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Carmageddon Day 31 (and more)
Aug. 4th, 2022 07:53 pmCARMAGEDDON DAY 31
Two weeks ago I was enthused when our local mechanics at Destination Auto called us up to say that Mercedes Benz of Honolulu would have be on island today to inspect and repair cars affected by their stop-drive-order that could result in total brake failure. After initially jockeying around an 8.30am time, which was apparently when the mechanic was arriving, we settled on 10am, a time when I was more willing to go into town, post-rush-hour traffic. Mind you, that date was still 16 days away at the time, after 14 days of not having a car previously, but I had a date. All was good.
Today I took my car in. Destination Auto was jammed full of cars as usual, to the point where I couldn't totally pull Julie into their driveway. (Maybe I could have, but the line of cars to one side and the palm tree to the other created a narrow enough gap in their driveway to intimidate me, as I decided I was headed toward the palm tree after pulling partway in.) But inside it looked like no one was even working. I handed over my keys, figuring I was going to need to walk over to lunch and sit around for an hour or two, as that's how long they'd told me it'd take, but it turns out the Honolulu mechanic was just sitting around, with no cars to look at. I was told it would be quick and I should stay put, so I sat down in their office (mask on), and worked on my computer for 10 or 15 minutes. And then Julie was back, with a certificate saying she'd been inspected, a warning that I'd get a message in a couple of years saying she needed a new inspection, and the OK to drive.
Finally.
Oh, hey, one reason they might have had no cars today? When Kimberly initially talked with the Destination Auto people two weeks ago, she learned that were doing an initial day of work on Kauai cars, I think it was that Thursday. Apparently they did the older model cars first. Which is fair enough, as older models had more time for their defective brakes to corrode. But it was yet another thing that Mercedes Benz had never told us: that they were starting to resolve the problem, and that we just needed to wait for the second batch. Anyway, from their turnout today, that was most of the affected Mercedes Benz on island. We apparently did not do a great job of being squeaky wheels (except it sounds like we got the very first call for the second batch).
After the whole carless month-long ordeal, I am pretty pissed at Mercedes Benz who has been revealed as a typical soulless corporation who puts themselves above their customers. Again, it's not about the long wait; it was going to take as long as it took on-island. Instead, it was about the fact that Mercedes Benz issued the top-level of safety recall, a stop-drive-order, and literally told their customers not to drive their cars, and that they might be liable for any accidents if they did. They chose to do that to cover their own asses, but at the same time their dealers and their mechanics were telling everyone that it wasn't a big deal, that we should go ahead and drive, that in fact we had no other way to get our car inspected but to drive it in. They put their customers in a legal hotspot, and in a situation where they might not have a car and then had their representatives saying that they'd essentially done so fraudulently, that the problem wasn't as they described.
But we have a car again.
SEEING OTHER CARS
Over the course of Carmageddon, I drove my dad's car into town three time (and over to Koloa once for some badly needed tasty dinner at Savage Shrimp).
It was very kind of him to lend me the car.
And I am *so* happy to have Julie back.
My dad's car is actually the only car other than Julie that I've driven in the last 30+ years. But I was still surprised how uncomfortable I was driving it. Part of it was just that all the controls were in different places, so I never got comfortable with the windshield wipers, let alone the cruise control. But it was also that it was so much *lower* than Julie, who is an SUV. I felt like I couldn't see anything! (The lack of a back-up cam didn't help).
So happy to be driving my own car.
LEARNING HOW TO DO CONTRACT WORK RIGHT
Another little revelation in recent weeks!
I've beens struggling recently to make time for things like invoicing my clients and filling out tax forms (most recently, for my Hawaiian excise taxes, which got delayed considerably because of Hawaii's long-time inability to get me a Taxid, until we finally were able to finalize our 2020 taxes near the end of 2021.)
It was just hard doing a day of work, and then going into my office sometime in the evening to do more.
Duh! Invoices and taxing are part of my contract work! They should be done in regular work time!
So the last few Friday's I've scheduled part of my days for dealing with ephemera, everything from making my plane reservations to the next Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshop to filling out forms for four semi-years of excise taxes. (Mostly done now!)
Now the trick is to make sure this administrative work doesn't overcome my real work.
A TRIP TO THE NETHERLANDS
So the next Rebooting Web of Trust is in the Netherlands, at the end of next month.
This is our first design workshop in 2.5 years, so that's exciting.
It's also (obviously) our first since COVID, and obviously there's concern in getting sick just before the trip or getting stuck in the Netherlands or who knows what. (So all of our tickets and hotel are refundable, and I need to finalize with some Traveler's Insurance, to pay costs if I get sick out there.)
