miscellany

[kate_nepveu]

• I have a Starveling Cat in Echo Bazaar now! Thank you again, yhlee. I can't express how much this amuses me. Anyone who's playing that I don't already know, leave your username in comments and I'll follow you under my game account.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (recorded off cable, half-watched while stitching) is not a very good movie. Granted, it wasn't a very good book. But I wouldn't have thought it possible to make the action sequences of the ending so boring on-screen.
• Reinventing the stitching wheel, part 25 in a series: linen turns out to not be a good fabric for blackwork.
• My car needs major repairs for the second time this year. I will not have put enough money into it to equal the payments I would have made on a new car this year, but I'm worried that I'm on the downward slide (it's a 2003 Prius with almost 94K miles). And I'm sad that I no longer love it. Any suggestions for feeling happy with one's older car again?
• The problem with Horton Hatches the Egg is that Horton is a Mary Sue, specifically the kind where the virtue of the protagonist is demonstrated by piling absurd pain and indignity on top of absurd pain and indignity. (Like an early Mercedes Lackey novel, or an SGA post-"Trinity" fic, except that Horton hasn't blown up a solar system.)
• I haven't done a SteelyKid post in ages, so those of you who don't follow Chad's blog won't have seen this recent picture. I have to point it out because it is so characteristic: open book, bare feet (she will not wear socks if she has a choice about it), random item of clothing she saw and insisted on wearing, stuffed animals, and big grin. That's our toddler.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, that's interesting. With my last couple of cars, it seemed as if the maintenance costs were starting to spike somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 miles. But maybe that was a cognitive illusion.

Part of it was probably that (a) I hadn't taken care of them as well as I might have (which is the second point, I guess), and (b) Boston-area weather really pounds the hell out of cars--but, then, the Magliozzis have to deal with that too!

Matt McIrvin

[(Anonymous)]

Also, OMG there are old beater Priuses now. Time flies, doesn't it?

[kate_nepveu]

It is not a beater! Nothing with less than 100K miles and no parts hanging off is a beater, darn it.

[sraun]

I'll agree cognitive illusion - there was a bit of legerdemain in the claim, but I think they admitted it up front. It's averaged - you'll have years where you shell out $8000, and years where you shell out $500. What happens for most people is that they see the peak you mentioned, and assume it's going to keep going at the level or higher, and it doesn't.

Oh, yeah - another one of their points was 'always do the scheduled maintenance on time!'

[veejane]

Yeah, the trouble with my car isn't the miles, it's the rust. The undercarriage is rusting right out, because you just can't drive around on that much salt without taking some damage. Even though the engine is still in pretty good shape (just hitting 100K miles), the coolant lines are on their last legs.

[(Anonymous)]

You could stave it off for a while by washing your car religiously. That was where I generally fell down.

[kate_nepveu]

I've got to start doing that--it always seems back-of-my-mind silly to wash the thing in winter, but I know I really should. I should start trying to make a habit of it, every other Friday morning or something.

[veejane]

(I never wash my car. It rains! Why would one need anything else!)

Well, I mean, it's also 17 years old. In general, I feel that such a timespan involves some inevitable wear. The body above the wheels is in pretty good shape; it's really the undercarriage and wheel wells that are orange. And I'm pretty sure I'd need daily carwashes to take care of that.