car etc update

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/9w5AGxi

I have driven so many cars. I’ll witter on about them behind the cut but first I have to share a brief story of Reno the cat.

This morning Reno the cat was out by the greenhouse as I came in to stop at the house for breakfast. He was staring nobly off into the distance, no brain cell in his head whatsoever, just wind whistling between his ears.

A bit later, I’d had breakfast and was getting myself together to do some work today (which I promise I’m doing I’m just taking a Tumblr break, the first this week basically, so there), and I saw him sitting on the shelf at the porch window, staring in. Ah, I thought, he wants to come inside, because that is often how he signals that. So I went over to the door, and opened it.

He saw me and meowed excitedly, and clumsily made his way down off the shelf, which he doesn’t know how to do gracefully. I stood waiting with the door open because this is the only thing one can really do, or Reno will get too confused to come in.

As he made it to the door, his sister Whiskey had clearly had enough; she also likes to go in and out the door and needs it held open a long time so she can stare through it and make her decision. The two of them share a brain cell and she usually has it. it’s not a very bright brain cell. She shot out the door precisely as he was about to come in it.

This distracted him so much he turned around and followed her, which made her hiss at him and run away, and he could not help but chase her. I yelled his name and he stopped and then saw me and remembered he had wanted to come in the door. I called his name and he finally came in the door. I let go of the door, which has one of those pneumatic soft-closer thingies on it, so it mostly shut behind him but then bounced back open to hiss shut softer.

As it bounced back open, he turned and ran back out the door.

Cats.

[image description: the garden, through the large metal mesh of the deer fence, in a sea of dewy green grass and plants with some distant trees in the background, and in the foreground is a cinder block counterweighting the planting bench canopy to keep the wind from catching it, and a white cat litter bucket in the mid-ground (presumably with transplanting supplies in it); just beyond the legs of the planting bench, Reno the cat, who is gray and white, is sitting upright looking the other way, ears cocked forward as he gazes out over the garden.]

Anyway, cars–

I have now test-driven a Honda HR-V, a Subaru Forester, a Jeep Compass, a Jeep Renegade, a Nissan Kicks, a Volkswagen Taos, a Mazda CX-30 and a Mazda CX-5. And then I also drove a Subaru Outback, a 2020 Limited trim package that’s now crossed the US several times and has had a young man intermittently living in it for some time, and said young man (who works here) was excited to tell me all about it and show me the Steering Assist which I can’t deny would be pretty sweet if I was driving across the entire country.

Of those, the only interesting ones were the Subaru Forester and the Jeep Renegade. The Renegade is a Fiat really, made in Italy, and the thing I liked about it was super dumb– it’s so boxy and upright that the driver’s seat is intensely vertical, your legs are really under you and you’re sitting up high but with plenty of headspace, so it’s sort of vaugely like a Wrangler only not quite so punishingly uncomfortable to handle, and it looks like a fucking Lego toy car but I tell you what I bet that four wheel drive is pretty sweet. Also 9.7 inches of ground clearance, hard to argue with.

The others were all fine, really, and the Mazda CX-5 downright pleasant– good balance of cargo and headspace with reasonable fuel economy, good adjustability, friendly technology though a lot of that is probably just that Dude has been driving a Mazda since 2016 or so and as the passenger I’ve had to learn to navigate the technology. (M-L was excited that the star button might take you to space– no, it’s radio favorites– and the paper airplane might be messages? no, it’s navigation.)

I have a terrible feeling that for all my diligence and research I’m still going to wind up back in a fucking Subaru. I did get the scoop on the local dealership, a friend of M-Ls has a 4-year old Forester that she loves from that dealership which she hates despite it having almost the same last name as her. (One letter different. You’d think you could leverage that into them being nice to you. Guess not.)

I’m taking the Amtrak this weekend out to Rochester and it’s going to be incredibly complicated to get back home. I looked at my schedule– I’d been vaguely thinking I had two weeks off in a row coming up but i do not so either I’m going to take the Amtrak a whole lot over the next month and a half or I’d better just buy a fucking car. Blargh.

I haven’t tried Kia or Hyundai and I missed Toyota because the Nissan guy wasted so much of my time (he was very clearly waiting for a specific car to come back from being test driven but not saying so, and finally M-L was like “genuinely we do not care what color” so he was like ok and went and got the one of the two other ones and then was like “there’s no gas in this we gotta go get gas” arghhh anyway) that the Toyota dealership closed. I also have a dodge hornet on the list but they were all in the shop, which is weird. (“Naw there’s some check engine light issue they all need a software reset over,” said the guy, and i was like what does that mean and will that happen after i buy them, but he was like “don’t worry about it” and we drove jeeps instead so okay?) And there’s a couple of chevys and a ford and i’m really tired.

I’ve actually liked most of the sales people so that’s been fun. We did genuinely shock the Mazda salesman when I admitted to being 44. “I was thinking you were young enough to be my daughter,” he said, “but that’s how old I am.”

None of them have been able to figure out that M-L and I are sisters. M-L reports that occasionally I’ll mention my partner having made me a spreadsheet, or that my partner drives a Mazda, and I often will use he pronouns for him, and she’s like “I can feel them not looking at me because they’d all assumed I was the wife” which is hilarious. I mean for context we are very, very similar in appearance, similar coloring, similar size and shape, we really do resemble one another, but we have slightly different cheekbones/jaws/face shapes, so we’re not identical or anything; we just have an obvious family resemblance. I guess it’s not super normal to go car shopping with a sibling but I don’t understand why it’s so unexpected. As the like, bonus level, often we’ll tell stories about Our Mom or Our Dad and we’re clearly both telling the story? So I feel like it shouldn’t be such a shock.

Anyway.

I’ll be mildly annoyed if I wind up just buying the second goddamned car i test drove but on the other hand at least i’ll know I bought it on purpose. (Your picture was not posted)