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Leaf me a loan
Nov. 14th, 2005 12:33 amI've been doing a lot of fall foliage shooting, which obviously I haven't gotten around to posting, but here's two as a study in contrast.
( Photos under the cut )
( Photos under the cut )
Nov. 14th, 2005
Enter: The Matrix, Exit: The Rodeo
Nov. 14th, 2005 01:03 amWe have a new car! It's a 2005 Toyota Matrix with all-wheel drive. My Rodeo was quite a Trooper (heh, a little Isuzu pun there) and served me quite well. But it had two major strikes against it: sucky mileage and an inability to get up the hill to the house when there was snow on the road.
So it's gone. Friday, Veteran's Day, we signed ze papers and picked it up. It's a fairly basic model, but it has all-wheel drive and that's pretty important up here. It'll also get tremendously better mileage, I'm expecting high-30's on the interstate. Sadly you sacrifice some fuel tank space with the AWD, so I'll probably be filling up about as often as with the Rodeo, it's just that said tanking will be about half the cost.
It's got to go back to the dealership to get an issue with the daytime running lights resolved. This thing turns on the full headlights automatically when it's dark. This is fine for most people, but you can't do that when you work at or regularly visit an observatory! On some cars all you need to do is lift up one notch on the parking brake, unfortunately, that trick doesn't work on this car. To stop this, they will have to reprogram the computer and cut a wire.
It also has a black box. It basically records all the important engine settings that relate to performance and driver input. I'm guessing it's a limited storage memory device that maintains 30 seconds of data then overwrites the oldest. According to the manual, they'll only disclose the information in certain situations, but since it includes requests by law enforcement agencies, I'm guessing that if I have a serious accident that they'll give it up to anyone who asks.
Monday we take care of some final title snafus and it's a done deal. Not that it isn't a done deal now, it'll just be more dunner.
( So here's some pix of it that I took today )
So it's gone. Friday, Veteran's Day, we signed ze papers and picked it up. It's a fairly basic model, but it has all-wheel drive and that's pretty important up here. It'll also get tremendously better mileage, I'm expecting high-30's on the interstate. Sadly you sacrifice some fuel tank space with the AWD, so I'll probably be filling up about as often as with the Rodeo, it's just that said tanking will be about half the cost.
It's got to go back to the dealership to get an issue with the daytime running lights resolved. This thing turns on the full headlights automatically when it's dark. This is fine for most people, but you can't do that when you work at or regularly visit an observatory! On some cars all you need to do is lift up one notch on the parking brake, unfortunately, that trick doesn't work on this car. To stop this, they will have to reprogram the computer and cut a wire.
It also has a black box. It basically records all the important engine settings that relate to performance and driver input. I'm guessing it's a limited storage memory device that maintains 30 seconds of data then overwrites the oldest. According to the manual, they'll only disclose the information in certain situations, but since it includes requests by law enforcement agencies, I'm guessing that if I have a serious accident that they'll give it up to anyone who asks.
Monday we take care of some final title snafus and it's a done deal. Not that it isn't a done deal now, it'll just be more dunner.
( So here's some pix of it that I took today )
Friday morning I was unloading stuff from my Rodeo before we took it down the mountain for the final time. There was a nice breeze blowing, and I noticed an interesting sight next door. It fairly screamed for me to take a photo of it, so I did.
( Photo under cut )
( Photo under cut )