I'm really looking forward to it though. When we moved to Kauai, part of my gameplan was to have twice a year trips off the island for RWOT work, and clearly that didn't happen. But now I also get the trick of learning how to make that work with my contract work. RWOT is technically one of my clients, but I'm also going to be losing 2 weeks with everyone else.
And, oh, figuring out those plane tickets was tricky. I'm making a stopover in San Jose in the way out, and I managed to a flight back all in one day, but none of it was easy. Hawaiian has talked about starting to have direct flights to Europe in a few years, on some new big planes, and I *really* hope that happens to make this easier!
THE STATE OF LUCY
I haven't written much about Lucy this year. She's been in at the vet quite a lot. There's nothing acutely wrong with her, except the fact that her 3 years of weight loss are starting to hit a dangerous level.
So, we've done testing, showing nothing. Good thyroid, good kidneys.
We gave her some appetite stimulant for a while, and even after going off of it she's demanding food every few hours, but pretty much only eating wet food, rather than free-grazing her dry food, and that's getting tiring.
So, I dunno. We've got another appointment on Monday. We're going to check her weight (which hasn't dropped since she started eating more, but hasn't starting returning either), and I also asked the doc to look at her teeth, to make sure there's not something there making her more reluctant to eat.
THINGS TO DO
The deficit of having Julie back? I can now start doing a lot of things that I wasn't doing because I had no car.
And some of that is car related. Something's wrong with her A/C. I think/hope it's just the freon pressure has dropped, since it seemed slightly gradual. And new back tires were on my TODO list for about now. I don't mind the costs. That's part of having a car. It's just a pain to get her into a shop and then get back home with us living out of town and being a one-car household.
Annoyingly, her "auxiliary" battery may have died from a month of non-use. It was definitely warning when I went out this morning, but I'd hoped it had maybe just discharged and would get back once I ran the car. But I'll see for sure when I turn her on for whatever I do on Saturday.
And I've also got a bunch of health stuff to take care of, but that's all later in the month. I put off my second booster so it'd be pretty fresh for the trip. I think I read that a month was the maximal efficacy, but I need to check that. If so, I should get it in about two weeks. And I have a shingles vaccine on my list for the same time.
And I need to do a fasting blood draw sometime before the end of the month for an appointment in September.
Was the annoying month without a car a way to give us a quiet break? I dunno. Very happy to be able to spontaneously leave the house again though.
Two weeks ago I was enthused when our local mechanics at Destination Auto called us up to say that Mercedes Benz of Honolulu would have be on island today to inspect and repair cars affected by their stop-drive-order that could result in total brake failure. After initially jockeying around an 8.30am time, which was apparently when the mechanic was arriving, we settled on 10am, a time when I was more willing to go into town, post-rush-hour traffic. Mind you, that date was still 16 days away at the time, after 14 days of not having a car previously, but I had a date. All was good.
Today I took my car in. Destination Auto was jammed full of cars as usual, to the point where I couldn't totally pull Julie into their driveway. (Maybe I could have, but the line of cars to one side and the palm tree to the other created a narrow enough gap in their driveway to intimidate me, as I decided I was headed toward the palm tree after pulling partway in.) But inside it looked like no one was even working. I handed over my keys, figuring I was going to need to walk over to lunch and sit around for an hour or two, as that's how long they'd told me it'd take, but it turns out the Honolulu mechanic was just sitting around, with no cars to look at. I was told it would be quick and I should stay put, so I sat down in their office (mask on), and worked on my computer for 10 or 15 minutes. And then Julie was back, with a certificate saying she'd been inspected, a warning that I'd get a message in a couple of years saying she needed a new inspection, and the OK to drive.
Finally.
Oh, hey, one reason they might have had no cars today? When Kimberly initially talked with the Destination Auto people two weeks ago, she learned that were doing an initial day of work on Kauai cars, I think it was that Thursday. Apparently they did the older model cars first. Which is fair enough, as older models had more time for their defective brakes to corrode. But it was yet another thing that Mercedes Benz had never told us: that they were starting to resolve the problem, and that we just needed to wait for the second batch. Anyway, from their turnout today, that was most of the affected Mercedes Benz on island. We apparently did not do a great job of being squeaky wheels (except it sounds like we got the very first call for the second batch).
After the whole carless month-long ordeal, I am pretty pissed at Mercedes Benz who has been revealed as a typical soulless corporation who puts themselves above their customers. Again, it's not about the long wait; it was going to take as long as it took on-island. Instead, it was about the fact that Mercedes Benz issued the top-level of safety recall, a stop-drive-order, and literally told their customers not to drive their cars, and that they might be liable for any accidents if they did. They chose to do that to cover their own asses, but at the same time their dealers and their mechanics were telling everyone that it wasn't a big deal, that we should go ahead and drive, that in fact we had no other way to get our car inspected but to drive it in. They put their customers in a legal hotspot, and in a situation where they might not have a car and then had their representatives saying that they'd essentially done so fraudulently, that the problem wasn't as they described.
