. OK that sounds a bit freaky but you just have to know how to appreciate art, and apparently my sister-in-law does. Ace-of-Cakes have nothing on my sister. A lot of people tell her that she should sale them, but when she tells them how much it would cost they don’t say a peep after that. A cake like Sponge Bob took her about 20 hours of labor plus materials, if she were to sale it and want to make a profit (which is the reason to sale) she would need to sale it at a minimum $500. She needs the big o TV production like Ace-of-Cakes does so people fork out the cash. So if you like her work, please share this posting with your friends.
Also if you need inventing ideas or know of someone that does, my bro is your man.
How proud are you about your next of kin?
When I was a little girl I lived in the city of Tijuana, B.C across the boarder from San Diego, CA and I really hated the cops there. I was just 5 years old and I wanted them dead. Pretty harsh words for a 5 year old, but they just instilled discuss in me. Their corruption and their abuse of power was worn on their sleeve like a badge of honor. Why you may ask that I felt this way at such an early age, well nothing happens without a reason and they gave me plenty of reasons to feel this way about them. Always stopped us on the road for no good reason but to ask for a bribe for infractions that never happened. Not responding to emergencies on a timely bases. Having our home broken into more then a dozen times and half of those by them. The sad thing is that I as a child had the opposite opinion about the police in the U.S. yet as an adult I see that its all the same everywhere. Some are just more obvious then others with the abuse of power that they display. See in the U.S. a cop will never tell a 5 year old that just witnessed a drunk politician crash into the car that her father was driving on their way home that, “we are arresting your daddy and if he doesn’t pay what we want him to give us, he is going to stay here and you will not be able to see him”. Yes that is what the baster kept telling me and I would just reply “my daddy is innocent and he is not going to pay you anything because the other man was drunk” see I always talked back especial to the cops because I had no respect for them. But in the U.S. I did they where suppose to be the good guys, I remember watching shows on TV where the cops where always arresting the bad guys and saving women out of burning cars…heck I was addicted to shows like Chips, S.W.A.T. and Kojak. Its very disappointing to see videos of police brutality, because for very video we see how many acts of brutality don’t we see. People are getting killed by cops and the fact that they are under traumatic stress or pumped up on adrenaline is not an excuse. Yes you are probably saying, “well cops get killed too”, yes they do…but the killers are bad guys they are miscreants and some are just plain evil. Besides policy are to serve and protect or are they not, and sometimes that protection is even protecting the bad guys from themselves. Act like the one in Birmingham, Alabama should not happen for no reason, that guy could have been dead and kicking his ass the way those cops did just proved that they are just as savage and unable to control their barbarianism as any ruthless scoundrel. One just has the licence to kill and a badge to prove it.
If cops are just mere human, what do you think about Robocops serving and protecting?
That brief moment between the conscious and the unconscious right after a mid-afternoon nap is truly a spiritual experience. You remain immobile for a few seconds and you are completely relaxed completely unaware of your surroundings You have no recollection of time or space you don’t even remember your name. You cease all ties with the world. You are no ones lover, no ones daughter and no ones friend. If you had a good dream you are still rejoicing in the events of that parallel world. Wishing to return to that marvelous dream land you close your eyes, but the conscious mind has now take control and you slowly start to remember where you are. As you start to take in the world around you the sounds and smells begin to trigger events in your memory and you start to remember that you have love ones and perhaps even a few enemies. As you slowly start to gain control of your body it begins to move just slightly first your legs then your arms. By now you as you just lay there you have realized that it’s Saturday afternoon and you still have tomorrow. Nice.
When was the last time you took a nap?
I read a post from The Elkhart Project blog on MSNBC website, it was about the federal stimulus program and how the government is spending the money, on what seems to many, frivolously. At the end of the article people wrote their point of view which is expected especially on such a debatable topic. As I was reading the comments I read the following from urcorrect:
“The stimulus is not going to help with the recession, thank the NAFTA program which has caused at least 20k jobs in El Paso. Ex. Lee, Wrangler and Levis closed there 14 manufacturing facilities in El Paso and moved oversees. Thanks Clinton for NAFTA program”.
