Jar of Goodness 12.11.22: New Car!

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for my new car! (Yeah, finally!)

I’ve talked about this already, but here it is in a nutshell: My 2003 Honda Civic gave up the ghost last June. At first, we considered getting a used car, at least to tide us over, but we discovered used cars are costing about as much as new ones, but with tens of thousands of miles, sketchy Carfax reports, and all kinds of signs of poor car care.

The problem with buying a new car is that they aren’t available. You have to order them, pay a deposit, and wait . . . for months.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Daniel Neman described his recent, 2022, pandemic-complicated car-buying experience, that was very similar to ours, though he started off looking for a new car and ended up shopping for used. Also, he was able to find more humor in his experience, which makes his editorial worth reading.

I won’t go into too much detail about what it’s like not having a car to drive around. I know it’s a “first world problem” and I’m not complaining. But it was mighty inconvenient, and a huge eye-opener, to not be able to just, well, go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted. Yes, we have another vehicle, but it’s Sue’s 1994 Ranger, and it has manual transmission (I mean, why should I learn now?), and we wanted to drive it only for short distances. So, Sue and I went everywhere together, and Sue drove. Usually, I’m the driver, because her truck is older, and I rather like driving, and the sedan is usually more pleasant that riding around in the big, bumpy pickup.

Anyway, I got the call from the dealer on December 1: the car had arrived! Yippee! And we drove to St. Louis (borrowing my mom and dad’s car) on Monday, December 5 to pick it up. Yay for Mungenast St. Louis Honda!

Fun fact: Mungenast Honda isn’t very far south of Kirkwood, where we go to get our international groceries and where we’ve been finding good wines recently. It’s even on the same road (Kirkwood/Lingbergh). My, how convenient for us!

The saga isn’t entirely over; I still need to transfer the license from the old car and get rid of the old car, get the deposit back from dealer 2, who was unable to fulfill the order before Mungenast St. Louis Honda did, and then, of course, pay off the new car.

But it’s really nice. I actually now have a car that is a trendy color—it’s not just the last/least desirable color that happens to be on the dealer’s lot. And after twenty years with my old car, it gradually became less attractive, especially after the semi-truck had rubbed against it, and after the hail damage; I did feel rather sheepish one time recently when I pulled into the lot of the local country club for a lunch meeting, parking beside shiny new Audis, Cadillacs, and Mercedeseses.

For now, though, I have a car I can feel pride in. I can drive around slowly, thinking, “Yeah, everyone, look at me!” For a change. I know this feeling will subside soon enough. But, you know; after years of driving around a car with 100,000 . . . 150,000 . . . 200,000 . . . 250,000 miles on it, the temporary thrill of owning a car with only 12 miles on it: Squeeee!

I mean, you know me. I’m not ostentatious. I don’t obsess about my looks, or the clothes I wear, or whatever. But every twenty years or so, when I do finally get a new car—which I hope to drive until the wheels practically fall off—I deeply enjoy the first few years of special newness. Sure, a Civic is hardly a “status” car, but it’s a smart, reliable, comfortable, practical car, and for me, that’s something I’m proud to own.

So for the record, it’s a 2023 Honda Civic Sport Sedan in Sonic Gray Pearl (a very trendy color) with black interior. I really like how the paint color (which at first seemed like a rather boring gray) looks dramatically different in different kinds of light.

This is my third Civic sedan, the others being a beige "almond cream" 1989 DX and a metallic-dirt-colored “shoreline mist metallic” 2003 LX. This is the first one for me that has an actually trendy, in-demand color.

It’s really interesting, and I think a testament to the Honda company’s enduring vision and tradition of excellence, that this new vehicle still feels like a Civic, in a very fundamental way. The controls are basically all in the same locations; the road feel, the seats, the fit, the way it drives . . . are clearly on a continuum with the other two. Compared to the various similar-type sedans I’ve rented in recent years, I can tell those couldn’t be Civics—but this one is clearly, well, a Honda Civic. I can see why people are Civic “enthusiasts.”

