Puppy Love – Part 2

My beautiful baby Eva has just recently turned 6 months old. She’s doing great, as am I. She gets more adorable everyday and I’m so glad we got her, she’s a blessing. We’re now a few weeks into her doggy school and she is doing, umm, well she is attending at least, haha. She’s made a few friends in the neighborhood, which I’m thrilled for too.

If I could ask Eva 10 questions, I think they would go something like this:

1. Why do you insist on stealing my seat whenever I get up? It doesn’t even matter where I’m sitting, I could sit on the floor in the corner of the room and you would steal it. What’s that all about?
2. Why whenever I try to put you to bed at night do you run the other way, and then proceed to run into your crate anyway, which is exactly where I was going to take you in the first place?
3. Why do you have to dig up my entire lawn?

Puppy Love

First let me answer some questions before they get asked.  No I’m not dead.  Yes I still have access to a computer and the internet.  Yes I still know how to write, relatively speaking of course.  Ummmm, I think that should about cover it.  Let me know if I missed anything.

Okay, on to the post…

Green is good!

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Green.  I’m not talking about money, I really don’t care for the stuff enough to waste my time thinking about it.  Unless of course I don’t have enough to pay the bills, in which case I think about it constantly.  Luckily for me I don’t need to spend my time worrying about it right now.  Let’s hope that holds true for a while.  What I’m talking about is Eco-friendly.  I’m seriously considering getting an electric car when they finally come out in 2012.  Now, electric cars have been out before, but never have they been given the chance to succeed the way they will be this time……hopefully.  If you’ve never seen “Who killed the electric car”, I highly recommend watching it.  It’s without a doubt my favourite documentary, and one of the main ideas that have pushed me towards wanting to own an electric car.  It’s funny and sad all at the same time that the electric car used to be more popular than the gas-powered car, but somewhere along the way we got sidetracked.  Or more likely, some people with lots of money and a rooting interest in gas/oil figured out a way to sidetrack us.  Watch the movie and decide for yourself.

I’ve also been looking at a number of other green initiatives and alternate energy products, but that’s not what this is about.  This is about a test drive I went on the other day.  The test drive was for an electric car.  As far as I know, the only electric car currently available in North America that is street legal (I could be wrong but, who can keep track).  The car that I went for the ride in costs about *cough, cough* a gazillion dollars $175,000.  Now keep in mind that’s Canadian dollars, so it’s probably about $75.99 American!

Yep, that’s right, $175,000!  I’ll point out now that I went along for the test drive, I did not in fact drive the car myself.  That would be stupid IMO.  I have no interest in driving a car owned by somebody I don’t know that costs more than I make in…….well, let’s just say more than a couple of years and leave it at that.  I don’t need more problems, so I was more than happy to sit in the passenger seat and just enjoy the ride.  Even if by some chance I did have the kind of cash that this car costs, I can safely say that I’d be more likely to lend it to one of my readers than to spend it on a car, no matter how nice it is.  That’s not to say that I plan on giving a large chunk of cash to the first person to comment (or the 5th), but more so that I have better things to do with my money than spend 10 times as much as I need to in order to get from point A to point B.  Don’t let that stop you from commenting though, you can never be to sure when I’ll mail off a cheque to you for being a loyal reader!

Does your ashtray work?

Searching for Biker Images seems to return a disproportionate amount of hot chicks on bikes.....No, I'm not talking about this pic.

With groceries securely packed in the back of my car, ice cream slowly melting, I headed home.  As I got off the highway I noticed the pack of bikers driving behind me, which wasn’t hard with how loud their bikes were.  There were 5 of them in all.  I found it ironic that they were driving so close behind me, so close that if I opened my hatchback I could probably reach out and touch them.  I’ve always heard people say that you shouldn’t follow too closely when there are motorcycles in front of you.  Apparently the same rule doesn’t apply to them.

I lit up a cigarette.  Bad, I know.  But that’s just the way it is.  A minute later I was pulling up to a stop light, about 6 cars back, waiting to make my right hand turn and get home.  The rumbling caught my attention again and I looked in the mirror to see the bikers coming to a stop behind me.  Well, most of them.  For some strange reason one of them was actually pulling up beside me.  The first thought through my head was, “Is he really going to be so impatient that he’s going to squeeze between me and the car next to me just so he doesn’t have to wait at the light?”.  That thought quickly left my brain when he got next to my driver’s side door and stopped.  Then he turned and looked at me.  Awkward!

Electric cars don’t need gas…

A couple of days ago I pulled the battery out of my ’98 Dodge Dakota, since, for whatever reason, it was dead and I couldn’t get it to charge properly while it was in the car.  Taking one last stab at it I borrowed a battery charger and hooked it up in my garage.  Getting the battery out of the car was no small feat I’ve gotta say.  Whoever put the new battery in last had stripped the nut that holds the negative wire to the battery and now it was basically round.  After much work I managed to loosen it a tiny bit and then pried it off of the battery.  Step 1 completed.

Once I managed to get it out of the car I hooked the charger up to it in my garage and left it for the night.  I’ll be honest and say that I wasn’t getting my hopes up as to whether it would actually charge.  My truck has always run fine, and I’ve never really had any problems with the battery until recently.  I’ve had the truck for about 12 years now, so I certainly can’t complain about how it’s treated me to this point.  I’d probably still be driving it if I hadn’t moved so far away from work.  Making the 40 minute drive each way to and from work everyday was getting a little expensive on the gas.  A 10-year-old pickup truck you may be surprised to know is not the most fuel-efficient vehicle in the world.  I believe I was filling up, pretty much every 3 days.  So that’s about $90 – $135 per week in gas alone.  Ouch.  Then there were the constant repairs that kept creeping up.  Like when I took it in for some service, which included some work on the tires among other things.  Then I drove tried to drive home only to find out about half way that my front brakes had seized up.  Of course the fact that it was fine before and they had just had the tires off couldn’t possibly mean that they did something, so it was left to me to pay for after much arguing.  Then there was something else a few weeks later, another $400.  Then another repair…..and a month later another.  It was starting to cost me almost as much as it did when I was actually making payments on it.  Probably more if you include the amount of gas I was going through.  The decision was made to buy a new car.  I only had that new car for about 2 months, but that’s a story for another day.  So 2 months after buying that new car I bought another new car.  Needless to say Nissan loves me, and believe me, everybody there knows my name, haha.

Oops, I’ve strayed from my story haven’t I?  Okay, where was I again?  Aahhh that’s right.