Changing Cars

24 Jun 2019 7 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Life, Technology Tags:

About three weeks ago, the check engine light in my car came on. Again. My faithful 2004 Corolla was going downhill, and I knew it. Over the last few months I’d had to replace the starter and the oxygen sensor and clean the gas tank. The rear fender was scraped, the windshield was cracked, and another wheel cover had disappeared (number nine, I think). In February I had to buy a set of new tires.

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So when the check engine light popped on again as I drove home on I69 on Friday afternoon, I wasn’t terribly surprised. Annoyed, but not surprised. It wasn’t blinking, so I wasn’t panicking. The next Monday I stopped by Mac Haik Toyota (an adventure in itself, given the condition of the I45 access road in League City) and told a service rep about my problem. They were backed up, so I made an appointment to bring the car in on Friday morning.

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The check engine light stayed on, and by Thursday the oil light was blinking now and then when I hit the brake, so I was happy to make it back to the dealership. Not so happy when Janie Elizondo, my favorite service advisor, gave me the diagnosis. The engine light was signaling that the fuel injectors were failing. And the excessive oil burning gave rise to talk about engine block replacement.

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Nope. No fuel injectors, no engine block. It was time for that new car I’ve been planning for over the last couple of years. Even a Corolla won’t last forever.

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So Janie called her favorite salesperson, Dawn Riddle, and I headed over to the sales floor, a place I hadn’t been since I bought my old car there fifteen years ago (it was Star Toyota back then; the name has changed, but most of the staff remains).

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It never occurred to me to buy anything but another Corolla. When you have a car that serves you well for fifteen years and 252,408 miles, there’s really not much reason to change brands. But, my goodness, how much the cars have changed!

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Dawn showed me around, gave me a brochure, and gave me some idea of what I was looking at. Back in 2004, there were two, maybe three “trims” of Corollas, and I headed straight for the lowest price; I had no money to speak of and wasn’t even sure I could get a car loan, having only recently gone back to work. But my Ford was dying under me (after a mere 80,000 miles), and I needed a car.

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Now there are six “trims” for 2020 Corollas (plus a hybrid version—and who knew the 2020 models would be out in June?), so the decision required a bit more thought (and a lot more money). I left with my head spinning and joined my friend Gerry Bartlett for lunch. Gerry, who drives a newish Nissan Rogue, has been telling me for over a year that I need a new car with all the modern safety features, including the Blind Spot Monitor. And I wanted wheels that didn’t have removable wheel covers.

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After lunch and a couple of errands, Gerry drove me back to Toyota, and we took a test drive. And of course I fell in love. More looking at features finally narrowed the choice down to the XLE—everything I wanted and then some (the S series has more horsepower, larger wheels, and a sportier interior, none of which matter to me).

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So when I got home I phoned Dawn and told her I wanted an XLE, but not one of the pearl white ones they had on the lot. After driving a silver sedan for fifteen years, I wanted something different. I wanted the blue-gray color Toyota calls celestite. And Dawn said she’d find me one.

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I didn’t hear from her over the weekend, but on Monday morning, just in case, I took my car title and my checkbook along when I went to have lunch with Gerry. And while we were eating, Dawn texted me: We’ve got your car.

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Even without financing I spent three hours at the dealership, and I must have signed about 43 pieces of paper. I had removed most of the contents from my old car over the weekend, and what was left was easily transfered to the new one. Then Dawn gave me a quick tour of the current state of automotive controls. Before I really knew what I was doing, I was giving Gerry a ride in my new car.

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Driving the car is no problem. The next morning I was on the freeway on my way to work. It’s getting used to all the modern conveniences. Keyless entry, pushbutton ignition. Finding the controls to adjust the mirrors (and figuring out that the rear view mirror adjusts by hand, the old fashioned way). It took me two days to figure out how to program the radio (wonderful HD radio for the local stations, and a three month trial of SiriusXM). Figuring out the door locks. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t lock the trunk until I realized it was sensing the fob in my purse. All those controls on the steering wheel. A whole new set of dashboard symbols. No mechanical parking brake. The back up camera (wait a minute, which way do I turn the wheel?). Tinted windows. And I love the Blind Spot Monitors.

