Fancy News - Exciting Times in Vermont, by Edward Huse, 2007

Today was an excellent weather day.
The tomato seedlings are looking mighty beefy, and next week they will start living outdoors, or maybe the week after next, (or wheneverthehell Summer finally starts and the nights don't frost over anymore).
There are also very robust lavender seedlings, and some annuals.
Both the tomato plants and the lavender plants each are grown enough by now to produce fresh floral smells, however neither one as yet smells the way it should (the tomato smells not a whit like a tomato plant on a summer day, etc.) but rather each has some odd smell that our acquaintance Dr. Macrovertigo ascribes to the plants' ancient alien roots, a juvenile characteristic that quickly fades as a given plant matures. All present expressed amazement or amusement, one laughed out loud, and very soon a party was in full swing.
Recently, I took the good old Saab to the new mechanic, for diagnosis and repair of unnerving hard shifting symptoms - I already knew that they are incredible at this shop, so I was glad to have them go over the machine. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised.
Instead of diagnosing the problem as some exotic mechanical crisis and charging us any amount, they charged less than an hour of labor to clean an accumulation of dirt in what is apparently is characteristic for good old Saabs - (a bearing on a shaft that moves to push the plate against flywheel sits in a channel that can collect dirt sometimes). Ray even showed me how to access and clean out the channel myself whenever it happens again!
And wait, there's more - suddenly like magic, the key no longer gets stuck in Lock position - huh!?
Unbeleivable! All of this instead of a 6 or 7 Hundred Dollar Repair!
(I express glee because I have gone through the experience of hunting for a mechanic in a new town. For example, I once had a car with that developed a rattle that I took around to different mechanics - each of 7 mechanics told me some variation of impending transmission and/or engine failure, one cautioned me to stop driving it for my own safety and to sell it to him for seventy five dollars! I finally found the right place when they diagnosed a U-joint prob that was fixed in twenty minutes for 60 dollars.)
The Artist is way pleased.
Who says nothing exciting ever happens in Vermont?