Christi\’s New Car

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1177954743-hr-11101.jpg\”

I\’ve been having transportation problems for most of the year. Back in December, my Mazda 626 developed two problems, one masking the other. The prominent problem was a pronounced noise as my front wheel bearings and axle went bad. Hiding under that problem was a transmission that was beginning to go tits up. This was the second transmission to go bad in this car in the 2 and a half years I\’ve owned it. So in December, I basically mothballed the car with the intention of paying it off before buying a new car. At the time, I was still wedded to the car to the tune $2500, which I did NOT want to roll into a new payment. Fortunately, Felicia\’s car was running fine, so we\’ve been car-pooling for the last four months. Unfortunately, this didn\’t work out so well. Her schedule and mine did NOT match at all, and this came to a head last week, when I would have to be waiting for her from 7 am to 10 pm on a couple of nights. Fool that I am, I decided to try driving the Mazda for the days that were the worst. It was still drivable, so what the hell, right? Famous last words. It made the 25 mile trip to work last Monday without incident. The trip home was another matter. I wound up having to tow it to the transmission shop, where the computer told the transmission guy that my torque converter was basically disintegrating. He\’d have to open up the case to see if the planetaries were okay. This would be a $250 repair, minimum, but probably more like $2500.

As an aside, Mazda 626s are junk. They are comfortable cars if you value creature comforts, but their transmissions are the worst in the world. The transmission guy said \”Yeah, I see a lot of those. We have six of \’em on the lot right now.\” A word to the wise.

So basically, the time had come.

I\’ve been shopping for a car since December, and I had pretty much narrowed it down to the Honda Fit, the Scion xA, or the Ford Focus, but when I went to the Toyota dealership in town, another prospect presented itself. The Toyota Yaris. After a little research, I determined that a: I could afford it. b: I could NOT afford the advice of car writers who advised spending \”a little extra\” to get a Camry or Corolla. And c: I didn\’t want to buy a Ford. The Honda Fit and the Scion were still in the lead, but each had a strike against them: the dealership didn\’t have any Scions with manual transmissions (and weren\’t likely to get one in, given that the xA is being discontinued), and the Honda Fit had a three month waiting period for the style I wanted. So I went with the Yaris. I got a five-speed hatchback. It has air conditioning and a cd player, but no other real upgrades. In truth, I didn\’t want them. I\’m paranoid about power windows–always have been–and power locks are convenient, but not essential. I would have liked ABS brakes, but that would have pushed the price higher than I would like. The picture attached to this post is not my car, but that\’s what it looks like, color and everything.

A manual transmission? Yep. I\’ve never owned one before, but I do know how to drive one. This is apparently becoming a rare skill. I\’ll be damned if I was going to buy another automatic. Automatics have been nothing but heartache for me. I hope to be driving this car ten years from now, and even after the warranty expires in five or six years, I won\’t fear a repair bill short of a blown head gasket or somesuch.

Beyond all this, I have a new car for the first time ever–it still has that \”new car smell.\” I don\’t think I\’ve ever even driven a car that had mileage in the double digits (now triple digits), other than test vehicles. I appear to be getting about 39 mpg, too, which is one of the other reasons I got this car. My payment is higher than my old payment, but the gas savings almost makes up for it. And my insurance went down by a couple of bucks. Better still, I won\’t be on the hook for ANY repair bill for another 100,000 miles. Five years without a repair bill? I\’ve NEVER had something like that before.

The only way this could be better is if it were shaped like a big high heeled pump. But that would have been pushing it.