So, that’s done: the car situation is resolved, and it was the last of the Big Things of 2022. The new second-floor refrigerator (ordering and waiting months for it); the second-floor air-conditioning conking out and us needing to get a new HVAC system for that floor (cha-chiiinng!); and (long delayed) finally getting the new roof, gutters, and new siding on the front and back dormers.

Sue and decided last summer, when it seemed everything was imploding but nothing was moving forward, that we should have some champagne on hand for whenever the last of these 2022 expensive, protracted inconveniences and frustrations were finally all over.

So when we got home from St. Louis with the new car, we did indeed celebrate!

Yep, sometimes gratitude has four wheels, a sporty ride, a 2.0-liter, 4-cylinder engine, a touchscreen infotainment system, a CVT transmission, a Sonic Gray Pearl paint job, and a 10/10 rating from Car and Driver.

Jar of Goodness 7.31.22: Wait. Jar of Goodness?

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for . . .

Well, it’s just been kind of hard recently.

I know I shouldn’t complain. There are so many people worse off than us. And my uncle just had a major health scare (fortunately, he seems to be feeling much better now). . . . But we’re getting tired of trouble, expensive trouble.

At the end of June, as we drove home around 9 p.m. after spending Father’s Day in Columbia, my elderly car died on US 63. (I posted about it earlier.) It was a late night as we had to have the car towed the rest of the way to Jeff City, and then, having been dropped off at the (closed) repair place, we had to wait for the one taxi cab in town. It was not marked; it was just some guy’s smoky-smelling SUV. This is a taxi? Anyway, he was pleasant enough. We didn’t get home until about midnight.

The very next day, as we were driving back to Columbia on the very same highway, Sue’s front right brake calipers went bad, and we pulled off at the very same place on the highway. The wheel was sizzling hot. So, we called AAA again and got another tow.

That’s right: we got two tows, for two different cars, from the exact same spot, within a single twenty-four-hour period.

Some of the good parts: We have AAA. We have AAA Plus. We were not physically injured. We have cell phones that work (you young things, try to imagine how much of a pain it was when your car broke down in the middle of nowhere, and cell phones didn't exist). The truck was able to be fixed within a few days. The service rep at our local Honda dealer, where both cars were taken for service, offered us a car to rent, which was very convenient.

But back to the complaining . . .

Trying to buy a car is a bitch in 2022, especially if you’re in a small town. In a nutshell: The available used cars are crappy and overpriced. Few in the Honda dealer’s lot are Honda Certified; in fact, few on the Honda dealer’s lot are even Hondas. As for new cars, they are simply not available. We find ourselves in the lucky/unlucky position of being able to purchase a new car, to make a sizeable down payment, and have excellent credit, being preapproved for a lowest-interest loan, and yet . . . there’s nothing to buy. So we paid a deposit and are on a waiting list. It will probably be months before our car is manufactured and arrives in Missouri. Meanwhile I can only dream about having a lovely, reliable, sexy new car.

Yes, the above image is shamelessly stolen from the Honda website. Why wouldn't they want someone like me sharing their lovely promotional photo of their top-selling sedan in its most desirable color this model year?

More complaining: the local Honda dealer appears to have done some kind of bait-and-switch on us, promising us that if we paid a deposit before someone else did, we’d be able to put our names on a car that’d been ordered by someone else who’d declined the vehicle, thus getting us ahead of the usual schedule . . . But then that evaporated. I think our young sales associate offered us something he wasn’t allowed to offer. They won’t tell us he screwed up, but that’s apparently what he did. I’m allowed to be angry about that, right? He told us we’d get “that cool Sonic Gray Metallic, by early August, instead of September!”; then he called a few weeks later and said “in early or middle September, maybe, and it’ll be white!” Wait, what? No!

It’s a long story. This crazy COVID economy is most of the problem; computer chips from China are in scant supply, so production is way down. The Honda company, the factory, has to allocate the few cars that are dribbling out of its assembly lines to all the dealers on the continent, and guess what? The rinky-dink small-town dealers like the one in this town are getting the dregs. They’re getting the black and the white cars. I think they’re getting just one or two a month.

Meanwhile, the big-city dealers that sell more cars in a bigger market get many more cars from the factory, and they get a greater variety of colors. So this is why we ended up putting a deposit and placing an order from a St. Louis dealer, too. Geez. It this crazy, or what? It’s about like what happened with us trying to get a new refrigerator this winter.

