On Father’s Day we drove back to Belleville to go out to dinner with my father, the first long drive we’ve done in the caar since my trips back and forth to Ottawa while Candice was still living there and me here. About halfway home: grindy noise! It came and went but performance, temperature and so on didn’t seem affected, and I noticed a wobbly pulley, so I figured it’d get us back to Toronto fine (and it did) and then I could take it in.

A couple days later, I had a new A/C compressor, and the wobbly pulley (and the serpentine belt) replaced too. And parts are not cheap for this old Swede.

Combine that with how often we drive — I filled up the tank for that trip, and before that the previous fill-up was March 25 — and the crazy cost of car insurance living in downtown TO, and the conclusion jumps out at you: We really don’t need a car here.

I take the TTC or my bike to work every day. Candice walks a few blocks to work. Grocery stores are even closer. Whenever we head downtown or to the Annex or Queen West we just take the TTC or walk. Hell, we don’t even have parking — the car is on the street all the time. And for the odd errand that does require a car, we can just use Zipcar or Autoshare in town and a regular car rental for road trips, and come in way, way under what we’re paying to have a car sit on the street, even though the car’s fully paid for.

I was car-free in Montreal from 1994 to 2001, but then as soon as I moved to Ottawa I bought the Saab, partly because Ottawa (and the neighbourhood I was living in) was pretty car-heavy, and partly because I had the disposable income and an excuse. But for someone who’s read car mags since childhood, I didn’t find car ownership all that fun. Too much maintaining and not enough spirited driving, maybe? Or maybe too sensible a car, or maybe too sensible a place to drive.

(The same thing happened with the motorcycle, I think. I’m not sure why, specifically.)

So the car’s going for sale later this year. Not sure when yet. Not looking forward to the process one bit, either! But I’ll be back to car-free soon, and I’m pretty happy with that, and especially happy living somewhere where I can, and not be too inconvenienced or treated like a freak for relying on transit.

(Via everyone and their dog, it seems. I think I saw it first on BoingBoing Gadgets.)

I forgot that I wouldn’t have a router right away, so I ended up getting a Speedtouch 516 DSL modem configured as a bridge, so I’m using Windows’ own PPPOE client until the move.

Next up is VOIP. I’m leaning towards Unlimitel because Babytel never replied to my email sent to their support address (pilot error: sent to .com instead of .ca), but there’s still a little shopping to do there. New blog theme/approach coming soon too, although that’s just fitting in the quiet moments of which there have been few lately.

Work is going awesome. I’m moving support over to RT any day now, have a huge set of projects and to-dos to drill through, and have really been given pretty much full ownership over my areas of responsibility already. (And everyone’s so great to work with!)

Off to Dan’s tonight for pizza, beer and conversation. (We tried this last week but I made it a block before I decided it was time to take a rain check and get the car in for a brake job right away. I lucked out in that a great garage happens to be exactly one block away from me, and Frank at Master Mechanic on Dupont and Concord took it in on no notice and did good work at a good price, which was nice considering I needed a garage on short notice in a strange city.)

Movers are scheduled: pack on the 25th, load on the 28th, unload a couple of days later. Final stretch!

Mouseycat might be sick. She had a very loose canine tooth removed the other day and we found she’d lost nearly a kilogram (nearly 2.2 lbs) since the last time she was weighed. There’s a chance that she just lost the weight because it hurt to eat, but it could be something more serious; blood tests ruled out diabetes but there’s still elevated white blood cell and liver enzyme counts so the current hypothesis is cholangiohepatitis. She’s on twice-daily antibiotic pills right now (which she just loves, let me tell you) and we’re back at the vet next Wednesday to find out what’s next.

Candice and I were in Belleville for Father’s Day weekend, and we spent Saturday with Dad at a weekend-long Beatles festival, with Beatles cover bands playing one after another on a single stage. It was surreal and straight out of the Simpsons, with the site map pointing out the “All You Need Is Food” food concession, the “Hello Goodbye” entrance/exits, the “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” outhouse row, and a Paul McCartney lookalike wandering the crowds progressively drunker all night.

I took my bike in to get the bottom bracket overhauled and bought a helmet and now I’m ready to start riding everywhere. This is what I should’ve been doing instead of the motorcycle, I think. Silly me. I found that the commute to work along bike trails is about 10 miles on mostly level terrain, so I want to try bike commuting at least a couple times this summer. I took a test ride (to U of O and back, which I figured would be a handy benchmark for this fall) which was around 10 miles and found it easy, so I think it’ll be fine.

Related to that, I’ve been hitting the gym 2-3 days a week for the last month or so. I don’t like the workout I’ve been doing much but I just ordered New Rules of Lifting to give something else a try, but I’ve still been making it there regularly, at least. I need to learn to squat and deadlift.

In work-related news, this is not so good, apparently.

New laptop is awesome and so, so light. It also lets me leave my work laptop at work, which means I don’t have to carry a laptop as well as gym clothes and lunch when I go to work, which was getting particularly annoying on the bus, which I have been trying to take as often as possible instead of driving the car an extra 25 km/day.

Speaking of the car, I replaced the water pump recently because it was very noisy and obviously unbalanced (like me!), and pretty much every other noise the car was making went away too! It’s so quiet now. I guess I could have replaced the water pump a while ago.

Last Monday, Candice and I had been together for four years! In a couple of weeks it’ll be our first anniversary. Yay!

That’s about it for now. I’ll try to post more often, especially since I’ve got so many new things going on all at once. For some reason I try to avoid “Here’s what happened today” posts even when it’s sort of interesting. I shouldn’t do that.

Now, the 9-3’s got kind of a weird tail-heavy shape, and the Elantra’s got the same thing going on. And hatchbacks where the glass is closer to horizontal than vertical are pretty rare, and they’ve got the same angle and the same little bulge. The trim along the sides is about the same, and the B- and C-pillar plastic is the same. The hatchback part is particularly odd, because Saab discontinued the hatchback in 2001 because GM thought hatchbacks were past their time. It got even stranger, though, when I saw the Elantra’s dash. Here’s a 2001 Saab 9-5 dash on the left, new Elantra dash on the right:

Now the Elantra and the Saabs are different classes of cars, sure, but the similarities are a bit too similar, and too unlike other cars (Saab reviews of that era always talked about quirky styling) to just come around because of design constraints.

The Elantra’s doing pretty well these days. I wonder how much of the 9-3 design’s popularity problem was marketing failure instead of a tired design?