dirty laundry, emissions testing and Barack Obama

We've had a washer and dryer now in both places we've lived in the US and I just find this fun. I can wash clothes like whenever I want - this gets me excited. We could wash clothes all the time in Africa too, we just didn't necessarily have water; so really we couldn't wash clothes whenever we wanted. Anyway so in the US I've been thinking about laundry a lot and laundry soap. We get lots of stains so I'm typically trying to find a way of getting out stains. Like you can get grease stains out with a little WD-40 and dish soap. My two new favorite things are Baking Soda and Borax, they clean everything and it doesn't smell like green grass or lilacs (I like smells, my body doesn't though). Now I'm into Fels-Naptha Laundry Soap, which I hear is going to take out yellow necks. Very exciting.

In the way of emissions standards, the car I'm driving doesn't meet them. Apparently the good people in the Chicago land area and then in the St. Louis area have to comply with emissions standards for their cars. As my borrowed car is from Chicago it has to have a test even though it doesn't live there right now. So I drove 2 hours yesterday to get the test done. This is a car that chronically has its Check Engine light on and of course it didn't pass. The nice man explained that I have to have the car fixed, bring it back to be checked with reciepts for the work done and have it retested. The handy computer was nice enough to tell me that the problem lies somewhere in the Catalyst system, but the test can tell exactly what has to be fixed. But the Testing man did tell me to drive it around a while before I brought it back because sometime sthe light will go out but the emissions problem may not necessarily be fixed, so I need to drive it around for a while and make sure the light doesn't come back on. Sounds convenient, then I can drive another couple of hours to get it looked at again. All of that said, I really did enjoy the drive. @ slept on the way back so it was a nice time to think.

I did get to see Mr. Barack Obama though yesterday. He had a town hall meeting at EIU and I was back from the drive just in time. It was curious to hear him reply to questions, few of which were really toothy. Mostly it was nice to hear him speak, you can tell a lot about a person when you hear them speak in an impromptu fashion. For me though, its exciting when an elected official finds downstate IL and he doesn't just tell us a bunch of stuff we want to hear regardless of the truth. You should have to go see an elected official if they come to your town, its your civic duty.