Again: It could be far worse. We have a neighbor who uses a riding lawn mower as his principal mode of transportation. Our problems are laughable to him. Our problems are “First World problems.” I know it. And we are so lucky that my parents, who are doing much less driving these days, are glad to let us use their car for out-of-town excursions.

THEN, with the one-car situation kind of settling in, Sue and I were driving back home from a trip to Columbia this past Monday, and AGAIN her truck started acting weird. It was making a funny noise. The engine heated up. The battery light came on. The power steering went out. We pulled over, again, on US 63 again, again near Hartsburg (actually, this time it was along the shoulder near the Boone and Callaway county line). (I’m starting to hate Hartsburg!)

Called AAA. Again. By this time, Tyler, the smiling young tow-truck driver for Kendall’s, knows us. “Oh, yeah, when they said it was a purple pickup, I knew it was you!” . . . Again, I’m glad we have AAA. Again, I’m grateful that the repair place was able to fix it. It was a malfunctioning pulley on the serpentine belt, and a broken serpentine belt. (This time, since we’re kind of honked off at the local Honda-everything, we had it towed to Telle Tire, and though they were busy, and we’d dropped it off after-hours without an appointment, they fixed it within a few days, and it was okay.) But I’m not liking this car stress.

Okay, next topic: Did I mention we’re finally getting a new roof and gutters? Supposedly? Yeah. We’re lucky that insurance is covering it, considering the damage occurred in the hailstorm in late March 2020, but fortunately it’s covered, and we have a surprisingly low deductible. But it’s stressful, anyway. We’ve been expecting them all month. We recently found out that the reason for the delay is the combination of our steep roof and the super-f-ing-hot weather we’ve been having. The roofing company doesn’t want the shingles and other materials to be compromised because of the heat. Not to mention the safety of their workers . . . And yeah, we have a sense of PTSD regarding the roofers. When we had the current roof installed in 2006, we unfortunately had a clown/ex-con/ripoff company rip us off. (You might remember our sunporch disaster, thanks to them.)

So we approach this roof work with trepidation. How can we not? This has been the biggest problem with owning this old house: We’re not fix-it people. We’re not carpenters, electricians, plumbers, roofers. And we have a hell of a time finding people to a) do the work, and b) trust to do it right.

Then, Tuesday, the day after Sue’s recent truck incident, and while it was being repaired, we discovered that one of our central air-conditioning units was making a funny sound, like it was straining. The coils had frozen up to the point where we were seeing frost on the outside of the unit. We turned off the system, and the thing defrosted, and we worried. It’s a 21-year-old system, and the maintenance folks have been telling us in recent years that it has a 15-year lifespan.

Fortunately, our annual scheduled a/c maintenance was only two days later, so that service call was covered by our contract . . . but unfortunately, the news was grim. The unit isn’t worth fixing; any fix would require retrofitting the coolant system for a different type of coolant, since the kind our system uses is no longer available . . . and any fix they did would still be a band-aid, as the aging compressor is no longer operating very efficiently anymore . . . So, tomorrow, we’ll meet with a sales representative and see what kind of suggestions and offers they can make.

Of course, they’ll offer us a discount on replacing both systems at once (we have two systems, one for the first-floor apartment, one for the second). But who wants to buy two air conditioners and two furnaces at once? Yeah, it would be nice to have them all be new and identical. But, but . . .

And yeah, I'm glad we have a separate first-floor air-conditioning unit that's working fine, so we can kind of live on the first floor if we need to. And I'm glad we've had relatively cool temperatures this week. But it's going to get back up into the nineties this next week. Ugh, ugh, ugh. The service man said the company might be able to tide us through with some loaner window a/c units until our new a/c unit(s) are installed, in something like one and a half to two weeks.

But who wants to make these purchases when preparing to buy an new car at the same time? And do you know what our retirement investments have been doing recently? Ugh!

So, “Jar of Goodness.” I’m giving you a mixed review this week. We’re just feeling really stressed and tired.

