Blessed by the Potato

Douglas Adams used to say that the reason young boys had to wear short pants was because nature had perfected the self-healing knee, whereas science had not done particularly well on the self-healing pant knee.

My car, being 13 years old, seems to have started evolving self-healing features. There was the leak in the radiator: the guy at the shop said I’d need to replace it within a year, 3 years ago. It lost about 1 L of fluid, and hasn’t leaked since. Recently, they found a small oil leak in the engine (leaking around the camshaft). That lost just under a litre of oil, and hasn’t leaked since (though that’s only been a few weeks, and I haven’t driven the car much in that time, so maybe if I push the engine more it will leak again).

I didn’t think too much of the leaks closing up: it can happen, especially as parts expand and contract with changing temperatures (the radiator, for instance, only seems to leak in the winter). Or maybe some “gunk” stopped up whatever microscopic hole was forming.

However, this week my signal light burned out. Bulbs burn out all the time, and after ignoring it for a few days while I was busy, today I figured it was time to go to Canadian Tire and get a new bulb.

Except now, it was working again. That was just freaky — bulbs don’t usually fix themselves! So now I’ve either got the beginnings of an electrical ghost (which in an old car can be annoying and tough to trace and fix), and maybe I shouldn’t try to get another winter out of it… or my car is actually incredibly awesome and repairs itself.

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