First Thoughts

… well, we did it, in just four days we tracked down a car we wanted to lease, completed the transaction, brought it home… it’s not our ideal car, plug in hybrid, hybrid, were both high on our list of desirable… still, we got heated seats, a bucket of safety features, a larger car than we had before, a moon roof, a pleasant, well crafted ride… and because we leased it, the chance to buy or lease the car of our dreams in three years…

… having settled the car question, we can drive out to Block Island, enjoy our niece’s wedding, and have a vacation in which we can finally have some down time and together time, which we have had little of for the past month and a half… between M’s accident and D passing away, we have been separated and tending to our respective family traumas… and then there was the drowning of our Honda Fit by tropical storm Ida… as i write “Ida” i am prompted to check my hurricane tracker app to see what is brewing in The Atlantic… a couple of storms, one doesn’t look likely to hit land, the other, coming off the coast of Africa is presently moving towards the Caribbean… should keep an eye on that one…

… a couple of things to do still to conclude the Fit chapter in our lives… we need to get our plates back so we can hand them in and stop the insurance on the Fit… we need to meet with a Geico representative to sign over the title and receive a check… it’s not looking like either will happen before we leave on vacation…

… for the next two days we will organize ourselves to get out to BI…

HCR meter, neutral, Joe Manchin and a handful of Democrat senators have crafted a compromise voting rights bill that Manchin has promised he can get ten Republican votes for… according to HCR, democracy hangs in the balance… i ascribe to this position too… it looks like the preservation of democracy or the preservation of the filibuster, at great cost to democracy as a governing principle…

First Thoughts

… just 84 hours after finding our car was drowned in flooding when tropical storm Ida passed through, we have organized a new car for ourselves, a Honda HR-V EX AWD…

… we are hoping to have it in our possession by Thursday, if not before…

… it’s hard to say that we have good car karma, given the drowning incident, but both times we have procured a new car, we have been able to do so under circumstances favorable to us… we got our Honda Fit during cash for clunkers… we traded in a car we paid 3K for and got 7K for it… it was a big part of making the car affordable at the time… this time we have an insurance settlement which is nearly double what we expected as a trade-in… again, helping with the money down situation…

… finding the car has been a whirlwind… we visited three different Honda dealers and two different Toyota dealers before settling on the HR-V above… there is a shortage of cars because there is a global shortage of microchips essential to their manufacture… most cars are being purchased before they get to the manufacturer’s lot… that we found one that met most of our requirements and desires already on the lot that hadn’t been spoken for is a small miracle…

HCR meter neutral…

  • about the Gavin Newsome recall election in which the far right contender is already claiming evidence of massive voter fraud, one day before the voting has even started…
  • quote of the day “If losers in a democracy refuse to accept the legitimacy of elections, the system falls apart.1
  • about Republican intransigence on the vaccine mandates imposed by the Biden Administration…
  • about the soft infrastructure bill that no Republican supports…

  1. Richardson, Heather Cox, Letters from an American, September 13, 2021: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-13-2021 ↩︎

New in the Neighborhood

Ever heard of a Honda Racoon?…

… this one has been tooling around the neighborhood… i want one!… sadly, i don’t think they are in production anymore nor do i think they ever made it to the US market when they were… this one has the steering wheel on the right side so imported from somewhere else…