I hate working on cars. I really freaking hate it.
There are many good reasons to work on a car: you are a mechanic, you are Tony Stark, or you are clinically depressed but don’t quite feel like dying. There are abundantly more bad reasons: you have to get to work, you are on vacation, you like your knuckles like Phineas and Ferb, e.g., un-busted, you want to stay non-filthy, or you don’t have the money to pay someone else to do it.
Elsa and I spent Saturday changing the starter in my car. It wasn’t her very first foray into mechanics, but the first big project, I think.
In some ways it was a pretty good representation of mechanic work: lying on your back on asphalt, getting all greasy, having to do mechanical work when you don’t feel like it, making a trip to the store for tools.
But in other ways it was quite unrepresentative: nothing went wrong, we only had to make one trip to the store, no one got hurt, no one skinned their knuckles, the old starter came out relatively easy, the new one went back in rather easily, the weather was nice, and everything just worked on the first try.
I’m not complaining about everything going so well. It’s just that I’ve set Elsa up to think that working on cars is fun and/or easy.
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