But we have a car again.
SEEING OTHER CARS
Over the course of Carmageddon, I drove my dad's car into town three time (and over to Koloa once for some badly needed tasty dinner at Savage Shrimp).
It was very kind of him to lend me the car.
And I am *so* happy to have Julie back.
My dad's car is actually the only car other than Julie that I've driven in the last 30+ years. But I was still surprised how uncomfortable I was driving it. Part of it was just that all the controls were in different places, so I never got comfortable with the windshield wipers, let alone the cruise control. But it was also that it was so much *lower* than Julie, who is an SUV. I felt like I couldn't see anything! (The lack of a back-up cam didn't help).
So happy to be driving my own car.
LEARNING HOW TO DO CONTRACT WORK RIGHT
Another little revelation in recent weeks!
I've beens struggling recently to make time for things like invoicing my clients and filling out tax forms (most recently, for my Hawaiian excise taxes, which got delayed considerably because of Hawaii's long-time inability to get me a Taxid, until we finally were able to finalize our 2020 taxes near the end of 2021.)
It was just hard doing a day of work, and then going into my office sometime in the evening to do more.
Duh! Invoices and taxing are part of my contract work! They should be done in regular work time!
So the last few Friday's I've scheduled part of my days for dealing with ephemera, everything from making my plane reservations to the next Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshop to filling out forms for four semi-years of excise taxes. (Mostly done now!)
Now the trick is to make sure this administrative work doesn't overcome my real work.
A TRIP TO THE NETHERLANDS
So the next Rebooting Web of Trust is in the Netherlands, at the end of next month.
This is our first design workshop in 2.5 years, so that's exciting.
It's also (obviously) our first since COVID, and obviously there's concern in getting sick just before the trip or getting stuck in the Netherlands or who knows what. (So all of our tickets and hotel are refundable, and I need to finalize with some Traveler's Insurance, to pay costs if I get sick out there.)
I'm really looking forward to it though. When we moved to Kauai, part of my gameplan was to have twice a year trips off the island for RWOT work, and clearly that didn't happen. But now I also get the trick of learning how to make that work with my contract work. RWOT is technically one of my clients, but I'm also going to be losing 2 weeks with everyone else.
And, oh, figuring out those plane tickets was tricky. I'm making a stopover in San Jose in the way out, and I managed to a flight back all in one day, but none of it was easy. Hawaiian has talked about starting to have direct flights to Europe in a few years, on some new big planes, and I *really* hope that happens to make this easier!
THE STATE OF LUCY
I haven't written much about Lucy this year. She's been in at the vet quite a lot. There's nothing acutely wrong with her, except the fact that her 3 years of weight loss are starting to hit a dangerous level.
So, we've done testing, showing nothing. Good thyroid, good kidneys.
We gave her some appetite stimulant for a while, and even after going off of it she's demanding food every few hours, but pretty much only eating wet food, rather than free-grazing her dry food, and that's getting tiring.
So, I dunno. We've got another appointment on Monday. We're going to check her weight (which hasn't dropped since she started eating more, but hasn't starting returning either), and I also asked the doc to look at her teeth, to make sure there's not something there making her more reluctant to eat.
THINGS TO DO
The deficit of having Julie back? I can now start doing a lot of things that I wasn't doing because I had no car.
And some of that is car related. Something's wrong with her A/C. I think/hope it's just the freon pressure has dropped, since it seemed slightly gradual. And new back tires were on my TODO list for about now. I don't mind the costs. That's part of having a car. It's just a pain to get her into a shop and then get back home with us living out of town and being a one-car household.
Annoyingly, her "auxiliary" battery may have died from a month of non-use. It was definitely warning when I went out this morning, but I'd hoped it had maybe just discharged and would get back once I ran the car. But I'll see for sure when I turn her on for whatever I do on Saturday.
And I've also got a bunch of health stuff to take care of, but that's all later in the month. I put off my second booster so it'd be pretty fresh for the trip. I think I read that a month was the maximal efficacy, but I need to check that. If so, I should get it in about two weeks. And I have a shingles vaccine on my list for the same time.
And I need to do a fasting blood draw sometime before the end of the month for an appointment in September.
Was the annoying month without a car a way to give us a quiet break? I dunno. Very happy to be able to spontaneously leave the house again though.