Imported From Montgomery

Now that we have a “mid-sized” car, every time we see a car that looks to her to be similar to the Purple Whale Donna will ask, “Is that car bigger (smaller) than we are?” A couple of times in the last few weeks we have come across a Lexus ES350 and when she asks about tone my response has always been that it is a bit larger that the Sonata. Today I checked, and you know what, it is slightly smaller in everything but 2″ longer in length. The big difference between the two automobiles is towards the bottom of the following chart, horsepower, torque and price. All that extra HP is needed to move the 300 extra pounds in weight. I have ridden in a ES350 and the extra weight is in the bigger engine, a smoother suspension and sound deadening. Is it worth 50% more than the Hyundai? Maybe to some.

Sonata SE Lexus ES350
Dims Dims Diff
Wheel Base 110 109.3 -0.7
Length 189.8 191.7 1.9
Width 72.2 71.7 -0.5
Height 57.9 56.3 -1.6
Interior Volume 103.8 95.4 -8.4
Front Leg Room 45.5 42.2 -3.3
Head Room 40 37.4 -2.6
Shoulder Room 57.9 57.3 -0.6
Hip Room 55.2 55.9 0.7
Turning Radius 35.8 36.7 0.9
Weight 3316 3605 289
Horsepower 200 @ 6300 268 @ 6200 68
Torque 186 @ 4250 248 @ 4700 62
Power/Weight 16.6 13.5 3.1
Gas Mileage 22/35 19/27 -3/-8
MSRP $24,027 $36,025 $11,998
Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 1042

Oops I Did It Again

In my quest to prevent door dings by parking way out or way to one side of the parking lot has its downside, like the sacrificial anodes used to protect deep sea oil rigs from corroding away, the poor wheels of the Sonata forfeit their beauty. I curbed a wheel parking yesterday. Not just any old wheel either, but the same one I scraped the day after we bought the car. Was I lucky enough to hit the wheel in the same spot? No, of course not, I blemished a different 3 to 4 inches of the edge.

I guess the only thing left to do now to even things out is to keep hitting that same wheel until I have scraped the entire circumference of the rim.

If when you read the title of this post, the first thing you thought of was Britney Spears, shame on you, Louie Armstrong did it first way back in 1932 – Oops I Did It Again!.

Its All Greek To Me

Our good buddy Greg decided that his special mid-life crisis car needed one more little special touch, a sort of cherry on top if you will. A personalized license plate. The South Carolina DMV doesn’t have anyway to check and see if a particular plate is available, so you have to pick three options, pay your money (only $30) and take a chance. Greg got his first choice, GETOPLES.

The first day he drove the car to work with his new plate on, one of The Valve Store’s(TM) many Robs came back and asked him what “gee-tōp-els” meant in Greek. He was of course kidding, but Greg missed it and tried to explain that it meant Get Topless because it was on a convertible, topless top-down. Yeah, we got it Greg.

Not Fair

Last Friday when I posted about the stove, the last line “Inau?gural meal pre?pared on our new range ? pizza.” was going to have a link to the Home Depot page of the range. But when I went to the page for it I came away shocked, we had bought the stove on Sunday the 19th and on Tuesday the 21st it went on sale for $101 less.

Donna called the store and spoke to someone in appliances who told her that all we had to do was bring in the receipt within 30 days and they would refund the difference. Saturday morning we headed into HD with our paperwork and a print out of the web page showing the new price. The first person we spoke to at the service desk was unsure of what to do, but a person who seemed to be in charge or at least more knowledgeable arrived, heard our story, said so & so will take care of you and disappeared into the office. So & so got part way through the process and then stopped stumped. She hailed over person number 4. This person said, “Oh we aren’t supposed to do that.” We planted our heels and Donna said, “Well, the person I spoke to in the Appliance Department last night said we could.” “Who?”, she asked. “Didn’t get a name,” Donna countered.

She chewed her cheek for a while with her fingers hovering above the keyboard, before saying, “Follow me.” We went over to the Returns Desk where she refunded us the cost of what we paid, then sold us the stove again at the sale price and gave us the difference back on a store gift card (a different one from what we used to buy the thing, so now we have two.)

If we had been turned down for getting the sale price, we were going to borrow a pickup from a friend and return the darn thing, telling them it didn’t work or something. Then take the money and go buy a new one at the sales price, even if we would have to wait another week for the 2nd stove to be delivered.

How Low Can You Go

We went on a Georgia Geocaching run today. We needed to check on our cache in Santa Claus because of a recent DNF and while we were out, take a route to capture 4 nearby counties of Georgia’s 159 total.

Neither one of us could figure out how we had hid a cache in Toombs county (Santa Claus) without having a find there. So our first stop of the day was to change that. We found LIFE’S A GAME, HAVE FUN! in a park in the town of Lyons. Next stop was to check on the DNF’d cache. Usually one person not finding a cache is not a concern, but the folks who couldn’t find it had over 1,600 finds, so they probably should have found it. The cache was right where we put it last December. That’s the thing with geocaching, no matter how many you have found, you can still get stumped by an occasional easy one.

In some of these small rural counties pickings can be slim, so we only had a total of 11 caches on our list along the route through all 4 counties. One county only has two caches total and we really started sweating badly after we DNF’d the first one we attempted. It was all I could do to talk Donna into looking for the second one because in is #2 on our Most Hated Style Hide List, the guardrail magnetic (the lamp post skirt hide is #1.) We had kind of a rough day, 4 finds and 3 DNFs, but we made the four count, one in each of the counties we wanted.

