Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

The as of yet unnamed Mini Clubman in my driveway is pleased to make its first appearance with its new stripes. I particularly adore the driving lights (the bug eyes) and the chrome on the hood scoop. Yes, it’s a black car… I didn’t like the way the British Racing green seemed to fade over the years so I went with black instead. I’ve put just over 100 miles on it so far and figured out what many but not all of the buttons do.

I’m sure it will be a great comfort to my father to learn that my Mini is very helpful. So helpful that when the temperature dips below 37° it puts up a little warning that conditions could get icy. In short, Dad, my car warns me about black ice just as often as you do.

cars, clubman, mini

I have survived my first week of unemployment! My contract at Pfizer ended the day before Thanksgiving, so Monday was my first official day as a Lady of Leisure. I had a more productive week than I’d expected. I did a lot of paperwork-type things such as applying for unemployment, poking at my resume, updating my LinkedIn profile and insuring my new car.

Oh right. That new car. I picked up my new 2009 MINI Clubman on Monday. Because I think it’s always better to start something like unemployment with a bang. I suspect I have lost my title to the Subaru so I need to order a replacement title before I can sell it, but I will be selling the Green Hornet. No pictures of the new hotness yet – it’s getting its final touches Tuesday morning (bonnet stripes!), so you’ll just have to wait.

I finally successfully rearranged my desk and got it vaguely clean. Of course, it’s already cluttered again but there’s more space for the Monster Cat now. Unfortunately he likes to take his half out of the middle and in this case the middle is the desk space between my chair and the keyboard. If he were smaller, he’d be an excellent wrist rest. Well, and if he didn’t insist on leaning his head on the keyboard. The turf war continues…

Thursday evening was the final reading for my non-fiction essay class. Four of us read our final essays and I think it went fairly well. Nerves attacked us all a little – the whole first page I was reading I had that “need to remember to breathe” thing going. However, I think all of us did very well! We had a small audience and people were appropriately appreciative and amused by our essay I think. The Fop quoted some of the best lines from everyone’s essays all through dinner, so I’ll call the reading a success!

So despite a little anxiety about the reading Thursday, as of yesterday I feel like I’m actually relaxed. The weather has turned chilly, the latest issue of Mouse Guard finally arrived, the Church is putting up their Christmas lights right now, and I myself actually will have time to decorate for and enjoy the holidays this year. We’ll see how long this bliss lasts.

cars, cats, clubman, holidays, mini, reading, unemployment, work, writing

Autumn has been rather jam-packed this year. Among the things keeping me from posting here and doing Nanowrimo was the essay class I took from UARTS: Writing This American Life. We are doing our final reading as part of a combined show with one of the photography classes Thursday, December 4th. There are 5 of us reading, starting around 7 pm. Some of the essays are more serious than others… Mine essay is about cars and involves a brief, torrid love affair with a Mustang among other things. This is my first ever public reading and I’d love to have a few friends come and fill out the audience!
Here’s the info for anyone interested:

Photos & Words
Thursday, December 4, 2008

Opening 6pm – 8:30pm
Continuing Studies, 9th floor
Terra Hall, 211 S. Broad Street

Reading 7pm
Connelly Auditorium, 8th floor
Terra Hall, 211 S. Broad Street

(The photography opening will be providing munchies and beverages!)

cars, reading, this american life, uarts, writing

I left Maine at 7:30 a.m.

I arrived in Drexel Hill, PA at 3:00 p.m.

I love my car.

My car is mostly unpacked, my office air conditioner is on, and the next order of business is to switch from sneakers to sandals.

There will be a fuller accounting later.

travel, driving, road trip

Components to a good day:

• Beautiful weather
• Not getting caught speeding on the way to the airport (rental Subaru + no traffic = fun… it was an accident, I swear)
• Free wireless Internet at the Providence airport (FREE!)
• An e-mail from the new yurt guy (we should be able to get a new yurt for Pennsic!)
• An on-time departure of my flight (remarkable!)
• A rather exciting, high-speed landing… also on-time
• Finding my car in the parking garage with no trouble
• Popcorn for dinner (shhhhh! don’t tell!)
• Dairy Queen for dessert
• Home

Bonus round:
Indicator #31 that summer has arrived: the soft, smoky smell of questionable substances wafting across the street from the group of teens hanging out on the church steps.

travel, yurt, cars, dairy queen, airplanes, weather, random

Don’t tell my Subaru, but…

Yesterday we went out test-driving.

Our first stop was the Toyota dealership where Priuses… Prii are going like hot cakes and they didn’t have one on the lot to look at. The nice sales dude did take us to the warehouse for “already sold” cars (on the third floor!!!) to sit in the only Prius they had around. The Fop mostly fits. I still think it’s too light on highways (it gets blown around a lot) but I might get used to that. It gets 20 more miles per gallon than my current car, but I worry about the stability, especially in extreme weather, given how light it is.

