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Time to Buy a New Car?

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Hmmmm…  The more I think about the kinda mealy-mouthed chatter Toyota’s service guy dispensed yesterday afternoon, the more dubious I become about the Dog Chariot. Using the finest beat-around-the-bush language, what the guy said really was that they couldn’t fix it, because the wiring inside the door is such a mess.

Apparently a previous owner (or their mechanic) dorked around with it, and that’s the source of our problem.

Did I hear the guy right?

If that’s correct, then there’s no functioning airbag on the driver’s side door. And that’s a problem, when you spend most of your driving hours in Phoenix’s homicidal traffic.

So…I’m wondering if maybe it’s time to get a new car.

Financially, this would be an advantageous moment: investments are running amok. There’s plenty of money to pay the difference between a trade-in and a new vehicle in cash.

One of Funny’s perspicacious readers bought a hybrid pickup. He’s beside himself with delight over the thing.

And today’s average gas price here is $5.04 a gallon — down from $5.27. Couple days ago I pumped a third of a tank of gas into the tank and paid $50 for the privilege.

If it’s reasonable to believe these prices will persist — and when have you heard of gasoline prices seriously going down? — then it would make sense to get a hybrid or fully electric vehicle. Soon.

Especially if the one I’m driving has a defect.

The Automotive Jamboree

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Dawn cracks (barely), and here we are down at Camelback Toyota, summoned hither by a recall involving nonfunctional airbags.

How could I do without this? Let me count the endless number of ways….

Appointment is 7 a.m. I pulled up to the driveway at about 6:50. There are 16 cars ahead of me – four in each lane – and I expect to be sitting here until the cows come home. And then to sit in the dealership’s waiting room until the cows go back out to pasture.

Sometimes Toyota has drivers who will take you back home. But it’s hard to see how they could manage that, with this mob in the pipeline.

This pisseth me off. The REASON you buy a Toyota instead of a Ford is not to have to deal with the recalls for shoddy construction.

When DXH and I were first married, I had a Ford FairLemon that my father had given me as a graduation gift. We lived in the apartments just to the north of this dealership, which at the time belonged to Ford. Our car was parked at this place more than it was parked in our carport space! So it was convenient that I could walk over here, since I was walking over here all the time.

* * *

And here I yam, already, waiting for a red Hyundai to come pick me up at the side door. Better than sitting in their waiting room for hours and hours, but…I sure as hell could do without it. The wait will be ample anyway, since it’s 7:30…though it must be said that the traffic is minimal for this time of day. I expect the plague is keeping people working at home.

Think o’that: coming up on high rush hour., Friday morning and there’s hardly any traffic on 16th Avenue, a main drag from north Phoenix to the central and southerly business districts. Looks like businesses are not reopening anytime soon…

Matter of fact, my son’s company announced they were not reopening their (expensive!) offices, but that henceforth employees will work from home. He’s not happy, because he would rather be in a more social setting. If it were me, I’d be beside myself with joy: work-from-home is exactly what I wangled for myself by founding ASU’s online courses in English & American Studies. Once I had all my courses online, I rarely had to trudge in to the campus. Which was just fine with me.

* * * *

And NOW here I am, ten minutes to 8:00, and parked – by golly! – in the living room. That Toyota dealership is INCREDIBLY efficient. Rolled in, handed the key over, got picked up by an uber-type jalopy, and delivered back to the house in 20 minutes.

Think o’that.

When we drove up, the garage door was hanging open. Alarming, because I don’t habitually go off and leave the door open. Nor would I have done so: there would have been no reason to walk out into the front yard through the garage as dawn cracked. So either I dorked up and left the door open all night(don’t think so! I’ve been doing laundry in the garage this a.m. and would’ve noticed if the door was hanging open) or someone has a door opener button that works on my garage opener.

So, dammit, I guess I’ll have to call the garage door guys and have them recode that thing.

Jayzus. Never a dull moment.