I don’t know exactly how many miles we traveled today, because I didn’t reset an odometer, but the Google Maps loop I did last night said 268 miles. When we got in the Purple Whale this morning the nifty miles to empty meter read just over 250 miles and the gas gauge was reading one segment over half a tank. We figured we might have to buy a gallon or two of gas in Georgia so we could make it back to the Kroger in Aiken to take advantage of the $1 a gallon off we earned by buying a stove. As the day wore on it looked more and more like we might make it home without having to pay the higher price for gas in Georgia.

We figured we were home free when the miles to empty read 80 miles and the sign said Augusta 41 because Aiken is only, at most 25 miles from Augusta. When the low fuel light came on as we entered the southern part of Augusta I was unconcerned as I figured that meant we had a couple gallons left which was more than enough to make it back. At about 5 miles from Kroger, the Miles To Empty display flat-lined. The last number I remember seeing was 38 a few miles back. We were right near a gas station, briefly considered pulling in, but didn’t. Let’s summarize: the low fuel light has been one awhile, the Miles to Empty display is blank and now the last LCD segment of the gas gauge has started blinking. Visions of the car stalling at the very last light before Kroger were taking form in my mind.

Well, we did make it the Kroger, even waited for a pump to free up with the car still running. I filled the tank with 17.5 gallons of gas and it cost $38.38 or $2.19 per. We had traveled 502.5 miles on that 17.5 gallons so since the last fill up the Sonata got 28.7 MPG. While I was outside filling the tank Donna was inside trying to see exactly how much the car’s tank would hold, turns out it is 18.49 gallons. All that worry about running out of gas and I could have traveled over 28 more miles. As long as all 18-1/2 gallons are usable…

We Get Paid To Lie To A Car Salesman

We stopped in at the Mazda dealer over in Augusta this morning. Our worst fears were that the same joker who tried to show us a Miata a couple moths ago would greet us. He didn’t and we were welcomed to the lot by a pleasant enough fellow who saw my $25 test drive certificate and asked if we were just here for that or did we have any intention to buy. So we gave him the same story we did to all those other salesman back in the spring – instead of replacing the Miata with a new one that we didn’t like, we were going to buy a second car.

I told him that I wanted to drive a 6i Touring and he said they didn’t have any on the lot, all they had were the sport models (AKA the base car.) He said that they usually kept more on the lot but they were having trouble getting them because of the earthquake in Japan. The first thing I though was, “Are all car salesman pathological liars?”, the 6 is assembled in Flat Rock, MI. (David, I apologize if they can’t make them because supply shortages from Japan.) He had a key for a 6i Sport in Kona Blue in his pocket, which would have been our color choice. He started it up, cranked the A/C and then showed us the trunk and the exterior of the car while the interior cooled.

We went for a drive. Instantly I liked the way it drove, the road feel of the base model was leaps and bounds better than the base Sonata, more on par with the Optima and our Sonata SE. The 176 horsepower felt as quick as the 200 of the Sonata. The car was quiet, roomy and very comfortable, for me. Donna didn’t like the way the seats hit her in the back and couldn’t get settled. The sales guy chimed in that the Touring seats were different, still cloth, but they might be more comfortable. We had the perfect out of any sales pressure because we were interested in a model they didn’t have, so he filled out the form for us, gave us a brochure, his card and took down my work phone number so he could give us a call when they got a Touring model.

The day after I was disappointed in the base Sonata we visited the Mazda dealer. Had the Miata test drive gone smoothly I think we might have tried driving a 6. They might have had a Touring model in Kona Blue. If those things happened differently back on our first try at this dealer back in March we might have ended up owning one of these. But I have zero regrets on missing out on the Mazda.

And we really didn’t lie to the fellow, everything we said was simply misplaced in time, and when we said we were going to buy a second car, we were using the word were in its simple past indicative form.

Four to six weeks later we’ll get a $25 gift card in the mail. It’ll make a nice down payment on a Carstashe for the Sonata.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1041

Can’t Believe It Has Been 11 Days

Since we last had a working stove. Well, it took us a week to finally order a new one and then there was an aborted delivery attempt, so I guess I really can.

We ordered an oven temperature sensor from the local parts house, but when I picked it up, the conversation with the guy behind the counter (who has been in the business a long time) said he’d sell it to me, but told me I was wasting my money as he had never seen one that ohm’d out good be the problem. He said that it probably was going to be the clock board, AKA brain, and if I had one version of my model of the stove I could get a new board for $305 and if I had the other version, well, they didn’t make that part anymore.

We thought about buying a new stove from the new appliance part of their business, but never did get around there to do it. We ended up at the Home Depot around the corner from our house for 2 reasons. 1) It is just around the corner from us and 2) if we went to Kroger (right next door to the Home Depot that is right around the corner from us) we could buy a $500 gift card and get double points to use to knock a buck off a gallon of gas at the Kroger filling station (that is just around the corner from the Kroger store that is right next door to the Home Depot that is right around the corner from us.) By some fluke they were offering quadruple points, so now we have two separate fill-ups where we will get a buck off a gallon of the price of gas.

We were supposed to have it delivered on Wednesday, but when they called they said that delivery would occur between 1:30 and 5:30, so I called to re-schedule because we had a haircut appointment right after work and we couldn’t take a chance on missing it. The time frame could not be adjusted, but I could change the day. The next available delivery was Friday (today) between 5 and 9 PM.

Funny thing happened on that Wednesday after work. We showed up at the hairdresser’s place and the door was locked, the lights were out and there were 2nd and final delivery notices from FedEx stuck to the door. Huh? When we got back in the car to drive home Donna checked her calendar and discovered that we weren’t supposed to be there until the next day, Thursday. Then it came back to us, Sheri had asked us to change the day at our last appointment back in May because she was going to be on vacation. Crap, could have had the stove yesterday.

Inaugural meal prepared on our new range – pizza.