Chalk’s Ocean Airways Investigation.

Normally, I find the subject of air disasters morbidly fascinating, but this particular example is noteworthy because I flew on this very plane only two years before the crash.

Wake Up!

Mama graciously let Finn and I sleep in until 8:20 this morning, so tired were we after our three-day adventure to New York for Great-Grandpa’s 95th birthday party. Finn got to spend time with her grandparents, meet a huge swath of her extended family on my side (this was one of the biggest turnouts we’ve had in years) and play in the lake, something she did not stop asking to do even as the stars were out and the fireworks were going off.

And now I’m back to missing her and her Mama terribly as I go back to the grind.

New Adventures In Advertising.

My daily commute takes me past the Baltimore City Courthouse right around the time potential jurors need to queue up out front to go through the vetting process. Often, as I’m sitting at one of the lights in front, I’ll see buttoned-up lawyers dragging carts loaded with file boxes of papers, nervous-looking plaintiffs accompanied by family members, or news crews set up under the shadow of double-parked media vans. Today, however, I was amused by the sight of two young women in Daisy Dukes and tightly tied t-shirts advertising a bail bonds service, attempting to cross the street in platform heels. They clacked their way onto the sidewalk, up the stairs, and entered the courthouse, on their mission of mercy, trailing behind a conservatively dressed woman (who I assume is the one who hands out business cards).

Capitalism at its finest, no?

Click, Click, Click.

As a gesture of appreciation for finally receiving a new taillight, the Saturn has decided that it doesn’t want to start. I noticed the available gusto with which it usually cranks over its sewing-machine engine was a bit lacking the other day, and yesterday morning it simply sat and made the click-click-click noise that cars make when the battery is either almost dead or connected with a wire dripping with corrosion. I’m currently borrowing my neighbor’s charger in order to get the Scout’s battery working again (that saga has taken another negative course correction, BTW) so I pulled the Saturn’s four-month-old battery last night and hooked it up, thinking the alternator isn’t providing a charge anymore. But after about 15 seconds, the charger reported the battery as being full.

Curious.

So this morning, I dropped it back in, cleaned the contacts off (the positive side was, indeed, flaky) and tried it about four times with no success. Last night I was really bummed, because I noticed for the first time that the alternator is buried behind the transversely mounted engine block and under the cowling, making its replacement more than this shade-tree mechanic is able to take on right now. But now, I’m just perplexed. If it’s not the battery, then it’s either the starter solenoid or the relay.

The plan to diagnose is as follows:

1. Try using the Jeep battery to start it.
2. Try jumping it from the Jeep.
3. Check or replace the starter solenoid.
4. Check or replace the starter relay. ($~11)

Update: Jumped it almost immediately off the jeep. So I’m thinking it could be the battery. I have to do some more sleuthing.

Old Friends, New Friends.

This weekend we took a trip across the Bay Bridge to visit with our good friends K&R, who have just added to their family a peaceful little boy called Zachary. After the initial hubbub of Finn’s birth died down, we realized how valuable it was to see friends, and how awesome it was when they brought dinner, and so we try to pay it forward as much as possible.

Mama outdid herself with some delicious portuguese chorizo stew and freshly baked bread, and we timed things just right to have plenty of visiting before it was time for night-nights and a quiet ride back over the bridge.

Miss Finn was well-behaved, preferring to spend most of her time practicing her climbing skills on two flights of carpeted stairs. She’s getting very fast…

HowTo: Add an FM Modulator to a Crappy Stereo.

Here’s a great primer on how to add an FM modulator to a crappy stereo in order to run an iPod on the down low. The Saturn has a giant, oversized (and thus unreplaceable) CD player, the CR-V has a giant, oversized CD/cassette player, and the Scout has a $20 Wal-Mart cassette deck held in with sheet metal screws. So this is definitely on our radar.

Lectric Leopards.

Driving home last week, I got stuck in inexplicable traffic, the kind where everyone inches along for a half a hour and then suddenly the traffic just sort of clears up and nobody knows why things were so slow for so long. While in the thick of the molasses, I pulled abreast of a car carrier hauling two very odd birds indeed: Lectric Leopards, which were early 80′s versions of the Prius, built from the tiny Renault5/Le Car chassis with the promise of 60 miles of maximum range.

I’m sure there are entire books that could be written on why this odd hippie French deathmobile never caught on in the states (even putting aside the suspicious nature Americans had for Renault at the time) in the midst of a recession and gas crunch, but I’ll give the company points for trying. I like to think there’s a Francophile treehugger gearhead somewhere south of Baltimore, who just picked these two cars up for a song, and who’s got some Prius running gear in his garage waiting for a swap. Bonne chance, messieurs.

Finn’s New Ride

Yep, that’s right. That right there is our new babyhauling chariot. That’s sixteen months of waiting and saving and cursing silently as we hoisted poor Finn into the gaping maw of the Jeep, praying we wouldn’t blow a disc or pull a muscle while simultaneously twisting, stretching, and lifting her into a rear-facing carseat. Now we’ve got four doors,bitches! Four doors and more airbags than a political convention. We waited and watched and saved and compared and test-drove, and when it was time to move, we marched on that Carmax faster than ants at a picnic.

