mojosmom

a new car! (That's not the actual car, just an image I snitched from a dealer's site.)

It's a white Prius C 3, hatchback, with a moonroof.

I've been planning to buy a new car for a while now, and actually went to the auto show last February to check a few out. I'd pretty much had narrowed it down to this one or a Fiat 500 Cabrio, but decided the Fiat really wasn't practical. As much fun as a convertible would have been, I'm not a fan of two-door cars and the back seat was insanely tiny. (Now if I could afford two cars, and had a garage, that would be different story.) Frankly, the possibility of getting a hybrid with a moonroof was a huge point in favor of the Prius; that combination wasn't even possible when I bought my last car!

Then last week I got the sad news that the hybrid battery on my current car, a Honda Civic Hybrid, was on its last legs, no surprise after 9 years and 163,000 miles. So instead of sinking $4,200 into a new battery, I made a down payment on the Prius. (My older sister and I had talked a while back about her buying my old car when I got a new one, but there is no way she'd want to sink that kind of money in a 9-year-old car, either. So I traded it in. Didn't get a lot for it, but I wasn't expecting to.)

But, oh my! When you haven't bought a car for 9 years, the technological changes can be a shock! Not to mention the stack of reading material they hand you. A huge thick owner's manual for the car (it's 556 pages! so you get a "quick reference guide" as well), plus a huge thick owner's manual just for the audio system (another 200+ pages). A warranty guide and a warranty rights notification. A navigation system guide. I think it's going to take me quite a while to figure all this out. But I'll have fun doing it. The sales guy paired my iPhone with the Bluetooth system, and showed me how to answer calls from the steering wheel. Ack! Please don't let me turn into one of those people I currently bitch about!

When I got home, I figured I'd go to the I-Pass* website to add this car and remove the old one. Now, the dealer had transferred my plates. So the site wouldn't add the new car because the old one, of course, had the same plate #. And I couldn't delete the old one first, because you have to have at least one car in the account. Fortunately, the customer service person who answered my call told me to just edit the current information, and stayed on the line while I did that to make sure that worked. I had the feeling I'm not the first person who had called with this issue! They should put that info on the site.

By this time, my insurance agent's office had closed for the day, so I left a message and will talk to them today about that. And, as I'm headed downtown today to lunch with a woman from my law school's development office (translation: she wants to hit me up for money), I'll take the opportunity to stop by City Hall and transfer my city vehicle sticker.


*This is a transponder you put in your car to automatically pay tolls.

Just before I got to work yesterday, my car started making a horrible, high-pitched squealing noise. Not wanting to be stuck somewhere in cold and snow, the first thing I did when I got back from court was to make an appointment to take it in for service, and put in for the day off. Naturally, when I left work, nada, niente, nothing. Quiet as ever. Same thing this morning. I took it in anyway, and they couldn't find anything to explain the noise. So I had them change the oil and do a couple of other small maintenance things.

So while they were working on it, I went over to the Borders near my house, because I had decided to get a Kobo eReader, now that I had a coupon to get it for under $100. Bought it, came home, and realized it's not compatible with my system. (I have OS 10.4.11; it needs 10.5.) So I had to take it back. Perhaps I'm just meant to stick with codices. Or, perhaps, I should upgrade my OS.

The first day of spring was marked by the last opera of the season. Operas, actually, as it was Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, which are nearly always paired. Mark Delavan was Alfio in Cav and Tonio in Pag; otherwise, the casts were completely different, but both were excellent.

I was quite taken by the publicity still for Katherine Lerner, a first-year Ryan Opera Center member who sang Lola. It has a rather Julia Margaret Cameron quality about it, don't you think?

The weather today was actually spring-like! Mid-fifties, very nice.

This morning, I took the car in for an oil change, and had them look at a tire that seemed a bit low to me. It had a nail in the sidewall! So I had to get a new tire, too.