Capricious Me

Time flies.

Grace & Anita came visit for a few days. Grace will be back to spend Christmas with me in sunny California.

The car’s pretty neat. I’ve been getting really good mileage, like consistently close to 50mpg… Drove to Palo Alto and back with a few trips to Sacramento airport from Davis on one tank of gas. It’s pretty cool… And it still has that cancer inducing new car smell. Alas, the Davis dust settles faster than I can scrub.

It’s at the dealership. My dad will drive it around for a week before I retrieve it and make the drive back home to Davis… YAY!!!!

Oh yes, so this is sort of old news, but Toyota has issued a recall for something like 38 million vehicles because they contain floor mats which could jam the accelerator and lead to fatal crashes. The 2010 Prius is not in that list, but I’m paranoid enough to think that that’s merely because not enough people have the vehicle yet.

They want me to pay 200 on top of MSRP for pieces of rubber which could lead to my demise? Thank you, but I’d rather die from a bacon overdose if you don’t mind.

And here’s hoping I made the right call in waiting for the dark gray prius instead of settling for a dark blue one today…

placed a deposit for a 2010 winter grey metallic prius II with misty grey interior this weekend.

No more, hopefully, dealing with car salesmen! I can’t stand it when they blatantly lie. Come on dude, don’t you think I know how to google and look things up??

Ooooook. It’s getting closer to the time when I have to make my final decision on a color for the 2010 Prius. The color I had in mind initially was dark metallic gray, but on further consideration, the red and blue don’t look too shabby either. The prob. with the red is that I can’t remember if it’s a darker, richer red or if it’s closer to primary red (which I would not want.) The blue is nice, but somehow it doesn’t seem like… me. It’s just too sports-car-wanna-be.

The nicest thing with the dark metallic gray is that it hides dirt well. Living in Davis, one thing you realize is that your car collects a LOT of dirt.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

I thought I had my heart set on Winter Metallic Gray for the 2010 Prius, but now I’m having second thoughts and considering the Barcelona Red…

Why don’t they have one that’s mostly gray or white with lime green accents? (Because I’d probably regret it in a few years, but in my love for all things lime green phase, I am blind to sense.)

And traffic was awful today. A commute that should have taken me 10 min at most took more than half an hour. Most of the hold up was due to the fact that they shut down one lane of Page Mill, really close to where the Alma traffic merges on to it… (That area’s already a bottleneck for traffic.) I should have just WALKED.

Well, I start my internship at Parc in less than 12 hours. My legs are horribly sore from the Shinteki Decathlon on Saturday, which was roughly a 12 hour puzzle event. My team, Tvelve Metchsteek, did very well for its first time – we finished all the required puzzles and all but one of the bonus puzzles. A major feature of this event was the traveling one had to do in order to receive or find the next puzzle. One of those traveling bits involved climbing a rather steep hill, for which my thighs are punishing me right now, i.e. I have the mobility of a arthritic cripple.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to convince myself that come September or October, the new Prius, and not the oh-so-sleek Honda Civic hybrid is the car of my dreams, but its half-hatchback half-sedan design bothers me and I’m not sure why. I think it’s best that I stare at its specs and the promise of a super fuel efficient car… and remind myself that I will be able to pull an Andy Bernard and sneak up on someone in EV mode. If I die in a car crash, it will be due to the attention paid the monitor showing how efficiently the car’s running at that moment with its nifty little animations.

As for the Accord, which has served my familiy so faithfully since 2000… it goes to my little sister, who, I’m proud to say, will need it so she can continue experimenting on children (har har, just kidding, I believe the politically correct description is “Child Development Sciences”).