From the Earth to the Moon... and then to Saturn.
Which could just as easily be titled "Holy Frak! Rick posted something on his blog!"
The title refers to a milestone: Last month my Acura passed the quarter-million mile mark, the distance from Earth to Luna. It had a hell of a time getting there, too; the exhaust was shot, it was using a lot of oil, one cylinder was firing intermittently, the air conditioning stopped working four years ago, and early in the spring I had a fun incident where my hood didn't latch properly after I put a quart of oil in and it flipped up and smashed back into my windshield while driving on the freeway. Boy, that was a hoot. TempleViper has been ready to give it a blindfold and a last cigarette before placing it in front of a firing squad made up of heavy artillery for quite a while now.
She had actually been looking at replacement cars ever since last fall when her Toyota suddenly coughed and died; we ended up getting a Ford Focus for her and then she was chomping at the bit to get almost anything to replace my Acura. Along the way we ended up spending money on many other things, including laying down new flooring and carpeting, so a newer car for me stayed on the back burner. I didn't mind; my car wasn't glamorous but it worked. Mostly. All the issues were fixable, but we had adopted the policy of putting money that would go to fix the car toward a different one.
And it paid off; a couple of weeks ago I got a 1995 Saturn sedan in absolutely beautiful condition. Yes, it's only three years younger than the Acura but it's been extremely well-maintained and runs like dream; it looks like the proverbial car-that-was-owned-by-a-little-old-lady-who-only-drove-on-Sundays and, by the Lords of Kobol, the air conditioning works!
In other news I've been battling pneumonia for a couple of months now, which is even more uber-sucky than it sounds - especially since it was settled into me for at least three weeks before I got diagnosed. TempleViper has been dismayed, especially with the news about Bernie Mac dying this Saturday from pneumonia. Me, I think it's far too early to panic; at the very least I have to finish playing Oblivion and Mass Effect before I croak ;-). Besides, the latest round of mega-super-antibiotics does seem to be making a dent in it, so I'm looking forward to eventually becoming an irascible old man lecturing young whipper-snappers about the ancient days when all we had in our computers were 64-bit multi-core processors and four gigs of RAM that we had to drag uphill through a blizzard both ways in order to run our games and dammit, we were happy! And then croaking.
I'll post a review of Mass Effect when I get further into it. For now, back to work.
The title refers to a milestone: Last month my Acura passed the quarter-million mile mark, the distance from Earth to Luna. It had a hell of a time getting there, too; the exhaust was shot, it was using a lot of oil, one cylinder was firing intermittently, the air conditioning stopped working four years ago, and early in the spring I had a fun incident where my hood didn't latch properly after I put a quart of oil in and it flipped up and smashed back into my windshield while driving on the freeway. Boy, that was a hoot. TempleViper has been ready to give it a blindfold and a last cigarette before placing it in front of a firing squad made up of heavy artillery for quite a while now.
She had actually been looking at replacement cars ever since last fall when her Toyota suddenly coughed and died; we ended up getting a Ford Focus for her and then she was chomping at the bit to get almost anything to replace my Acura. Along the way we ended up spending money on many other things, including laying down new flooring and carpeting, so a newer car for me stayed on the back burner. I didn't mind; my car wasn't glamorous but it worked. Mostly. All the issues were fixable, but we had adopted the policy of putting money that would go to fix the car toward a different one.
And it paid off; a couple of weeks ago I got a 1995 Saturn sedan in absolutely beautiful condition. Yes, it's only three years younger than the Acura but it's been extremely well-maintained and runs like dream; it looks like the proverbial car-that-was-owned-by-a-little-old-lady-who-only-drove-on-Sundays and, by the Lords of Kobol, the air conditioning works!
In other news I've been battling pneumonia for a couple of months now, which is even more uber-sucky than it sounds - especially since it was settled into me for at least three weeks before I got diagnosed. TempleViper has been dismayed, especially with the news about Bernie Mac dying this Saturday from pneumonia. Me, I think it's far too early to panic; at the very least I have to finish playing Oblivion and Mass Effect before I croak ;-). Besides, the latest round of mega-super-antibiotics does seem to be making a dent in it, so I'm looking forward to eventually becoming an irascible old man lecturing young whipper-snappers about the ancient days when all we had in our computers were 64-bit multi-core processors and four gigs of RAM that we had to drag uphill through a blizzard both ways in order to run our games and dammit, we were happy! And then croaking.
I'll post a review of Mass Effect when I get further into it. For now, back to work.