Jar of Goodness 7.3.22: My 2003 Honda Civic

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for my 2003 Honda Civic.

It served us well. We’ve had a lot of adventures together. From the time we acquired it, on January 10, 2004, when it had only 54 miles on its odometer, to 9:40 pm on June 19, 2022, when it overheated, smoking, near Hartsburg on Highway 63, with 288,380 miles, it gave us countless good rides. It even stayed running long enough for me to swing off the highway, give it one more pulse of the accelerator, and then coast, as the engine cut out, to near the stop sign at the quiet intersection of Westbrook and Mount Pleasant roads, just off the highway, but completely and safely out of traffic.

It was almost like it was taking care of us one last time.

It literally blew a gasket—the head gasket. The only fix, at this point, would be a new engine, which, of course, is ridiculous for a nineteen-year-old car with 288,380 miles on it. All that’s left is to salute it, with thanks, for its terrific performance and reliability.

I have to admit, I was never smitten with the car. At the time we got it, I was hoping to get a car that was, well, a color. Instead, we bought it off the lot when it was the only vehicle with the options we wanted. And, being past the model year, it was on sale. So instead of it being a pretty Galapagos Green Metallic, Eternal Blue Pearl, or Radiant Ruby Pearl Civic, we ended up with a car that was Shoreline Mist Metallic—the “beige” of that model year. Or as my dad called a similar color of their first Ford Taurus, “metallic-dirt-color.” How do you describe that color when you sign in at a hotel, or request roadside assistance from AAA? . . . “It’s metallic tan. Sort of silvery beige?”

My 1989 Civic had been “Almond Cream”—which was unquestionably beige. It was also not a sexy car, but it was extremely practical and perfect for me in the years I lived in Arizona and Montana. It got beautiful gas mileage and also was incredibly reliable. Remember when you could get a car without power window and door locks?

I can totally see why there are Civic enthusiasts. Now that I’ve had a fourth-generation Civic sedan and a seventh-generation one, I’m having trouble thinking of a single reason not to get an eleventh-generation one. Especially since, after some years of designs that seemed uninteresting to me, the current Civics have a simpler, classier, yet still sporty, design.

Our usual m.o. is to hang on to cars as long as they keep running reliably. We accept that as they get older, they’ll start looking cruddy. But until the repair bills start getting truly painful and repetitive, we still prefer occasional repairs to having monthly, mandatory car payments. We know our car’s history; replacing it with some stranger’s used car that is one-third to one-half used up is full of question marks. Yet, replacing it with a brand new car is dauntingly expensive.

Admittedly, as the car has aged, and we’ve gotten more interested in comfort, we’ve opted to use rental cars for out-of-state trips. This kept the extra miles off the elderly Honda while also letting us luxuriate in quiet, smooth-gliding sedans with oodles of cargo room.

My 2003 Civic was totaled twice in recent years. It’s easy to total a car that is only worth about $1,500 or $2,000. First, on October 3, 2018, an 18-wheeler waiting to our right at a stoplight, as we waited to turn left, unexpectedly also turned left when the light turned green, and it crunched against the side of the car (that was a long story involving a construction zone and a less-than-capable construction worker who screwed up as she directed the truck to turn when it wanted to go straight.) Ugh.

The car needed serious work on the front right quarter panel plus the right headlight and bumper; the other injuries, though, were mostly cosmetic. The semi trailer rubbed against the car at very low speed. Amazingly, I could fix the car (enough) for just about the same amount as the insurance settlement gave me for it.

The next time the car was totaled was March 27, 2020, when we got tennis-ball-sized hail.

In the case of the hail, it was only a broken windshield and destroyed windshield washer nozzle-thingie that needed replacing. The rest of that damage comprised dents that were best left alone.

After all this, the car looked pretty roughed up, but amazingly it was not rusted out. It still cleaned up well. I was never embarrassed to drive it (although I was kind of sheepish when I used it to drive myself and a friend to a luncheon with the upper classes at the local country club). But by now, it definitely has a “good side” and a “bad side.”

Man, just think of all the adventures we’ve had with this car! Countless trips to Ohio to visit Sue’s family. Countless in-state trips to St. Louis, Kansas City, Hermann, the Lake of the Ozarks, and all kinds of special places. Plenty of gravel roads and conservation areas, church picnics, state historic sites, festivals, concerts, you name it.