Well, I expected to spend the whole day sitting in Toyota’s waiting room, so…if you have to be carless in Gaza, better to be carless in your own precinct of Gaza.

{chortle!}

My father used to use “car tune-ups” to get away from his obnoxious wife. He would tell her he was taking his aging Ford down to the dealership to be worked on – and at Ford, an all-day wait was not only likely but inevitable. But what he was doing was sitting in the parking lot smoking. And stinking up the car.

One day she remarked to me, laughing, “He thinks I don’t know he’s smoking in the car.”

I refrained from replying, “He doesn’t give a damn whether you know he’s smoking in the car.”

But the poor woman was so stupid that it was unreasonable to expect that she would figure it out.

Gawdlmighty… Other people’s lives!

Mine, too, I suppose. They certainly made their exploits part of my life.

As soon as my mother died – practically instantaneously – my father packed up the house, donated everything he didn’t absolutely need, and moved himself to what was then called Orangewood, one of the first “life-care communities” to hit Arizona. Dreary place, IMHO…but then I never cared for institutional living – three years in the dorm (plus 11 years in public schools) was as much of that as I ever want to endure . He, having gone to sea all his adult life, was well adapted to communal life. He not only didn’t seem to dislike it; if anything, he enjoyed it. Or he would’ve, if he hadn’t been snabbed by Helen.

All the widows (which meant almost all the women inmates) at Orangewood were on the hunt for men. The instant my father walked in the door, Helen went in for the kill. She grabbed that guy before he could sit down.

Within a few months, she wrangled him into proposing to her, a huge mistake on his part.  She was SUCH a nitwit. And though my father pretended to be stupid – it was part of his working-class macho pose – he was anything but.

However, whatever smarts he had went out the door after my mother died, and so he allowed himself to be maneuvered into marrying her. This was such a disaster that at one point he took to renting a room at another old-folkerie. He would tell her – yep! – that he was taking the car to be serviced, and then repair to his secret flophouse and spend the day watching TV from a Levitz recliner.

What a witch that woman was! But he refused to divorce her because…uh huh…what would everyone think?

Life: William Shakespeare couldn’t come anywhere close to making it up!

Speaking of servicing the car, I let myself be persuaded to have Camelback Toyota change the oil and rotate the tires. That was redundant, since Chuck’s successors recently did that. But offhand I couldn’t remember how long ago that was…and frankly, I wasn’t especially impressed the last couple of times I took the car to Chuck’s.

Pete took over the business, as Chuck had been grooming him to do for years. Very good. But…now that the place is his, there’ve been some changes made….

Chuck ran that shop like a small-town garage. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. If you brought your car in to be serviced early in the morning, Chuck or one of the underlings would drive you home. Later in the day, they’d come pick you up. Now you sit an hour or three in their run-down waiting room listening to the traffic roar by on 7th Street.

Also, that time a tire got a nail in it and I was running nearly flat, Chuck would NEVER have said “we don’t do tires…take it up on Camelback to Discount Tires.” They would have taken the nail out and fixed the flickin’ tire! If a new tire needed to be purchased and they didn’t have one on hand, he would have had one of the underlings go pick one up. Basically Pete just tossed me out.

Sooo….I had already pretty much decided to look elsewhere for routine car service. And this morning I believe I found the “elsewhere.”

Good old Chuck. To my mind, he defined the term “good man” — possibly even “great man.” His wife had debilitating health problems for some years toward the end of her life. He stuck with her and took care of her himself, every inch of the way. Meanwhile, hanging onto the business — kept it thriving.

At any rate… Pete lost a customer over a rusty nail. And Camelback Toyota gained a customer over a recall, a short wait and a ride home.

* * * *

A-a-n- the postscript:

The hour coming on to 3 p.m., I call Camelback Toyota to find out how (or if) they’re doing on the Venza’s airbag issue. They claim it takes 8 hours to replace the side airbags.

Uh huh. Well…izzat so?

