Diary of a Wolfeman

“Deja-Bu” – that feeling you get when you pass someone driving a Subaru identical to the one you are driving yourself.

The time has come where the good ship HS Golightly (AKA “Holly”) must be retired and a replacement brought in. The reasons behind the move are mainly financial – it was a terrible loan rate and the car was actually rated as worth only about $500 more than the cost of some needed repairs (some damage to the heads when the timing belt went and a power steering pump). There is also the idea of tourney season coming up, and we need more cargo room to haul our ever-expanding camping gear collection.

Like most people, I hate car shopping. The entire process of buying a car from a dealer is not designed to make things easy for you. You only get to compare cars side-by-side if they happen to be at the same lot, so when you’re shopping for used you must resign yourself to a lengthy process as each dealer tries to coerce you into buying what they’re selling, never mind what you told them you’re actually looking for. (Yes Mr. A.M., I am talking about you and your damn Equinox.). Or (almost) worse, you get a dealer with a huge selection – that is scattered over 5 different lots scattered across town.

In any case, to chop several paragraphs of me griping about the process out of this post, suffice it to say that we eventually did find a car that was both A) worth driving and owning and B) we could fit into the budget. The surprising thing was the car we ended up with.

Originally, I was looking at a 2004 model, but in the end it turned out that the dealership had spent so much money on the car already (trade-in value, repairs, etc.) that they wouldn’t be able to fit it into my budget as well as make my upside-down Kia loan go away. They could do all of this, however, if I were to instead buy this 2009 model…

Uhm, ok. Twist that arm there just a tad… newer car, a little more miles but in better shape and without the leather interior. And it’s even silver!

So, after about 150 signatures on the dotted line and a liter of my O-Positive, I am the proud owner of a loan that has the physical representation of an as-yet un-named silver 2009 Subaru Outback wagon.

The differences, New Car vs. Holly:

• Slightly bigger engine producing 32 more horsepower
• Estimated improvement of 1 mile per gallon!
• Automatic transmission with Sportshift (almost as good as manual… but no more clutch-cramps)
• Wheelbase is one inch shorter, but the new car is:
• 3.2 inches longer,
• 5.1 inches wider,
• 6.1 inches taller overall,
• and yet 121 pounds lighter,
• with a towing allowance of 2700 pounds. (Which is better than a Dodge Magnum!)
• The big change, though, is we went from 13.6 cubic feet of cargo to 33.5 internal, with a full set of factory roof rails  on top.

I think I can fit all our crap inside that :)

Speaking of those larger numbers, this is the last year (in my mind, at least) that the Outback is a station wagon and not a full-up SUV. There was a minor re-styling in 2008 over the previous body which added a couple inches here and there, but the 2010 re-design added a handful more. This was a bad move in my mind, as one of the selling points to an Outback has always been that it isn’t a ginormous SUV. Luckily for me, Subaru has a well-earned reputation for building cars that last, so I’ll be in this one until the SUV trend finally dies off and they go back to their more minimalist days. (Heh – my first car was a ’74 Subaru wagon – I could almost fit it inside this one.)

I may end up missing the Kenwood stereo I had installed in the Kia – it had HD Radio (which I almost never used) and would play MP3 files from a USB stick (which is almost all I ever did with it). The new car has an aux jack in the center console, so with a two-ended headphone plug you can wire in anything that has headphone outputs… but at that point I’m not using the radio controls, so I have to fiddle with a small device flopping around on the end of a cable if I want to skip a track or something, and I don’t get the track readout in the display on the dash.

Considering that this is my only real disappointment in the entire car, I think I can live with it :)

So today, Da Wolfe did his civic duty and showed up for Jury duty, and was pissed off inside of 45 seconds. Jury duty is of course served in a courthouse, which is high on the list of places you’ll be subjected to what people say is keeping us safe – the mass-annoyance of everyone who has to go into the building.

This wasn’t always so, as evidenced by the design of the building, which has an entryway juuust wide enough to put an X-Ray luggage scanner into, so the prep area where one is supposed to put their keys in the bowl is in this tiny vestibule that is almost outside – which today meant 2 degrees above freezing while I was forced to divest myself of jacket, cell phone, keys, thumb drive, change, bluetooth headset, cap, wallet, watch, belt and my fucking shoes.