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The main manual (there are several, including a quick reference guide) is over 550 pages long—the collection (in its own plastic tote) looks like what used to come with a computer, back in the 1980s.

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In fact I feel like I’m driving a computer, and I still have a few things to figure out, but I love it. I hope we have another fifteen years together. Maybe by the next time I need a car, all the cars will be driving themselves.

Nutmeg

29 Mar 2019 3 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Life

Nutmeg, my furry companion for more than nine years, crossed the Rainbow Bridge last Friday, after a long illness. She was a rescue cat, found in a culvert with her kittens when she was a couple of years old. By the time I met her at Second Chance Pets, her kittens had been adopted and she was ready for a life of leisure. That is to say she was prepared to be a couch potato for the rest of her life.

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She was affectionate and laid back, with a loud purr and a sandpaper tongue, with which she loved to wash my face. She loved ice cream and spaghetti sauce (no, not together). She was overweight by nature and never saw the kitchen counter, but she had her favorite places on the living room couch and my bed. She upheld the cat’s tradition of never allowing a bed to be changed without feline assistance, and nothing beat sleeping on a towel warm from the dryer.

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Early in December she lost her appetite, a marked change for her, and we began a series of visits to the vet. She had severe arthritis in her spine, but a battery of tests didn’t turn up much else, despite her obvious digestive problems. Steroid shots helped for a while, but when those stopped working, the vet diagnosed her problem as lymphoma. Gradually she stopped eating, but she still climbed into my lap to sleep in the evening, until at last she let me know it was time.

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When I started to put her things away over the weekend, I realized that even our furry friends leave the bits and pieces of a life behind. From time to time I go to estate sales with my friend Gerry Bartlett. Gerry has an antique business and looks for treasures for her shop. I occasionally buy something for myself (a book and two movies at the last one, a turtle carved from tiger eye not too long ago), but I remind myself that I don’t need more “stuff.”

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Seeing the material remains of someone’s life and household can be interesting, but I also find it a bit depressing. The contents of the kitchen spread all over the counters. Souvenirs of a stranger’s long ago vacations. Books, some well worn, some never opened. Clothing and shoes and linens. I hate to think of that happening to the contents of my house one day, but I’m not sure how to avoid it.

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I thought about that as I gathered up Nutmeg’s possessions and decided what to do with them. I expect another cat will find her way into my life eventually, so I cleaned the litter box and stashed it in the storage closet, along with food dishes, mats, comb, brush, and nail clippers, a few toys, and the doggy steps Nutmeg needed to make it onto the couch the last few months. Toys that showed years of wear I threw away, along with half a dozen of those corrugated cardboard scratching pads, which Nutmeg loved.

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She didn’t love the scratching post or the small kitty condo that sat in my living room ignored for years, so I put those out at the end of my driveway on Sunday evening. They were gone Monday morning, off to entertain someone else’s cat. I brought a box of Meow Mix seafood and sauce, the only food she was interested in the last couple of months, to work for the office cats and the ferals in the back yard. The leftover veterinary food (which was supposed to help Nutmeg lose weight, although it never really did) I took back to the clinic, to pass along at their discretion.

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I sometimes think my bedroom is haunted, not unpleasantly so, by the many pets who have shared it with me. I feel paws crossing the bed when there’s no one there, and I remember Cleo and Twinky, and the other cats before them, and the dogs, Sandy the scruff terrier, Fred the labrador mix, and Albert the gentlemanly basset hound. Now Nutmeg has joined them across the Rainbow Bridge. There should be quite a furry crowd waiting for me one day.

Happy New Year 2019!