Our second, rather fateful stop was at the Mini dealership. The Clubman is adorable. I didn’t like it all until I saw it in person. The only stick shift they had available to test drive was a turbo version. Oops. That was fun! Too fun probably. Now I’m comparing horsepower between the turbo and the non-turbo and cross-referencing against my current car. I’m going to go back for a longer test drive during the week and one out onto the highway. I’m doomed, I think. Even the turbo gets 10 mpg more than my current car. Bonus feature of the Mini: No new car smell. Drawback: Rear visibility limited but mostly mitigated by side mirrors.

Our last stop was at the Subaru dealership. Foresters got huge at some point in the past few years. I tested out a Forester (automatic… *yawn*) and a Legacy (stick shift, more fun but not exciting by any means). Alas I still dislike what they’ve done to the Impreza with the latest redesign. I like the “baby wagon” look of my 1998 Impreza. Now the Impreza looks like every other hatch-back. And the Forester looks more and more like every other small SUV. Ultimately, this is a drawback for me. I like my car NOT to look like every other car in the lot. I suppose I could get flames painted on… The Subarus are all-wheel drive and handle well, but they don’t get significantly better gas mileage now than they did 10 years ago. Another drawback: Intense new car smell. Ew. Bonus: Subaru actually has cars in stock.

The Prius is back-ordered 6-10 weeks. The Clubman is back-ordered 3 months or more. But I could have walked out with a Subaru yesterday. (The only annoying moment of “I hate salesmen” yesterday was at the Subaru dealership when the sales manager swung by to be all sales-y at us about wanting to make a deal on the L.L. Bean edition we were poking at so he could get it out of his showroom. The sales guy who was helping us was pretty annoyed by this too.) Luckily, my time line for purchasing is like 6 months. I think I’ll need to replace my car this year – it’s got a few more good trips in it, but I think ultimately it’s getting to the point where I should stop taking long road trips up and down the Eastern seaboard with it. It’s 10 1/2 years old after all!

At this point, I’ve narrowed my choices down to the Prius and the Clubman – the Clubman with a strong lead. I have a few friends who are Mini and Prius owners. I’ll be asking them how their cars handle in the winter and on highways. I’m still taking suggestions. I’m looking for a medium-sized car that gets over 30 mpg, doesn’t look like every other car in its class and is a stable, reliable vehicle. I’m not a fan of trunks.

car shopping, cars, clubman, mini, prius, subaru, test drives

I shall survive this week!

Monday night, after a long day of meetingness, I headed down to Mike’s house for dinner with his fabulous wife Lise and the superheroes. Lise is an secret super hero because she makes kick-butt guacamole. The little superheroes are really quite endearing. And clearly too smart for their parents’ own good. It was fun hanging out with children and adults – I could have easily stayed chatting far to late and ended up sleep deprived for tomorrow morning. While chatting, we saw two raccoons in their backyard. On my way back to the highway I saw 2 opossums and 4 white tailed deer, all does, all big. Well, big in the sense that they were taller and heavier than the little runt deer we usually see in the Philly area. Certainly more than match for the little Prius I’m renting this year.

The Prius is a cool little car but it feels a bit like a toy. I’ve put a lot of miles on it so far – enough that I had to put gas in it tonight. *gasp* I could definitely see buying one if I drove more… and I think I’ll be researching it a bit anyway.

Last night I went out with Ann and Andy to a fabulous Italian place in Providence called Siena. The wait was considerably longer than quoted but the comps and food definitely made up for it. The food was divine. The company was fabulous. The evening rocked.

Tonight we had dinner somewhat as a team. More Italian food which was tasty enough for delivery/catering food. After, I gave Andy a ride home, he, Ann and I sat in their gazebo for a bit talking. It’s so nice to sit and chat about randomness. I’ve done a lot of that this week and I have apparently missed doing it more. I’m not going to think about that all that much. Over-analysis leads to melancholy!

The all-afternoon team meetings have been bigger than I expected with a lot more people from external teams than I envisioned but mostly useful all the same. ;) We have 3 new people on the team I hadn’t met before this week so it’s been good to meet them.

I am all checked in for my flight tomorrow. It’s been a fun week filled with fun people so far – my fingers are crossed for the rest of the week to finish out just as well.

work, meetings, dining, adventures, people, fun, travel

Fixed: I noticed earlier today that Monster Cat was showing up crappily in Windows IE. (Because it’s been so long since I cared that I’d forgotten that it’s taboo just to resize images on the fly despite the fact that they look fine when you do that on the Mac…) So I re-exported and fixed that little problem tonight. The latest (2008) episodes should all display clearly and legibly now.

