Clean Cars and other thoughts

Today I took the car to the car wash. Well there is more of a story than that but you knew that. I have about 2 hours on a Friday. Very precious time. Levi free and yet still guilt free time and most importantly free, free. I get out of work at about lunch time on Friday. Levi needs to be picked up at 2.55pm. Generally that gives me about 2 hours to do some sort of chore that would be either twice as long or twice as complicated with a little helper.

Today I decided to use my Scoopon coupon and get the car washed and 'protective coated'. I went to some Eco-friendly place in Kedron. It was odd. The first thing is, as I drive in the guy at the intake spot says to me;

"It will cost you $15 extra because your car is dirty"

OK, Wait a minute here. It's a car wash right? So if the car is actually dirty then it costs more!

I, of course, was incredulous;

"This is a car wash right? Surely you don't expect me to wash the car before I bring it here?"

"But this is more dirt" (We are talking about the outside of the car, remember)

So you will use $15 worth of more water in the first 30 seconds to clean it? I mean really. The first thing they do is hose the thing surely washing off the little or a lot of dirt all with roughly the same amount of water and effort. Anyway, this was a fight I wasn't going to win so I just let him have the car and went into the cafe. Now I had allowed about half an hour, tops three quarters. It took 1.5 hours! (Must have been all that extra dirt!) Of course now that required frantic phone calls to get Levi picked up at school. Luckily he and I were going to a friends house and she ended up taking him, but frantic is the least of what I was feeling.

Then we all went to the disco. The Prep Disco. I tell you there is nothing funnier. There are about 4 kids (all of them girls) who kind of get the dancing thing. The rest of the kids and certainly all the boys were belting around in the half dark trying to whack each other with their glow sticks. It was brilliant. They were all end-of-week tired and regularly someone dissolved into tears, but generally there were happy running kids all over the place.