Look up the problem on the Great Treasure Chest of Knowledge: the Internet. hmmm…

Quite possibly not so…

It appears that what’s needed is to check the wiring, which may or may not need work. This, we’re told, takes about an hour. And….yeah…judging by this PDF, replacing the side airbags (if it’s necessary, which it isn’t necessarily) could be a time suck.

Hmmm. Looks like you have to be sure they put the thing back together right…

• Confirm window, mirror, speaker, and door lock operation
• Confirm interior door handle opens.
• Confirm initializations have been performed

Better write this stuff down and remember to check those things BEFORE leaving their lot.

It’s 3;30 in the afternoon. The car has been there since 7:30. Yep: that’s 8 hours. Sooo…where is it, fellas?

 

Arf-a-Roonies!

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LOL! It’s only 8:30 — just dusk — and already the neighbors are having fireworks frenzies.

Staggered out for a dip in the pool. (the water is  SOOOO warm it’s actually hot!). Followed by Ruby the Corgi, who of course has to stand guard over the human’s bizarre shenanigans. (Read: Arf arf arf arf arf arf arf….)  This evening the doggy serenade is accompanied by the staccato racket of neighbors’ bang-bangs from all directions.

Most of the great public fireworks displays here in the city have been foresworn by reason of the plague. Apparently none of the usual suspects are presenting the usual elaborate fireworks shows.

Tha’ss OKAY, though: the locals are making up for it. What marvelous frenzies of banging, booming, snapping, and bopping! Dunno how long this will go on — it’s only 8:40 now — but it’s hard to believe most people bought up enough bang-bangs to hold forth longer than about a half-hour. No doubt the racket will settle down in another 45 minutes or so.

Interestingly, Ruby is unfazed.

I’ve had dogs that were flat-out terrorized by the racket from fireworks. This evening, Ruby was far more concerned with the human’s habit of bizarrely dropping into a puddle of chlorinated water. She seemed not to notice the bang-bangs at all. And now that the human has climbed out of the drink, dried off, and taken up its position loafing on the bed, she seems utterly unconcerned with banging and the whanging going on around us.

Dogs. Quite possibly even stranger than humans.

Moving for Olde Age?

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So my friends J & L(x2, of the male variety) invited me and a bunch of co-religionists to view the valley fireworks from their high-rise apartment on Central. This has become an annual tradition, which is really cool. This year they wanted party-goers to donate a chunk of dough to the church for the privilege, a chunk which, alas, I don’t happen to have laying around on the living-room floor. So…the human will be home listening to the local bang-bang nuts playing with their explosives and trying to calm the poor little dog’s nerves. (When I’ve gone to J & L’s for the Fourth, I’ve left Ruby with M’hijito, where the unruffleable Charlie the Golden Retriever keeps her pretty calm.)

That high-rise strikes me as a potential alternative to an old-folkerie, for when I get too old to handle the hassles of living in a house on a quarter-acre of land. Though a two-bedroom there is just an apartment and so is a lot smaller and more economically appointed than the four-bedroom Funny Farm, for an old buzzard it has a lot of advantages…

  • Less space to have to keep clean
  • Much better security
  • Someone else takes care of the exterior.
  • It’s within walking distance of AJ’s.
  • It’s close to two excellent hospitals (my house is close to a large urban hospital, too, but that place is not what you’d call “great” in terms of quality and safety).
  • Incredible views!
  • The lightrail goes right by the front door — you could ride it to the museums, the library, the baseball games, AJ’s, the Episcopal cathedral downtown, and even out to Tempe (if events at the university beckoned).

On the other hand…

Moving to J&L’s tower would mean sacrificing manysmall pleasures and would make parts of my present life so difficult I might have to make major changes…like find a new home for Ruby.

In a two-bedroom apartment, there would be no space for both a guest bedroom and my office. And the whole extra bedroom and closet that I use for storage would go away!