Christi\’s New Car

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1177954743-hr-1110.jpg\”

I\’ve been having transportation problems for most of the year. Back in December, my Mazda 626 developed two problems, one masking the other. The prominent problem was a pronounced noise as my front wheel bearings and axle went bad. Hiding under that problem was a transmission that was beginning to go tits up. This was the second transmission to go bad in this car in the 2 and a half years I\’ve owned it. So in December, I basically mothballed the car with the intention of paying it off before buying a new car. At the time, I was still wedded to the car to the tune $2500, which I did NOT want to roll into a new payment. Fortunately, Felicia\’s car was running fine, so we\’ve been car-pooling for the last four months. Unfortunately, this didn\’t work out so well. Her schedule and mine did NOT match at all, and this came to a head last week, when I would have to be waiting for her from 7 am to 10 pm on a couple of nights. Fool that I am, I decided to try driving the Mazda for the days that were the worst. It was still drivable, so what the hell, right? Famous last words. It made the 25 mile trip to work last Monday without incident. The trip home was another matter. I wound up having to tow it to the transmission shop, where the computer told the transmission guy that my torque converter was basically disintegrating. He\’d have to open up the case to see if the planetaries were okay. This would be a $250 repair, minimum, but probably more like $2500.

As an aside, Mazda 626s are junk. They are comfortable cars if you value creature comforts, but their transmissions are the worst in the world. The transmission guy said \”Yeah, I see a lot of those. We have six of \’em on the lot right now.\” A word to the wise.

So basically, the time had come.

I\’ve been shopping for a car since December, and I had pretty much narrowed it down to the Honda Fit, the Scion xA, or the Ford Focus, but when I went to the Toyota dealership in town, another prospect presented itself. The Toyota Yaris. After a little research, I determined that a: I could afford it. b: I could NOT afford the advice of car writers who advised spending \”a little extra\” to get a Camry or Corolla. And c: I didn\’t want to buy a Ford. The Honda Fit and the Scion were still in the lead, but each had a strike against them: the dealership didn\’t have any Scions with manual transmissions (and weren\’t likely to get one in, given that the xA is being discontinued), and the Honda Fit had a three month waiting period for the style I wanted. So I went with the Yaris. I got a five-speed hatchback. It has air conditioning and a cd player, but no other real upgrades. In truth, I didn\’t want them. I\’m paranoid about power windows–always have been–and power locks are convenient, but not essential. I would have liked ABS brakes, but that would have pushed the price higher than I would like. The picture attached to this post is not my car, but that\’s what it looks like, color and everything.

A manual transmission? Yep. I\’ve never owned one before, but I do know how to drive one. This is apparently becoming a rare skill. I\’ll be damned if I was going to buy another automatic. Automatics have been nothing but heartache for me. I hope to be driving this car ten years from now, and even after the warranty expires in five or six years, I won\’t fear a repair bill short of a blown head gasket or somesuch.

Beyond all this, I have a new car for the first time ever–it still has that \”new car smell.\” I don\’t think I\’ve ever even driven a car that had mileage in the double digits (now triple digits), other than test vehicles. I appear to be getting about 39 mpg, too, which is one of the other reasons I got this car. My payment is higher than my old payment, but the gas savings almost makes up for it. And my insurance went down by a couple of bucks. Better still, I won\’t be on the hook for ANY repair bill for another 100,000 miles. Five years without a repair bill? I\’ve NEVER had something like that before.

The only way this could be better is if it were shaped like a big high heeled pump. But that would have been pushing it.

Rules of Engagement, revisited…

This is my 200th blog entry, so I thought I’d recap some of my standards for new contacts. My apologies if I sound like a stuck-up bitch here, but, like Popeye, I yam what I yam.

First: If you have no photographs of your face on your profile, I’ll look at you askance. A cartoon character is not a photograph.

Second: If you have no content on your profile–content you’ve provided yourself rather than from other sources–I’ll probably ignore you.

Rules 1 and 2 work like this: If you have a picture, but no content, I’ll probably ignore you. If you have interesting content but no picture, I’ll probably “friend” you, though I’d still love to see what you look like.