Actually, I bought Jen and I some lunch first. But then we marched into the showroom with a printout in hand, featuring that pretty silver car, with low miles and a stick shift, and said, “This one.” Arthur, our salesman, really didn’t have to do much other than hand us the keys and take a siesta in the back seat. He knew we were there to party. He was professionally mortified, however, when we pointed out the red Sharpie drawings on the back of the C-pillar plastic, and he had their service guys remove it as soon as we finished the test drive.

Did I mention this thing has a table in the back? A fucking table. It’s the cover to the rear well. It’s got legs that pop down, and you can pull it out and use it for tailgating selling lemonade.

When I told Arthur we were paying with a check, he didn’t blink an eye; he just said, “Ok,” and tried to ignore my shaky hand as I wrote out one of the biggest dollar amounts I’ve ever spent (Yes, the down payment on this house was orders of magnitude more expensive, but that was all done by the real estate people, and all I did was sign a paper that said “move this money there.”) It sure did feel good to have done that at least once in my life.

So, power everything, a sunroof, cruise control, 6-disc CD changer (?!?) and enough room in back to comfortably hold a carseat with the LATCH system and not bungee cords. The seats fold and tumble down into a space the size of a deck of cards, unlike the Jeep’s mattress-like bench, which only folds when stood upon. And a stick! It’s not like the stick in the Saturn, which has a clunky, open American feel to it, or the Scout, which is like driving, well, a truck. This has the Honda-style stick which feels miniaturized somehow, and on a spring: The distance between 1st, 3rd and 5th is about a quarter-inch, so one has to be careful not to accidentally downshift when looking for fifth gear merging into traffic. At least the sweet spot is larger than my last Honda. It will take some getting used to, but it’s the kind of getting used to I’m prepared to do for the next 150,000 miles.

Bambi Airstream

Would that I had $4900 laying around, I would so totally buy this 2005 Airstream Bambi trailer. That’s about $20,000 of awesome in a 19′ package. And it would look good behind a Scout.

Car Shopping, Part 2.

Anyone following along for the last couple of years knows I’ve been thinking about buying a new car for, well, the last couple of years. When last I wrote about the subject, we were considering four-door hatches along the lines of the Fit or the Matrix, in search of better gas mileage and a reasonable price tag. Since then, we’ve actually had the baby and now know how difficult it is to jockey her in and out of the car—especially since we’ve upgraded to a larger car seat.

So the Fit (our previous winner) was out, and we started considering the next larger size of four-door babyhaulin’ vehicles. The CR-V was an obvious candidate, so we looked at the other models in its class—the RAV-4, the Forester and the Rogue. We’re ruling out anything GM makes at the outset; my last experience with Ford was middling, and I haven’t trusted a Hyundai since 1988, when I cracked the door hinge on a one-year-old Excel by rolling down the window. (It wasn’t mine, thankfully). We ruled the Forester out after several different experiences in several different models, all of which made Jen carsick. I don’t trust Nissan anymore, even though one of the best cars I owned was a Sentra wagon; that was twenty years and one almost-bankruptcy ago, and their styling over the last ten years has left me uninspired.

So that left the Toyota and the Honda. We hit the local Carmax and walked through the SUV section until we found a row of CR-V’s in the previous body style, and, lo and behold, there sat a gunmetal gray stick!

Out on the road, the car handled exceptionally well, and I found that everything was engineered exactly the way I would want it to be. The cupholder/tray between the seats folds down out of the way perfectly, the cargo hold is wide, devoid of space-robbing, poorly fitted plastics (I’m looking at you, Chrysler) and there’s a hidden well under the deck where the mini-spare normally would go. I also liked 60/40 fold-and-tumble rear seats. It’s the rare kind of car where form follows function but still manages to be stylish and clean. I was in love.

The RAV4 we drove was also at least one body style behind, and an automatic (I don’t know if they come with manual transmissions, but I doubt it). The car itself was a 2004, and it had low miles, but it didn’t have the same put-together feel that the Honda did. It drove well, it had lots of pep, and it was shiny, but it reminded me more of a down-market Chevy than a serious contender. The plastics were simple, the doors felt thin and cheap (much like other Toyotas I’ve been in) and it lacked the polish and feel of the Honda. Sorry Toyota, if I wanted a Chevy, I’d buy one and save that other $7,000 for a new roof on my house. (Side note: In the showroom there sat a 2005 Ford Taurus with 50K on the odometer for $7,000. I found that kind of depressing).

Just for kicks, we checked out a Pilot to see what the next size up would be like, and were not impressed. Actually, we were turned off the minute we opened the rear hatch to see the back row of seats (they claim it fits 7) and got turned off at how useless they were and how much room they took up. That’s room I need for bikes and cat food and coolers and suitcases and presents and huge boxes and puppies and toys and playmates and second carseats, not thin metal space hogging, puke-inducing jumpseats.

Even though the CR-V had much higher mileage than the Toyota, I think it would be the best choice for our family, and I have no doubt we’d get 200,000 miles out of the engine with careful maintenance.

So for now, it remains a question of when. We’re being very conservative with our available cash, but I’m hoping to drive off the lot sometime before the snow flies (and, optimally, sooner than that, as Finn isn’t getting any smaller).