Since Sue has kept her 1994 Ranger, with its manual transmission that I’ve never mastered, the 2003 Civic was “my” car. For four years, I drove it back and forth between Jefferson City and Columbia for work. I don’t miss wasting that 5 hours a week of my life spent commuting. But except for when the weather was nasty, it was usually a pleasant drive, in that car.

Although I can get a little misty as I think with nostalgia about this car, as if it were a part of my family, as if it were a person, I’ll stop. I know it’s just a thing.

And I know we probably held on to it too long. But who has a crystal ball? Since the world changed in 2020 due to COVID, nothing’s gotten back to “normal” yet. Car shopping in 2022 is fraught, whether you’re talking new or used: the prices are higher than ever (but come on, will they ever really go back down?); car production is low because key supplies are low; and there’ve been some notable natural disasters (flooding, hurricanes, etc.) in recent years that cast doubt on the soundness of used vehicles.

Dealer’s lots are shockingly empty. Around here, at least, they’re all looking like used-car lots, and sparse ones at that. They’re just selling any old cars that come to them, you'd think. Around here, they’re not even offering them as Honda Certified Used Cars. And the big dealer-companies shift vehicles near and far, trying to guess what towns will buy which cars.

The local Honda dealers don’t even have sample new cars for you to drive. It’s a three-month wait plus a deposit, if you want to order a new car from the factory.

I suppose times are changin’. More and more people are happy to buy things, anything, online, sight-unseen. And un-test-driven.

Will we ever return to the point where dealers fill their lots with shiny new cars? Even when computer chips and other supply-chain items become readily available again, why would the car industry want to go back to the situation where tons of unsold stock sits out in the weather, needing eventually to be sold with rebates in order to create space on the lots for the new model year? Why would they do that?

After all these thoughts, and after looking at used cars that are available, we decided to put a deposit on a new car. The choices in used cars were pretty unappealing (though I'm pretty sure the ones they showed us were ugly ones in an attempt to encourage us to buy new--dealers can be so frickin' crooked). We got over our sticker shock (when you haven’t bought a new car in about twenty years, the prices seem outrageous). It’ll be all right. The car we’ve settled on is already in production, so we should have it within only about a month. And the new car will be not only reliable, but also attractive (even, dare I say?) sexy. We’re looking forward to having a car that—who knows—might feel like a facelift for our sense of style. The neighbors will be going, “Whoa!”

UPDATE, 7/19/22: Jefferson City Honda pulled a bait-and-switch on us! The nifty sonic gray metallic Civic Sport, already in production and supposed to arrive in early August, that we had supposedly put dibs on with our deposit, somehow simply evaporated (or, I bet, they sold it to someone else--hey, maybe someone offered them more money for it--which is totally crooked if they accepted it), and so they offered us a white one . . . which would arrive in September. So I'm pretty damn down on my local Honda dealer. Not on Hondas . . . just on this damn crooked (or at best, inept) dealer.

. . . No wonder I hate buying cars. It's much better to find a good one and drive it until the gaskets blow out. We've just started looking at other dealers now, with our arrival date shifted to, probably, October. JC Honda just kinda wasted a month of our precious time.

Separated at Birth--?

Sorry--I just couldn't resist it! The clypeus of the cicada has always looked like the grille of an automobile to me. They always remind me of Edsels. (Click here for some nifty diagrams of cicada anatomy).

As you probably know, cicadas (like zillions of other true bugs, such as leafhoppers and spittlebugs) eat by sucking fluids from plants. When cicadas are young and live underground, they tap into roots; once they've got wings, they drink from stems. If you turn a cicada over, you can easily see the slender strawlike tube they jab into the plants.




The clypeus (which looks like a "nose" to some people, though I think it looks more like an automobile grille) contains the muscles that the cicada needs in order to suck plant juices.

Okay, maybe the Edsel isn't the best example. . . . How about one of these?








The photo of the 1939 Ford truck is from here, the 1938 Buick sedan is from here, and the 1937 Ford coupe is from here.