Digging Up The Daylilies

There are 2 articles in the New York Times this morning that reflect my life and experience. The first is about Americans changing their religious identities. Apparently the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just released a study showing that about a quarter of all Americans have changed their religious affiliation as adults (this includes choosing to be unaffiliated).
The second article says that kids are increasingly choosing to not get their driver's licenses at the first possible moment. Like me. A serious late-bloomer. My friend Michelle said on Friday that I'm obviously right on schedule based on my "developmental delays" (very tongue in cheek); I had a bat mitzvah in 2004 and got my license 3 years later.

Last night we had 5" of fluffy snow on top of our dense, frozen snow pack. Happily it is dry and fluffy -- easy to get off the car and easy to shovel. Last night when I got home from knitting I shoveled the driveway and then parked. This morning I went out very early to shovel again. My next door neighbor was just finishing up her driveway (and my sidewalk!) and offered me the use of her snowblower. So I did the driveway, my elderly neighbor's drive and her sidewalk, all in the time I would have spent to shovel out my driveway. I like the snowblower. :)

On my way to work I stopped at our awesome neighborhood hardware store. They've been selling salt as fast as they get in, and so are selling it first-come first-served, no reservations. I tried to buy a bag of salt to be picked up later, but they said they couldn't. Instead they took my name and number and called me 40 minutes later when the truck came in with the salt. The guys at Quality Hardware are working really hard to keep us stocked with the salt we all need -- the owner's retired father drove two pallets of salt up to the door and I got one of those bags. They were really apologetic that they couldn't give me my usual discount because they were paying a premium to get this salt in. No worries.

Oh yeah. Gene, my maintenance guy at work, gave me a snow brush. He says the college kids threw away a bunch of them when they moved out in August and he saved a couple. So now I've got a snow brush to replace the one that's lost somewhere in storage.

I'm doing ok driving in the snow. The car wallows or sways occasionally in soft snow ruts, but I just hang on and keep going, and so far I haven't hit anything, thank God.

I passed my driver's test!! I am now a legally licensed driver. Only 13 years late. :) I aced my parallel parking. The examiner didn't think I looked around enough in intersections, but he passed me. Yay!
Now I'm off to work where I'm hoping a friend has a doughnut for me.

So last weekend we drove 7 hours each way to go to a family reunion in Nebraska. And while we were there, we did something truly ridiculous. We bought a new car. Ok, so we did actually need a new car, and we'd been talking about it for a while. But somehow we progressed from research through "Wouldn't it be wacky if we bought a car while we were here?" straight on to "Where do I sign?" in the space of 48 hours.
Thankfully the Subaru did not die on us. There was oil-related smoke coming out from under the hood and the car every time we stopped, but our mechanic declared it to be safe. He also told us that the oil drip would cost $1000 to repair and that the timing belt could go due to one of the two oil leaks. Hence the thoughts of new car.
We bought the old car our first winter in Wisconsin. It had all-wheel drive and awesome brakes, everything we needed to transform my desert-born husband into a snow driver. It was 2 years old, and we thought we'd got a great deal (we didn't, but that's ok). There were a couple of hiccups, but our fabulous mechanic, Harry Harrison (no not the author), kept it running beautifully. It did, however, take a lot of gas. 25 miles to the US gallon (about 6.6 miles per litre). Not bad in the grand scheme of things, but not fabulous. The car was really too big for just the two of us, especially since we gave up hauling ourselves, two friends, and a day's supply of foam weaponry etc plus camping gear.

In Nebraska the family reunion was hosted by Drew's Great-uncle Roy, who owns a Toyota dealership. In his younger days, Uncle Roy and his father, known as HP, had a Ford dealership and a Honda dealership as well. So it didn't take long before Robin (Drew's sister) and Drew's parents started saying "You should talk to Uncle Roy about a car". We went to the Toyota dealership and the salesmen there were very nice. But we didn't like the Matrix (too big, about the same size as our Outback), they didn't have any Scions (Drew doesn't like the back of those anyway), and the Yaris only comes in a 2-door model. So we asked for a recommendation to the Honda dealership.

At the Honda dealership we had a fabulous saleswoman. She let us test drive the Fit (the Jazz in the rest of the world). A good friend here in Wisconsin bought one earlier this summer, and she loves it. So Drew was emailing through the whole thing with questions like "Do you really really like it?" and "About how much did it cost?". We managed to get the Fit Sport (cruise control was non-negotiable for us) with a bunch of fancy accessories thanks to choosing the demo car.


We were a little late for dinner, but everyone forgave us when they saw the new Fit. It's so big inside despite being small on the outside. We could probably have sold several more that night. One of the keys to our being able to buy the car was that the dealership in Omaha had 5 sitting on the lot. Apparently Omaha is a large car, SUV kind of town. We talked to our Fit-owning friends here today, and they said that there's a multi-week waiting list for them in the Madison area. So we wouldn't have been able to make a deal like we did in Omaha.

We're very happy with our new car. It got 36 mpg on the drive home!

Speaking of the drive home, I have to share the name of the worst-named gas station ever. We passed many highway signs for the Kum and Go. Often it was paired with a Subway. Sounded like an underground whorehouse.