Then we have the pool issue. Despite the latest spate of grousing, I like my private pool that resides behind 8-foot walls and piled-up vines. I love skinny-dipping whenever I feel a whim to cool off. And I’m not going to strap myself into an elastic strait-jacket for a five-minute dip in a public pool. Here, when it’s miserably hot I can step out the back door and hop in the drink. There I’d have to change clothes, ride an elevator downstairs, traipse to a pool, then climb back out, ride back up, and hang up a suit in the bathroom.

Living on top of the neighbors is not my idea of a gracious lifestyle, no matter how fancy the apartments are.

AJ’s would be within walking distance, at least as long as I can still walk that far. But how long would that be? If I’m not walking the dog a mile or two a day (which surely would not happen in that hard-edged part of town), before long I won’t be walking much at all…won’t be able to.

Despite the crime in the neighboring slums (which does spill over into the ‘Hood) and the soaring property taxes and the endless wrangling of workmen, I’m inclined to think that living in my own little cottage with my own yard and my own garage and my own swimming pool mightily beats living in a box in the sky.

Would a high-rise apartment beat self-imprisonment in an old-folkerie? Probably. But can I provide all the services for myself here that I’d have to provide if I were living in an apartment? No doubt.

Think I’d druther have those services here than there…

Drivin’ Drivin’ Drivin’….

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And here we are with the rest of the cattle herd, parked in the Mayo’s waiting room.

Getting out here from central Phoenix induces a migraine headache — the Mayo Clinic is situated in affluent Scottsdale, where they presumably figure they’ll be closer to the kind of patients who a) know what the Mayo is; b) have the kind of jobs that provide the sort of health insurance that will cover the Mayo; and c) are bright enough to run to the doctor whenever a need arises…or appears to arise. The location is one BITCH of a long drive from North Central. I left at 20 after 8, and it’s now 9:17 a.m.: yes, almost a full hour of navigating rush-hour traffic with my fellow homicidal drivers.

But…given the quality of US medical care in general and Arizona care in specific, it’s worth the drive. HOOO-lee mackerel.

My late mother-in-sin — SDXB’s mom — was at John C. Lincoln — the Institution that serves this part of town — after she’d had some sort of cardiac episode. While she was laying in the hospital room, she DID have a heart attack, and…NO…ONE…NOTICED.

Actually, that’s wrong.

A cleaning lady  noticed. She came into the room to pick up the trash, and instead picked up the phone — to call the nurses’ station. Mom survived…but only by the grace of God.

So that’s why I avoid John C. Lincoln.

Doing so means the nearest hospital is a fair hike from here. EMTs will take you to some of them, but not all of them. Especially not to the Mayo…the only one where you can feel solidly sure of getting competent care.

If I had any sense, I’d sell the Funny Farm and move closer to the Mayo Hospital, thereby insuring that the local ambulance services  will take me there. But I don’t have any sense; nor do I have enough $$$ to afford to buy a comparable house (or much of any house) in Scottsdale or Paradise Valley. Ohhhh well. We all have to go sometime…maybe sooner is better than later…

*****

So I get in to see MayoDoc. She hasn’t a clue, being a GP, and she reports that their eye specialists are not seeing any but the most urgent cases, because of the plague. She suggests I visit thus-and-such an ophthalmologist, who…heh!!…happens to be in practice with my guy!

When we say “waste of time,” we MEAN waste of time.

😀 😀  😀  😀  😀  😀  😀  😀

Speaking of the which… I was supposed to be down at the church for today’s volunteer gig along about noon. Having come unstuck in time, I had no clue that Today’s The Day, until my opposite number for the morning hours called to say “where ARE you?”

Well, where I was was in the backyard throwing food on the BBQ whilst dealing with the Leslie’s pool repairman. Ohhhhhhhh gawd!

So, so, sooo tired beyond description. Now I have to hang here until the Swimming Pool Service & Repair guy finishes wrestling with the pool, write down what he wants me to do (because you may be dead SURE i won’t remember!!), then race down to the church and sit through the last several hours of phone duty and then take a vial of water up to Leslie’s and then call Pool Dude and tell them what they say and…and…but…but…if I have this pool dude’s phone number (and name) I sure as hell don’t know where they are.

