Category Archives: Castle Willett

It’s bizarre, and a little unexpected, what an odd feeling it is not having a landline tonight.

It’s irrational. I know that we almost never make calls out using it – I use Skype or my cell phone. I know that 99.99% of the incoming calls were not only useless, but an active annoyance that raised my blood pressure and made me say bad things about my fellow human beings. I know that we were paying way, way too much for that “privilege” and we had talked for months about actually pulling the plug. I know that I still have a phone number, as does The Long-Suffering Wife, as does my iPad, and her iPad.

But…

Unplugging all of the phones and storing them away was a real turning point, almost like boxing up the possessions of a loved one who had passed on. It probably a generational thing, but the phone was a symbol, a link, the way that you kept in touch with friends and family, the way that you called for help in an emergency, the way that you called your girlfriend on the sly in high school. And it hasn’t just faded out and changed – it got tossed out on its ear, cut off and banished, soon to be in the trash.

It’s not the adult brain that’s having a problem. It’s the part of the brain that’s left over from the five-year-old who was trying to call grandpa in the days long, long, long before even touch-tone phones and only knew that you started by dialing “zero,” only to be asked over and over by the operator, “what number do you want?” and repeating over and over, confused, “I don’t have a number, I want to talk to grandpa,” until she finally convinced me to get my mom on the phone. Mom, of course, was mortified and apologized profusely to the operator, which no doubt confused the take-away lesson, but still remains a strong memory fifty-five years later.

THAT part of the brain can’t help but wonder what I was thinking when I threw away all of the phones today.

The last time I bought a car with this little time between the start of the process and driving it off the lot was probably 25 years ago, some time in the late 1980’s. That time it was lust – this time it was more mature, with overtones of inevitability.

That time it was an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera and the crisis was a car accident that suddenly left us with three kids, my job, and no transportation. I had been drooling over this particular car for months with no way to afford it or any justification to get it. Faced with a situation where I had to either rent a car for a few days or a week or two and figure out what to do, I went and paid full MSRP for my “lust-mobile.” It was a great car that met a horrible fate, of which we will not speak.

This time it’s a Honda Fit, but this time the crisis is the aging nature of my existing car and the sudden onset of potentially fatal repair bills. I saw it coming and had done my homework, but hadn’t had a good reason to give up on the old van when it was running okay. Faced with a situation where I have to either rent a car for a few days or a week or two and figure out what to do, we went and paid about 99% of MSRP. Lust had no part in the equation.

It’s not the car I would have bought if I had won even a small part of the $1.3B lottery tonight – but it will do. Most of the cars I lust after these days are $70K or more – this one lists at about $22K, then throws in some extras and ends up about $26K plus tax and so on. Most of the cars I lust after will go zero to sixty in about five seconds or less – I’m not sure the Fit will go zero to sixty in less than twenty seconds if you pushed it off a cliff.

But it’s practical, it’s roomy (for a subcompact), it’s got lots of cool electronics and things (voice activated commands, satellite radio, GPS navigation system, rear view and right side view cameras, etc), it’s gotten excellent ratings from Car & Driver and the like, and most user reviews are highly positive. The only reason we got any discount from MSRP is that the MSRP is so freakin’ low to begin with, there’s just not a lot of wiggle room.

The feelings are completely different. The original lust-mobile was an expensive car for its day and way more than I should have even dreamed of paying at the time in our financial situation. This car is cheap but practical, costing less even than the cars we got for the kids when they were teens, and we could have paid for it on credit cards. Literally.

That’s when you know you’ve become an olde farte. When the comfortable, cheap, and practical wins out over the flashy, cool, and expensive, you’ve crossed over a line that’s hard to go back across.

Here’s to the next (cheap) 180,000+ miles.

(I apologize if you’re seeing this in your email inbox twice. After whining and pissing and moaning and griping about my car problems, I hit “publish” and immediately got a message that said, “SERVER MAINTENANCE – Your server is going through a few minutes of routine maintenance. Please don’t touch your browser for a few minutes.” When I checked, while WordPress says that the original article published, I can’t see that anyone got an email, it’s not on FaceBook, or LinkedIn, or… So let’s try this again, this time with FEELING and four-part harmony!)

Nothing tops off a long day at the office more than having your dashboard light up like a Christmas tree with all of those blinkedy blinkedy red warning nights, accompanied by the blingedy blingedy sound of the really urgent, loud, “you’re in deep shit now” bells and buzzers.

It makes me think that this might not be one of the cheap repairs. Shit, and I just put a full tank of gas into it yesterday!

We had been talking about going out looking for a new car anyway. If I had gotten one of those jobs that involved a two-hour commute each way it would have been critical and would have had to happen immediately. But I got the job that’s a twelve-minute commute away, so it wasn’t critical.

Now, that might be what we do on Sunday.

The good news is that it didn’t happen miles and miles away. I could have been in one of those two-hour commutes and fifty miles away, out on the freeway. (Been there, done that, not nearly as much fun as it sounds.) I could have been going out to the hangar, thirty-five miles away. It could have happened in heavy traffic. It could have happened while I was driving at “maximum freeway speed.” It could have happened with a car full of people, or one of my kids or The Long-Suffering Wife driving. It could have happened back when I was still job hunting and didn’t have a paycheck.