04 Jan 2019 6 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Books, Life, Reading, Technology, Writing

Every year I try to write a New Year’s post, although sometime during the first week of January seems to be about the best I can do. This year I spent New Year’s Day with friends, eating various traditional foods, including pork chops, black-eyed peas, and cabbage (in the form of coleslaw this year). My own tradition involves herring in wine sauce, but I didn’t take that to the party, since no one else likes it. I ate herring on New Year’s Eve, because I have every year since I was a little girl, and I’d be afraid to break the streak. Besides, I do like herring in wine sauce. (Good thing, because there’s a two-pound jar—the only size available at HEB—in my refrigerator.)

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I wrote very little fiction this year. I did some editing, for myself and a friend, wrote my Grammar Gremlin columns for the Houston Bay Area RWA chapter newsletter, blog posts, and book reviews. I closed out (I think) my contest career by unexpectedly winning the RWA Golden Heart in Paranormal Romance for Jinn on the Rocks, the third manuscript in my Pandemonia series. I’m still thinking about independent publishing for the three Jinn books, but I’ve been thinking about that for years, and it has not magically happened. Go figure. I’m also thinking I might try my hand at writing a cozy mystery, since I’ve been reading so many of them. Clearly I’m not into “write what you know,” so maybe I should try “write what you like to read.”

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I read 62 books in 2018, just clearing my Goodreads goal of sixty. (There was a time when I was a book-a-day reader, but those years are far behind me.) Each year I’ve noticed I read more on Kindle than on paper, but I was really surprised to see that in 2018 I read only a dozen printed books, and fifty ebooks. (As I write this, my Voyage and my Fire 8 are on their chargers on the kitchen counter; my Fire 10, which I bought mostly for watching video, is on the coffee table. Now and then I even read on my phone.) On New Year’s Day there were 627 titles in my Amazon cloud, but I think I’ve bought three or four more since then.

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Last year I read 27 mysteries by 15 authors, including multiple books by Cindy Brown, Annabel Chase, Waverly Curtis, Robert Goldsborough, Pamela Kopfler, Cynthia Kuhn, Julie Mulhern, and Kate Parker. Almost all of these books were cozies. I’ve been a mystery fan all my reading life, so this isn’t a surprise.

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Science Fiction used to be my go to reading, and I still have more science fiction (and occasional fantasy) on my keeper shelves than any other genre. This year I read eleven SF novels, but 7 were in Kirsten Beyer’s Star Trek: Voyager series. I’m hoping to up my SF reading this year. I have 55 to chose from in my Amazon cloud, not to mention the printed books in the bedroom. And all those keepers to reread some day.

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I read nine “mainstream” novels last year, but three of those were Laura Andersen’s Boleyn trilogy, set in an alternate Tudor England and just as easily added to the SF list. I love alternate history, and I have Andersen’s second trilogy to look forward to this year. My romance reading was down this year, only five, but I have plenty of those on hand for 2019.

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In nonfiction, I read ten books (and nonfiction accounted for four of the twelve printed books), ranging from the craft of writing to Hollywood history to the tale of a T Rex skeleton. I have plenty of nonfiction ebooks waiting, too.

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This month my faithful HP desk top computer reached the more-than-venerable age of nine. Yes, really. There was a time, long ago, when I actually looked forward to a new computer (or a new version of a favorite program), but now I’ve been putting off making the change for at least three months. The computer is slow, and I frequently have to wait for programs that stop responding, but I muddle along because I dread trying to get a new machine set up and working. We got new computers at work last summer (Dell all-in-ones), but we had IT guys do the switch (I wasn’t even there). And the switch has not been without problems. I haven’t decided between an all-in-one or a small tower with a big monitor, and I’ll probably have to buy a new (wireless) printer). Meanwhile I back up my documents frequently and cross my fingers.

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Wishing you all a happy and healthy year full of reading, writing, friendship, and all the other good things in life.

books 2019

 

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