Meanwhile the Toyota people want me to bring the car down to the dealership to get some recalled nightmare part replaced, which obviously I now won’t be able to do tomorrow because I’ll be running from pillar to post with the swimming pool fiasco.

§§§§§§§

So here we are down at the Cult HQ. I got here two hours late. Now there’s only an hour left to go. My morning counterpart, Barbara, has hung around and spent the last hour chatting, which was nice.

The pool is crystal clear, thanks to the SPS&R guy. How long this will last remains to be seen. But at last the filter has been cleaned, so there’s a good chance the present repair will have some longevity.

§§§

Long, LONG elaborate email from the power company, Salt River Project, going on about a plague of scams visiting their customers.

§

Don’t know when I’ve ever been so tired. Up since 4 a.m., for unknown reasons. Then of course the fun junket across the crazy-making city.

Then couldn’t even sit down for lunch before the Pool Guy showed up.

It’s 103 degrees out there, with 21% humidity. Lovely, lovely day…

Thirty-five minutes to go…

Never a Dull Moment…

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ls there a question why I feel exhausted all the time?

No. The truth is, it’s not feel exhausted…it’s that I objectively am exhausted all the time! Because I do not live in reality. I live in the Land of the Loony Tunes!

First thing this morning, I’m flying around trying to get dressed to drive out to Scottsdale to get my hair done by the Great Hair Stylist of the Western World, Shane. Gotta be there by 9:30. which means I have to leave here by 8:30; 8:45 at the very latest. Meanwhile we have the usual dog feeding and house maintenance chores to get through first, in addition to showering ad washing hair and finding some clothes that aren’t too embarrassing to wear in public.

A-n-n-n-d as I’m charging around: BING BONG! Front doorbell.

Helle’s Belles, now what?

Look out the front window and there’s Ex-Pool Dude, the guy I canned because he made such a f**kin mess of the pool. ohhhh noooo….

He has gone out and bought a brand-new Hayward pool cleaner!

God help us. The things cost four hundred bucks! He can’t afford four bucks for lunch, dammit.

This, I realize, is how desperate the poor guy is to get back on my payroll.

I tell him I’ve already bought one and it’s already installed in the pool. And after making nice to him for  a few minutes, I send him on his way.

{sigh} Talk about your guilt trips!

Fortunately, I’m batting around too frantically to think very hard about this.

Fly around bat around fly around bat around fly out the door, streaking toward Scottsdale’s tony Fifth Avenue district, wherein Shane resides.

We’re trying to get my hair to grow back to its former glory. You’ll recall that I had to have it all hacked off short after I broke my shoulder, because I could no longer comb it. If it ever does grow back, it’ll take years and years. What we had this morning was a couple inches of shag.

He did his usual handsome job of spiffing it up. But at this rate I’ll never have long hair again. Right now it’s about an inch long in back, maybe three inches on top.

Weather: 110 and overcast today. Not the kind of stuff one enjoys driving through, from pillar to post — no matter how great your car’s AC may be. And mine is just fine.

After the junket to Scottsdale, I drove back through the Arcadia district, sight-seeing and considering real estate opportunities — many more than used to now exist for us po’ folk in those parts, in the form of shiny new apartment buildings.

Apartment living is not much to my taste — been there, done that, don’t wanna do it again — but as a practical matter, it may be one of the only choices for Olde Age.

********

Didn’t get this posted y’day…one distraction after another. In eight minutes, I have to leave for the Mayo, therein to harass MayoDoc about the eye thing that my 80-year-old (and then some) ophthalmologist wants to take a scalpel to. Sorry, Doc: second opinion time!

Soooo…let’s send this off, and then while I’m waiting endlessly in the Mayo’s waiting room, we can get started on another post…