New Car Fever

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 16 Jul 2005 12:00:00 GMT
# I had an exciting day yesterday. Got in my Civic at about 7:45am. Noticed that the heater/AC fan, which had been making lots of noise the night before, was totally non-functional. Headed out up the hill, and noticed a bad sound from the right front wheel. Stopped at the top of the hill to inspect it; flat. Emptied my trunk enough to get to the spare tire, jack, and lug wrench. The screw holding the spare tire on was very hard to turn. Rusted from 12 years of sitting there. A few taps with the very rusty lug wrench freed it. The jack still worked despite all the rust, and I managed to change to the half-size spare, which was down to 20 pounds. Borrowed a battery-powered pump from my neighbor and got it back up to 60. Off to the repair shop. Horrid scraping sound from right front wheel. Stopped about half a mile down the road. Took the spare off and found that the sheet metal shield between the wheel and the suspension was scraping against the inside of the brake disc. Bent it out of the way. Remounted the tire. Off to the repair shop for real this time. Took Bud over an hour to repair the tire; he had other things to do. He was busy so I swapped the wheel with the repaired tire back on myself (and saved some money in the bargain). Back on the road, headed to work, around 10:15.

I've been planning to replace my Civic in October or November, when I'm done paying for our Odyssey. Now I think I might do it a little earlier. Will probably get another Civic. Twelve years and 250,000 miles of reliable operation is mighty good marketing. But I'll test drive a Toyota Corolla. I'm also interested in Honda's new Ridgeline 4-door pick-up truck (with locking trunk under the bed), but at $28K, and twice the gas consumption, it's out of my price range.

# Claire Wolfe at Backwoods Home Magazine - Rock 'n Roll ala Mode - Hardyville has a machine gun shoot. [claire]

# I'm downloading Fedora Core 4, the latest version of Redhat's open source Linux. I plan to install the "Workstation" configuration in a Virtual PC virtual machine. Gotta scratch that Linux itch. Four, count 'em, four CDs.

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