Suggestions? If you notice any other weirdness, feel free to comment. Also, I am not a comic artist so if you see something I could do better, please mention it!

Monster Cat! This will be week 3 of doing Monster Cat on Monday-Wednesday-Friday. I wonder how long I can keep that up. I already have 2 for next week and plan to build the 3rd before I leave for CT on Sunday.

Travel: Oh yeah, I’m going to be up in Connecticut Sunday evening through Thursday afternoon next week. Save me some snow, folks!

My car! Because what random, “late”-night post is complete without me gushing about my car? My Subaru turns 10 years old this week! Happy birthday, Green Hornet! Still under 155,000 miles, only 12,000 of which I’ve put on it in the last 5 years. Yeah, that tells you something about how radically my driving habits changed when I moved to Pennsylvania.

car, monster cat, random, travel

It’s Tuesday, I’m in Connecticut and I’m wearing polka-dot socks. I have training this morning and most of tomorrow and meeting most of the rest of the time. I’m not sure when I’m going to get actual work done this week. Yes, I’m still tired. I started waking up at 2:40 this morning and then woke periodically, about every hour, until the alarm went off at 6. I would really like my body to get used to this new allergy medicine because it’s doing lovely things for my actual allergies… I don’t want to have to choose between sleeping and breathing!

It’s cold out there! YAY! Not too cold, chilly is a better word. I do wish I’d brought gloves. The steering wheel of my pumpkin-mobile is cold! (Yes, it’s a pumpkin. I got an orange Saturn Vue from the rental place this week. It’s really quite cute and festive.)

allergies, cars, random, socks, training, weather, work

I just got off the phone with the Philadelphia Parking Authority people. I received a notice that I hadn’t paid a ticket I got for an expired inspection except I never got that ticket.

We’ll ignore the fact that my inspection is indeed expired at this moment (it expired after the ticket was issued though and my car is sleeping over at the mechanic’s tonight to get a sticker). We’ll also ignore the fact that I often make a habit of going a month or two before re-inspecting my car because I either flake or get lazy. We can even ignore the fact that in the past I have indeed received the exact same citation. I just don’t go into Philly anymore and I have barely driven my car since the knock sensor issue was identified in July.

I checked the date on the ticket against my calendars and blog, and at the time the ticket was issued I was posting the notice about the Fop getting an LJ account… so… really totally not me. (Hey, I wouldn’t put it past me to completely forget a trip into the city on an errand or something.)

Now, for those of you who have never experienced the joys of Philadelphia, the Parking Authority has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to deal with and impossible to resolve issues with unless you go down there in person… and even in person, it is hard to resolve issues to your satisfaction. A good tactic is to bring a bottle of pain killers, preferably prescription-strength. Is a $61 ticket wondering worth my time to try to fix it or should I just pay it?

I decided to try calling the “pay by phone” number to see if I could get to a real person. The auto-answer menu was either deliberately designed to confuse the caller or just poorly setup. The 2nd level of the menu sounded something like this:

Press 1 … to pay a ticket by phone … press 2 … to get the status of a ticket … to [do something else] press 3 … press 4 … to dispute a ticket … press 5.

Guess what I pressed? 5. And it worked.

After a few moments, I was talking to a real person. A nice person who was able to look up the ticket number and listened to my confusion about getting a ticket when I was neither in the city nor out of inspection. Then she was able pull up a scan of the original ticket to determine that the license plate number was a typo. Well, duh, of course it was a typo but it’s always nice when people agree with me on that kind of thing. She updated the ticket, gave me a confirmation number, and the whole call took less than 10 minutes. I am amazed. I honestly expected to have to provide proof, in person, during business hours (which would have taken me 2-3+ hours round trip and displaced my workday). Hurray for being able to fix typos over the phone!

In other car news, the little Green Hornet is getting all its bits fixed at the new mechanic today and tomorrow. See, the Hornet started to roar a couple weeks ago… now I know that can mean the catalytic converter is dead. The new mechanic gave me reasonable estimates for both exhaust work and the knock sensor, less than 2 car payments if I were to buy a new car right now. Then I looked at the blue book value of the car again. At this point I might as well drive it at least another winter. I’m an expert procrastinator. Besides, Subaru doesn’t have any greens in its color options for 2008.

You know why replacing a catalytic converter is so expensive? At least in part because platinum is used as a catalyst to convert carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide. This is what I learned from NPR and the Nobel Prize committee today.

car, catalytic converter, parking, parking tickets, philadelphia parking authority, state inspection