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

[scifantasy]

Horton Makes a Boom?

[mkozlows]

I only know of one way to feel good about an older car, and that is to no longer own it, so I think my advice is not helpful. (I also am PATHOLOGICALLY TERRIFIED of out-of-warranty maintenance to a point that is mathematically provably irrational, but hey.)

[kiya]

My Echo Bazaar twitter account is mahoganynickel. :)

[malkingrey]

I'm malkingrey on Echo Bazaar, as I am most places.

[veejane]

I am happy that my 17 y.o. car started this evening in the 18 F weather! Because being stranded, even just long enough for AAA, would have sucked a lot.

[yhlee]

I've never done blackwork, so I wouldn't know what fabrics to pick; what's a good one to start with?

[sraun]

See if you can find a copy of the first Car Talk, by Click & Clack, the Tappett Brothers (actually Tom & Ray Magliozzi). It should have been first published in the late 80's or early 90's. I owned a copy before I bought my house - I may still, but haven't the faintest idea where it is.

High points I remember:

First - average annual maintenance levels out. Sounds like you're at about the point where they'd expect that. At the time, original warranties were two years / 20,000 miles, and they said any modern car from a first-world country was good for 100,000 miles easy, usually 150,000 and frequently 200,000. I'd assume those numbers have only gone up in the past 20 years, since you can now commonly get 5 year / 50,000 mile original warranties.

Second - whenever anything breaks, fix it right away, no matter how trivial. It's the trivial broken things that don't get fixed that drive us to buy new cars.

Third - fool yourself. When you're going "I really want a new car" - take it to your mechanic and have him fix everything. Then take it to a paint shop, and have them give it a full paint job in a different color, and clean the insides, refurbish everything. They may even have something that will give it the new car smell for a while.

[kass]

SteelyKid is so cute, omg! I flail.

[annew]

I second the 'get the inside detailed' suggestion. I always felt better about my old car whenever I cleaned the inside of it myself, and a professional cleaning probably would have been even better.

LBMango

[(Anonymous)]

I actually have two, it started out accidentally, and I just kept using them both... the more active one is lbmangolondon my lbmango twitter account also has one...

[cofax7]

Steelykid is adorable!

(Although I admit I'm distracted by the Stuffed Appa! Where did you find it?)

[genarti]

That picture is adorable! I love it.

But I must say that on the first read, I misread "big grin" as "big gun," which created a slightly different mental image...

[tessercat]

My EchoBazaar twitter is also, shockingly, tessercat. :)

I am intrigued by the knowledge that there are starveling cats to be had! I did not know!

Your child is ridiculously adorable.