Lots of bad things that “could have happened.”

But I was alone, two miles from home, at 35 mph, and I was able to risk ignoring all of the blinkedy and blingedy and get it back into the driveway.

Apparently some cooling system problem – I first noticed that I wasn’t getting any heat even though I had been driving for five minutes, and at 48° F that’s an issue. What next caught my eye was the temperature gauge, up there where I’ve never seen it before.

I fiddled with the heating controls and the temp dropped back down to normal – for about ten seconds. It then almost instantly pegged high, along with the aforementioned blinkedy and blingedy. I was by that time about a mile and a half from home with green lights ahead of me.

I thought about just parking it, but that particular stretch of road is narrower and all marked “No Stopping Any Time.” I understand that this would have been an exception. But it still would have been blocking a lane and potentially dangerous. So I put my faith in the probability of significant safety margins built into the system and kept going. By the time I got to where I could pull off into a shopping center parking lot, I was only a half-mile out. What the hell? Go for it.

In the driveway I shut it down fast, then hopped out to see if there were any other side effects going on. Like, oh, say…fire!” Nope, seems all good. Not even any odd smells. I passed on the opportunity to pop the hood and see if the engine block was actually glowing in the visible spectrum.

I’ve gone back out now after it’s cooled down and checked for a second to see if it will start. It did. I did not see any oil running down the runway underneath, nor did I get any oil pressure warning lights while driving. So at least I didn’t apparently crack the engine block or have a piston seize or throw a rod.

When I get a chance I’ll check to see if there’s fluid in the radiator. Maybe there was just a cracked hose. Or a crack in the radiator at worst. Maybe it’s just a stuck thermostat, or something that’s gotten jammed in the controls that shunt fluids back and forth to the heater.

Maybe this will be just a $500 fix. Or $800. Or $1,200.

Or maybe it’s time to take $2,000 and put it down on a new car instead of trying to resurrect an otherwise perfectly good vehicle that already has 188,815 miles on it.

On a side note, this being an adult thing really sucks sometimes.

Nothing tops off a long day at the office more than having your dashboard light up like a Christmas tree with all of those blinkedy blinkedy red warning nights, accompanied by the blingedy blingedy sound of the really urgent, loud, “you’re in deep shit now” bells and buzzers.

It makes me think that this might not be one of the cheap repairs. Shit, and I just put a full tank of gas into it yesterday!

We had been talking about going out looking for a new car anyway. If I had gotten one of those jobs that involved a two-hour commute each way it would have been critical and would have had to happen immediately. But I got the job that’s a twelve-minute commute away, so it wasn’t critical.

Now, that might be what we do on Sunday.

The good news is that it didn’t happen miles and miles away. I could have been in one of those two-hour commutes and fifty miles away, out on the freeway. (Been there, done that, not nearly as much fun as it sounds.) I could have been going out to the hangar, thirty-five miles away. It could have happened in heavy traffic. It could have happened while I was driving at “maximum freeway speed.” It could have happened with a car full of people, or one of my kids or The Long-Suffering Wife driving. It could have happened back when I was still job hunting and didn’t have a paycheck.

Lots of bad things that “could have happened.”

But I was alone, two miles from home, at 35 mph, and I was able to risk ignoring all of the blinkedy and blingedy and get it back into the driveway.

Apparently some cooling system problem – I first noticed that I wasn’t getting any heat even though I had been driving for five minutes, and at 48° F that’s an issue. What next caught my eye was the temperature gauge, up there where I’ve never seen it before.

I fiddled with the heating controls and the temp dropped back down to normal – for about ten seconds. It then almost instantly pegged high, along with the aforementioned blinkedy and blingedy. I was by that time about a mile and a half from home with green lights ahead of me.

I thought about just parking it, but that particular stretch of road is narrower and all marked “No Stopping Any Time.” I understand that this would have been an exception. But it still would have been blocking a lane and potentially dangerous. So I put my faith in the probability of significant safety margins built into the system and kept going. By the time I got to where I could pull off into a shopping center parking lot, I was only a half-mile out. What the hell? Go for it.

In the driveway I shut it down fast, then hopped out to see if there were any other side effects going on. Like, oh, say…fire!” Nope, seems all good. Not even any odd smells. I passed on the opportunity to pop the hood and see if the engine block was actually glowing in the visible spectrum.

I’ve gone back out now after it’s cooled down and checked for a second to see if it will start. It did. I did not see any oil running down the runway underneath, nor did I get any oil pressure warning lights while driving. So at least I didn’t apparently crack the engine block or have a piston seize or throw a rod.

When I get a chance I’ll check to see if there’s fluid in the radiator. Maybe there was just a cracked hose. Or a crack in the radiator at worst. Maybe it’s just a stuck thermostat, or something that’s gotten jammed in the controls that shunt fluids back and forth to the heater.

Maybe this will be just a $500 fix. Or $800. Or $1,200.

Or maybe it’s time to take $2,000 and put it down on a new car instead of trying to resurrect an otherwise perfectly good vehicle that already has 188,815 miles on it.

On a side note, this being an adult thing really sucks sometimes.