Third: If your pictures and content are in bad taste, I’ll probably ignore you. What’s in bad taste? Depends. I reserve the right to act as final arbiter–it’s my page after all–and as a certain Supreme Court Justice once said, I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. I’ll also invoke John Waters’s distinction between “good bad taste” and “bad bad taste.” Certainly, there are plenty of people on my friends list with risque or downright pornographic material on their pages. I’d rather see something pornographic done with style than something below the threshold with no style at all.

Fourth: If you’re trolling for a sex partner, move along. I don’t use this page for that purpose.

Fifth: My grammar and spelling aren’t perfect, but at least I make an effort. Please return the courtesy. I ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS ignore anything sent to me in text-speak, without exception.

Sixth: While I love my transgendered sisters, just because you and I are both trans doesn’t mean we have much in common. I’m fairly forgiving on this, but conversations about trans-ness get old in a hurry. Ask yourself if you share my interests before you contact me. How will you know? Read through my blog, for starters.

Finally, some facts about this page. Everything on my page is open to the public (fool that I am). There is no secret archive of extra-naughty pictures here, no clandestine conversation. Friend or not, you can send me messages, leave comments, and view everything that I post here. If you want to keep track of me, you can add me to your “favorites” without friending me and get most of the benefits of being my “friend” (you won’t get a YIM contact, but you probably won’t find me on YIM in the first place; I don’t chat all that much these days). The best part is that you don’t need my approval for this.

Scattershot

I’ve been lazy about blogging lately, but given the amount of updates from everyone else on my list, I’m thinking it may be a kind of seasonal malaise. Blog fatigue, if you will. There’s no overall theme to this entry. Just some thoughts about my recent doings:

I got out to see Grindhouse this week. It was fun, but I walked away from it unsatisfied. The problem I had with it was that the fake trailers were more entertaining than the faux grindhouse movies provided by Messr’s Rodriguez and Tarantino, though this may, in fact, be an authentic grindhouse occurrence. Planet Terror was too goofy to really stick in my memory, while Death Proof seems like a hollow echo of Tarantino’s previous films. Not content to rake through the detritus of the cinematic fringes for material, he’s now cannibalizing himself. I don’t know what the hell the Cannes film festival is thinking in making this an official selection this year. I hear that Rodriguez is going ahead with an actual movie based on his “Machete” trailer, which pleases me. I’ve always felt that Danny Trejo was the heir apparent to exploitation bad-ass William Smith. Would that we could get films from “Don’t” and “Thanksgiving” (best line in the whole shebang: “White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved on…Thanksgiving”). Rob Zombie’s “Werewolf Women of the S.S.” was a bit too over the top to be credible, unfortunately. A fly in the ointment.

If you’re interested in programming your own grindhouse festival, the following are on DVD and come with a conditional recommendation (conditional in so far as you really need to have an appetite for these sorts of films to enjoy them):

Truck Turner. Isaac Hayes as a bad-ass. Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols as Mama, foul-mouthed queen of the prostitutes.
The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. Featuring (dead Playboy Playmate) Claudia Jennings and Jocelyn Jones as bank-robbing good-time girls. The similarity between this movie and Thelma and Louise is disturbing, exploitation elements not withstanding.
Ms.45. Fuck with her and she’ll blow you away…
The Great Silence. A completely nihilistic spaghetti western starring Klaus Kinski. From the maker of Django. Easily as good as the Leone/Eastwood films. Maybe even better than a couple of them.
Pretty Maids All In A Row. A sexploitation film starring Rock Hudson, directed by Roger Vadim, and written by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenbery! Even James Doohan has a bit part. Beam me up, Scotty.
Tokyo Drifter. The yakuza movie as Pop Art freak-out.
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The apotheosis of American obssessions with fast cars and big tits.

I also started my container garden last week. I got a seed starter, as usual. This year, I’m doing basil again, and also Roma tomatoes and Bell peppers. I’ve never had good luck with Bell peppers. They always turn out runty. I may also add jalapenos and canteloupe–though I think I’d be better off growing canteloupe out in the yard itself. The most amazing thing happened when I started the seeds though. The basil seeds claim that they take three to ten days to germinate. I sowed them on the top of the pellets without burying them this year, and I watched in amazement as the seeds germinated in three minutes. Three minutes! No time-lapse photography required! I don’t understand why fresh basil is expensive. You look at it cross-eyed and it grows.

