Wheels up

The car has a bad transmission, which is a sealed unit and will cost $6000 to replace. That’s bad arithmetic in a car that’s going on ten years old and over 100K miles and barely gets 23 miles per gallon at the best of times, and that’s before you consider that the speakers are randomly static-laden and the sunroof occasionally goes half-up of its own volition and the car stereo is iPod-era and doesn’t work well with the iPhone.  It’s one of those things where there’s so much to fix and straighten up that you despair of fixing it at all – and the promise of being able to find something at least partly electrical is very attractive.

Right now, the three contenders are the Prius V, the newest Chevy Volt, and the Ford Fusion Energi. The Prius is just as it says: big hybrid wagon, proven technology. But ultimately fuel-burning; there’s no all-electric option there.  The Volt will go all-electric for 50 miles, which is enough to get to a Cal game or up to the city – and if you don’t find a charger, you still have the gas generator charging you back up, with an ultimate range far enough to drive to Disneyland on a tank. Splitting the difference is the Fusion Energi – only about 20 miles all-electric, but enough for me to go to work and back or for us to get groceries or run the quick errands without having to dip into the gas motor. 

Personally, the Volt is at the top of my list, but I haven’t sat in one or driven it or anything – but I do really like the idea of an American-made electrical vehicle (and a Chevy at that, given that my family literally bought nothing else from 1969 to 1993) without the complexity of a six-speed transmission to deal with and with support for Apple CarPlay and modern phone integration. But with the others, I also like the idea of a car that I know I’ll have room to sit in and have a grown-up midsize ride.

And that’s the thing – I’m starting to get like that with the house. The facing on the cabinets is peeling, the carpet on the stairs needs to be cleaned if not replaced outright, one of the toilets makes a noise and another has a rickety seat and has to have the handle held down to flush, and the whole thing needs a massive allergen flush to get the dust out so I can start breathing through the night normally. (Maybe.) Things being how they are, though, it’s not like we can sell the house and start over somewhere else; unless you bought AAPL at $15 in 1997 and sold it all six months ago, the only way you sell a piece of property in Silly Con Valley is if you’re leaving for good and never coming back.

And in a way, I suppose I’m a little like that about myself. I’ve been dealing with this sleep study and its aftermath for months now – what started off as a “am I sleeping wrong on this shoulder and causing my neck/shoulder pain that way?” turned into claustrophobic masks and allergy shots and a million wires in my scalp, and even now, when I can finally just barely make it through the entire night without ripping the BiPAP mask off my face, I’m not sleeping any more soundly or waking up any less, which begs the question whether the sleep clinic knows how to do any more than “positive air pressure”. I genuinely suspect they don’t, which makes me wonder how I’m ever going to property evaluate things like posture and head elevation and whether I need a different pillow or mattress or God knows what. The shoulder still hurts, by the way, and there’s been a recurring pain in the left hamstring for a while now and we haven’t yet sorted out what the deal is with the dust allergy and whether that’s helping or not, and my heart rate and blood pressure and cholesterol are all elevated from even four years ago and only respond sporadically to changes in diet and exercise, if at all.

As with so many things, the problem is that when there’s too many things to fix, you despair of ever being able to get them all fixed, which in turn leads to despairing of getting any of them fixed.  And it’s often tough to undertake a new approach when it’s going to be a long time before you see results, if ever, and then ask why you gave up this food or that drink or did this much extra exercise only to see your LDL or triglyceride numbers budge not at all. It’s not just energy of activation that’s tough to overcome, it’s the willingness to try something new that’s going to take take a lot of time and effort and isn’t guaranteed to pay off in the end.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have any hobbies. Or why I’m not a gamer. Actually there are plenty of reasons for that, but we’ll get to that later.

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