Saturday, September 17, 2011

It's been ages since I last posted.  It's funny; I feel a strange pressure to write something "worth reading", so I just don't write.  It's not that I don't have ideas for topics - those usually come to me during the work day and I've forgotten them minutes later - I just don't do it.  So, from now on, I'm just going to write whatever, things I think are cool, fun, amusing, interesting, etc.  At the very least I'll have some kind of snapshot of my life (and so will my 6 followers, who are mostly family members and what appears to be a golden retriever....well, it's actually my friend who uses the golden retriever's picture as her profile pic).

My history with cars


Lately I've been fixated on buying a car....a Fiat 500.  One of the cute new ones.    They're all the rage.  I love the old ones, too, from the 60s especially I think, but the new ones are easier to find in Canada.  The picture above is of an old Fiat 500....see how you can tuck them into the tightest spots?I've never owned my own car, as in picked it out myself, paid for it myself, etc.  I drove my parents' cars as a teen and into my twenties.  A 1966 Mustang black top.  Second-hand Mercedes sports car.  A diesel sedan that sounded like it was making ice.  A beat up 1968 Beatle Bug.  Pretty cool cars, overall; I was lucky.  My history with cars, though, is not so lucky.  I crashed the Mustang; I almost took the door of the sports car off pulling out of the garage (helps to close the door before backing up) and the dashboard of the Volkswagen caught fire one day.  It also rolled all the way down the hill into someone's yard another time.  When I met Bill, I attempted to drive his 84 Volvo station wagon.  Even though I'm of Scandinavian background, I'm not built like the Swede they had in mind when they designed that model.  Even with the seat all the way forward, my stubby little legs wouldn't reach far enough for me to press the clutch pedal down far enough.  Not comfortable.  Plus, I was so unused to driving a standard transmission that I would grip the gearshift handle so hard that the top popped off, disconnecting the overdrive.  It was an ordeal. There were tears (Bill's).  That thing was a tank.  Boxy, but safe.  So, for the life of the Volvo, I became one of those women who lets her husband drive all the time.  Eventually, Bill got a company car - a Dodge caravan minivan - and, since we don't have children, we decided we didn't need two family cars, so we shipped the old burgundy Volvo wagon by train out to Vancouver where it lived out its days happily with my brother and his family.  Two company cars later and we're cruising around town in a not so cool pseudo SUV -  cappuccino coloured....or as Bill likes to say, beige.  Our friends call it the Earth Destroyer 2000 - Earthy D. for short - but it isn't really a gas-gulping SUV. Still.  So, my idea is to get a Fiat 500, call it Dante and paint flames on it (inferno, get it?).  But I can't really justify buying a second car at the moment....so I've promised myself that if I finish my novel - still in outline stage - I can buy myself the car.