So I naturally had to rely.
“urcorrect, your not so correct. Thanks to NAFTA we are polluting Mexico and we are killing their people. In the town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas children are being born with deformities thanks to the manufacturing plants that moved there form the US. Not to mention the profit that US companies are making by paying workers there $8 per day and no benefits. The only thing they are getting in return is slave labor and polluted air, water and land. It’s not Clinton you should be mad at, but the good old corporate fat boys and the American people in general. We are now the beneficiary of cleaner air, water and land beside the goods that we are buying for cheaper so we are just as culprit. Don’t throw the rocks then hide your hands. Just because you did not pull the trigger don’t make you and less guilty”.
If NAFTA benefited someone it was definitely the U.S. why else would the U.S. government agree. Seriously do people like urcorrect think that the U.S. got the short end of the stick and do they really think that once again foreigners are taking over their livelihood. Stop blaming others for our shortcoming and start accepting that no one takes anything away from anyone that did not want it in the first place. Sure I know that the 20k employees that lost their jobs did not directly ask to loss their job. But for years the U.S. government has been pleading with Americans to get educated to start to move towards careers in the sciences and technology they have been telling the American public that the labor intensive jobs would be moving out of the U.S. due to the move towards a global economy. Ignorance is no excuse and just because factory workers where not continuing to educate themselves its not Mexico, India, or China’s fault that they lost their job its their fault for not wanting to better themselves.
Besides, like I responded to urcorrect, our consumerism is polluting the world. Thanks to our demand for giant screen tv’s, gas guzzlers and our so many other demands we are exploiting other countries, their people, their land, their air and water. It seems that the more we move into the future the more we continue to repeat history. A global economy is just another form of colonization just at a larger scale.
Are you prepared for a global economy?
I love Gordon Ramsey he literally kicks ass. “This is a f*@&ing disgrace” he yells out from his kitchen when something is not up to his standards and his standards are no joke. His work ethic, hunger to succeed, and standards of excellence for himself are to be admired and are reminisced from a era in which America was made great thanks to hard working people with those same qualities and determination to succeed. People like Gordon Ramsey’s inspire and motivate me to look within side myself for that same passion and hunger to be the best at what ever it is I’m doing.
I unfortunately keep seeing that the world around me people act with a sense of entitlement that is just sicking. Why? It’s sad for me to see how we as a society enable the weak and stupid call them disadvantaged and allow then to live a quality of life that is undeserving, yet we call people like Gordon Ramsey a-holes and try to knock them down at all costs. We think that by protecting the weak we are doing a good thing, but we are not its survival of the fittest and we are messing with nature. The weak and stupid are going to out number us and what the hell are we going to do then. I see myself living in a world like in the film Idiocracy (2006) where in 2505 the president was an ex-wrestler named Camacho and they where watering their crops with an energy drink because water was only used in toilets. Our standards for education are something to be ashamed of, our standards for health are deplorable how is it possible that Americans consume a ridiculous amount of medications and not to mention energy drinks, our standards for employment are a joke everyone lies on their resume and there is no way for a company to get an honest answer from a previous employer because they are afraid that the lazy ass that they had to fire because they did no work will sue them.
Instead we lower our standards to the lowest common denominator, because we want to be all inclusive and not hurt anyones feeling. We do not want to discriminate, well the hell with that I say, not if we want to continue to evolve as humans. We should learn from people like Gordon Ramsey and raise the bloody bar people are more resilient and far more capable then society wants to give credit. Take Kyle Maynard a young man that was born with congenital amputation of the forearms and lower legs is a Champion in Wrestling and just debuted as a MMA fighter has proven that humans have the ability to over come any obstacle to get what they really want. There is no excuse for failure.
We need to read more, learn more, work more, strive to be better every freaking day.
So would Gordon Ramsey ask you to “get the f*%$ out of my kitchen you lazy cow” or would he give you a job offer…well that’s if you knew how to cook of course?