Thank you, oh shoe-bomber for that last bit you fucking asshat.

Then I got to sit around until noon, when they let us out for lunch. “Oh, and you get to use the Employee Entrance when you come back!” (She said it with Capital letters) “It’s easier than the public entrance.” Cool, I thought, I only have to want to rip their heads off once today.

Riiiiight.

The Employee Entrance? 10 feet down the sidewalk, only it doesn’t have the vestibule, so I’m taking off my jacket, cell phone, keys, thumb drive, change, bluetooth headset, cap, wallet, watch, belt and my fucking shoes a second time with a freezing-cold breeze blowing up the back of my shirt.

Y’know, if this is all to ensure my safety while I’m in the building, I’d rather be mildly unsafe. And I sure as shit won’t be flying anytime soon, because there’s no way I’m getting through airport security without punching someone.

9:30am. Breakfast with the lovely Illyana at Holman’s. (A great little dive, by the way; you should check it out on a day when I’m not going to be there – I like it quiet.)

11:30am. Left the restaurant and called my insurance company – and got the “please call back during business hours” message. I called back again, and this time impersonated a clinic and got into the automated system, which then confirmed I am eligible for lenses and frames; no idea on the value thereof. Went to the mall.

Noon. Saleslady confirmed that I indeed have a hardware credit available and priced things out for me – both sets of frames I chose fell under the coverage limit, but the lens options I wanted would bring the total up to $169. Money well-spent, I figure. It’ll take 10 days to get them though.

Crap.

This is where I give some mad points to Binyon’s: they offered to give me a pair of “loaner” lenses to use until my ordered lenses come in. This is extremely cool, because it involved them throwing away a set of basic lenses – it’s not like anyone else will have my exact ‘scrip, so they won’t be able to re-use the lenses.

So, either they are very cool about this, or the lenses and two hours’ worth of technician time to grind and fit them is really a lot cheaper than they want us to think it is. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt this time and say they’re cool.

Noon to 2:00pm. Wandered ’round the mall killing time while Binyon’s built my glasses.

2:00pm. Picked up my new glasses. I be stylin’ now. Once my eyes get used to the change in ‘scrip, I’ll be able to see a little better. Now time to vacate the mall because I have spent far too long there for one day.

5:00-8:00pm. Office Holiday Party at Uptown Billiards. Food was good, table arrangement in the party room is still poor – one of the pool tables is pushed too far to one side to allow for a dartboard, and wouldn’t you know it, half our group ended up hanging out on the narrow side of the room and were constantly being asked to step aside for a pool shot. I expect a little better out of a pool hall. The Boss stole all of my blackjack mojo, and I ended up just breaking even this year.

Saturday needed help, but the weekend turned out ok.

9:30am. Got up to get breakfast (yay for Lazy!)

10:30am. Some light shopping, got the car washed, stopped at Wendy’s for a quick bite.

1:30pm. Discovered I had missed getting into the bank by 31 minutes.

Damn.

Continue shopping.

3:00pm. Get home, pull shades off of glasses and notice that the left arm is out of position. Inspect carefully, left arm of glasses falls off.

Crap.

Run upstairs, make calls. My regular eye doctor is booked, but I can sneak into Binyon’s at the mall at 4:00, and they take my insurance. Print new insurance card and run to appointment.

6:00pm. Sales lady at Binyon’s informs me that my insurance company’s servers are down, so they have no idea what the dollar amount of my benefits are, please try back tomorrow.

Fuck!

On the good-news side of all this is the fact that my current glasses are frameless with super-light lenses, so I can still wear them with only one arm, provided I don’t move my head too quickly.

Been busy on a project over at the other blog. Check it out!

Have you ever had an argument – with yourself? And lost? Ahh, the joys of mild schizophrenia.

Here I am, already a JOAT (Jack Of All Trades) with enough varied interests to skin a cat, and here I am wanting to start up yet another hobby – and an expensive one, at that.

