Harry's Ruminations

We spent 12 hours yesterday and ~2 hours today looking over cars, and we found-out several things: * Old Buicks. Wow...no one can amortize production costs like General Motors. The Buick Century we looked at definitely felt like a quality buick from 1985, manufactured in 2002, right down to the front bench, column shifter, and coarse, powerless engine. * Mazda 626, a very surprising, well-handling machine, but too small for our needs, we think. Whitney had a ball driving it, but it felt like a 'tween' car...between a civic/corolla and a decent family sedan. Also, CR doesn't like them too much * Salespeople are highly variable in the used-car trade, and we saw the full gamut, from "Big John" at Swope (lied to us about everything...I barely believe 'John' was his real name..) to Danielle, the waif who looked 12-years-old. It think Whitney and I freaked-out Danielle. * The Toyota Camry really is that good. It's like, they took everything that makes ...

Link Still, I don’t really care. I want my ER doctor to understand anatomy, even if all she has to do is put the computerized defibrillator nodes on my chest and push the big red button, and I want programmers to know programming down to the CPU level, even if Ruby on Rails does read your mind and build a complete Web 2.0 social collaborative networking site for you with three clicks of the mouse. Dang straight!

It's not final yet, but our Intrigue is junkyard bound. Whitney got a call from the 'State Farm Total Loss' department, which we assume implies it's totaled. I went by this morning, and collected what few things I'd left last week--garage door opener, some CDs, lotion, hair brads/clips/scrunchees. The poor car looked so sad...one year, 25k relatively trouble-free miles, we're moving on. Last night was narrowing the list...our requirements: * Must be * Within our budget * Whitney must be able to drive it * 4 doors * Big enough to be a 'family car'--stroller, car seat, etc. * Safe * Reliable * Low operating costs--regular gas, good mileage, cheap/easy to repair. Here's what we have: Buick Century Another Intrigue (01 or 02 model) Mazda 626 Honda Accord Toyota Camry Only downside to the Intrigue are the known mechanical/body issues--steering rack, strut tower bearings, window regulators (dumbest design I've ever seen...!), and so-so mileage.

Erik suckered me into reading another of his slightly-off books: Gil's All-Fright Diner Pretty neat, little book, read over 2 hours in 2 days. The premise is essentially a folksy, redneck buddy tale, but these two buddys Duke and Earl (yeah, ask Erik says, "You gotta know something's up when the two main characters are named Duke and Earl"), they happen to be a Werewolf and a Vampire. Redneck Werewolf and Vamipire... So, the story starts with their old pickup truck (naturally...) running out of gas in front of Gil's All Night Diner. Gil skipped town a few years ago, under mysterious circumstances, and the proprietress, Loretta, has two problems--she needs to run a new gas line, and she keeps getting attacked by Zombies from yon graveyard. The premise holds-up pretty well, and the book is full of quotable quotes...overall, it was good to read ANYTHING. Distraction is good for one, it would seem...

Further on the I need a small digicam front: Driving home Monday, what should appear in my rear view mirror...silver with two blue-ish stripes? Yep. Ford GT, Tailed by a bellicose Fox-bodied mustang with an exhaust, this guy wasn't having any of it. Right at the Northern I-64/I-75 split the GT driver put his foot down and it was like the Stang had thrown out an anchor. He was GONE, all this on a roll from about 85mph (at which point, the GT was probably only at the top of 2nd gear!) * * * At the other end of the spectrum, I saw one of these: It's a Smart ForTwo, the smallest car on sale in the world (I think...) Tiny 1.0L engine, tucked underneath the floor. You 'parallel park' one by nosing it perpendicular to the curb.

Haven't slept very well since the excitement last week, and it's wearing on me...my routine is off and I'm suddenly a very light sleeper. I still go to sleep easily, but I wake up very easily, too, and I'm having bad dreams. And boy, have I just been a joy to be around--moody, sleepy, and quick tempered. Everything's just in limbo at the moment--all 3 projects I'm on, my car's in the shop, Whitney's car. Total state of suspended animation.

So, we picked Joey Actually-My-Name-is-Simon, and headed Team Combs over to McDonald's in Shelbyville. While in McD's, I noticed the fry assembly line: At one end, close to the drive-thru window is the holding area, where crisp, deep fried potatoes sit under a heat lamp in red McDonald's packages awaiting customers. To the right of that is the deep fryer, the heart of America's burgeoning artereosclerotic crisis, where hyrdogenated vegetable oil at God-knows-how-hot fries the rather-uniform Taters as they sit in baskets. The fryer's apparently run by a digital timer, set each time a basket lowers into the oil. All pretty mundane, the height of Fast food efficiency... ...and then, we see that efficiency, amp'd-up to eleven To the right of the fryer was a machine that had a hopper at the top, a diagonal line of the fryer baskets below the hopper, and a mysterious empty space below the line above, perpendicular to the top. To my horror, I saw a girl dump 5 bag...