I should be getting out next weekend. I don’t get out much right now, partly because I’m still sharing a vehicle with my SO and partly because I’m constantly growing a beard for my electrolysis. Next weekend should work out, though. I haven’t taken any pictures since January. If I’m not careful, they’ll take away my tranny license.

Cheers.

All Politics is Local, revisited

As I’ve said in the past, I used to think of myself as a moderate. Those days are long gone thanks to the last six years of misrule, but with each new scandal that unfolds in the press these days–seemingly a new scandal every other day, no less– I have to keep telling myself that it could be worse. It could be the idiots that currently run Missouri running the country.

While I realize that state governments do a lot of things–or are supposed to do a lot of things–the two most important things to my mind are maintaining the roads and maintaining the schools. If you’ve driven through Missouri recently, you’ll get an idea of how adept our current administration is at the former, and even though Missouri is relatively prosperous (compared to, say, Mississippi), it consistently ranks at the bottom of the country when it comes to education. So what has occupied the current state government? Two things, mainly: overturning Roe v. Wade and passing nonsense resolutions declaring that the United States is “A Christian Nation.” I wish I was exaggerating. Unfortunately, I’m not. This is not why I pay my taxes.

I thought of this because it became clear to me this morning that my state government is doing something else with its time: it’s catering to the plutocracy. Let me put this into some kind of perspective: in last year’s elections, the voters of Missouri voted to raise the state’s minimum wage. Missouri is a relatively “red” state, so no one was more shocked than I was when this ballot initiative passed by a 3-1 margin. Three to one. 75 percent of voters voted for it. Even the most bone-headedly ignorant politician understands those kinds of numbers. Or one would think. One other small detail from the last election: Democrats made gains in the state legislature for the first time in over a generation. Significant gains, though not enough to win a majority. One would think that the party in power would take notice of THIS, too. But you would be wrong. Since it reconvened earlier this year, our legislature has been trying to overturn last year’s ballot initiative on minimum wage through back-door technicalities. To which, I have to marvel at the cheek. Do they not realize that if you take that to the voters in the next election, they’re going to toss your sorry ass out of a job (possibly after applying tar and feathers and conducting you out of the capitol on a rail)? “We know that you overwhelmingly passed this measure, but WE know better than you ignorant voters.” That’ll play well, even in the areas around Springfield where the state is the reddest.

Geniuses, every one of them.

Peer Pressure is a bitch…

This is Laura’s fault. Here’s my current little slice of freely-associated heaven. And, yes, I know how goofy the top of the list is. It appeals to me. So sue me.

Enjoy.

Androgynous

I don’t have anything important to say, but to keep my hand in the game, here’s the lyrics to “Androgynous” by The Replacements (written by Paul Westerberg):

Here comes Dick, he’s wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane, y’know she’s sporting a chain
Same hair, revolution
Same build, evolution
Tomorrow who’s gonna fuss

And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous

Don’t get him wrong and don’t get him mad
He might be a father, but he sure ain’t a dad
And she don’t need advice that’s sent at her
She’s happy with the way she looks
She’s happy with her gender

Mirror image, see no damage
See no evil at all
Kewpie dolls and urine stalls
Will be laughed at
The way you’re laughed at now

Now, something meets boy, and something meets girl
They both look the same
They’re overjoyed in this world
Same hair, revolution
Unisex, evolution
Tomorrow who’s gonna fuss
And tomorrow Dick is wearing pants
And tomorrow Janie’s wearing a dress
Future outcasts and they don’t last
And today, the people dress the way that they please
The way they tried to do in the last centuries

If only this were true…

Enjoy.