Well, expensive if I do it the way I want to, anyhow…

Lately I seem to have caught a bit of the blacksmithing bug, and have been doing a lot of reading online and watching various training videos on the subject. I’ve learned some good stuff (someone finally made a nice vid of an actual Japanese master bladesmith constructing a katana) and gotten a little frustrated by not being able to go out to the garage and pound something with a hammer.

Something tells me the city might complain if I built a forge on the sidewalk…

Got a letter from a lawyer’s office today, which is always a bit freaky. “what the hell did I do?” you think to yourself.

It turns out, it was more of what I didn’t do. Apparently, in 2004, I was supposed to have paid $9 in income tax and didn’t. (News to me, I have no recollection of 2004 at all). So, since I was so late with it, they added a $10 penalty.

And hired a legal firm to collect.

Now, it probably took said legal officers about 15 minutes to set up an account in their system for me, print out the letter, hand-address an envelope, run it through the postage meter and then drop it in the OUT box. With my understanding of the average legal fees, that probably cost the county $25 to collect $19.

Oh, wait, make that $18, there’s a discount for paying online. I hope the County gets a bulk discount for the other 20,000 people that owe them 10 bucks.

Okay, I understand that the legal firm is probably only charging the County a percentage of the funds collected, but still. It seems kind of a silly way to go about it, since the County could just as easily have tasked an intern with calling or mailing people to let them know they owe something before sending them to collections.

Cuz really – 6 years, and this is the first I’ve heard of it? Oi.

We’ve been missing camping since we haven’t been doing SCA stuff this year, so we decided to head out to a regular ol’ campground for a few days to get at least one use out of the tent this year.

We ended up choosing Lazy Bend Campground on the Clackamas River because:

1. It was available for reservations – I hate the stress of walk-up camping
2. It has flush toilets. Every other camp in Oregon has vault-type toilets, which are amazingly somehow worse than a porta-john.

There was also an entry in a guidebook saying how the camp was far enough away from the road that you wouldn’t be able to hear passing traffic, and that the site rated an 8 or 9 out of 10 for scenic qualities.

They lied about the road.

Really, either that or they managed to get all of their notes out of order when they sat down to write up their review. The highway is only between 25 and 75 feet away from all the sites in the camp, and a few of them are visible directly from the road which gets traffic at all hours, including semi trucks. The saving grace for about half of the sites is that the river is also really loud due to the rocky shallows it passes through and it drowns out the traffic.

There was another bummer in that we were hoping to get some swimming in, but the river is low, fast and rocky at that point (not to mention bone-jarringly cold) so that wasn’t an option. Promontory Park is about a mile down the road though, so you can drive down there if you feel like leaving the site.

The biggest disappointment for me, however, was arriving on-site just past check-in time to discover that not only had someone screwed up the reservation cards attached to each campsite, the Camp Hosts had changed their days off and were not in attendance. Tolerant and I were forced to drive the 10 miles back to Estacada to get a signal and make a few calls. We did eventually get things figured out, but it took until the next morning to finalize the arrangements and could have gone much easier if the Camp Host wasn’t such a crotchety old coot.

Thankfully, Tolerant and I were accompanied by one of our best pairs of friends, and we still managed to get a fair amount of fun packed into an extended weekend. We’re going to plan farther ahead for next year and reserve a site early at one of the really popular sites like Detroit Lake where we know they’ll have all the amenities we’re looking for.

To: the jerk down the street who was setting off mortars until the wee hours:

Learn how to fucking reload!

Honestly, if you had been able to fire those 5 or ten or however-many mortar shots you had in a reasonable succession, I would have been able to wait you out and then fall asleep. But No! You had to be the world’s slowest artillerist and only fire one about every 15 minutes, so just about the time I’d be drifting off, there’d be another *whump*… **boom!** knocking me back into wakefulness.

Combine this with the idiot that honks his horn outside my house every might around 10:15p, and I’m about ready to build some self-contained, automated paintball rifle emplacements on the power poles. Let’s see how long it goes on after the first 1000 rounds of neon pink paint.