Ave Maria! (And More!)
Jan. 25th, 2026 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aI: AVE MARIA
We've now had our new Kia for almost a week. We actually haven't taken it out much, but then we don't drive a lot. So she came home with us on Tuesday and has been out to the golf course and the ramen restaurant since.
We of course needed a name for the new car. She's a sparkly white car, and so my first suggestion was Emma, after one of my favorite X-Men characters, the White Queen. But, that had zero resonance for K., I think because Emma wasn't in the '90s cartoon. So after playing around with names a bit, we eventually came up with Maria Kia, because it's a nice rhyme-y name.
Maria turns out to have a lot of songs about her, but most of them aren't very good, and most of them aren't very memorable. There's a lot of "Maria, Maria, Maria." The one obviously good and memorable is obviously "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" but we hope we won't be singing that for a long time. (There was also a Blondie song we enjoyed, but it wasn't memorable, just pleasant.)
Oh and I should note that white would have been pretty much bottom of my list for car colors, because anything white on Kauai quickly turns to red because of the high amount of iron oxide in our soil (a slow transformation that has taken hundreds of thousands of years and so doesn't show up on the other islands). On the other hand, since I've been driving again I've noticed that brightly colored cars are a lot easier to see than darkly colored cars (like our belovéd, lost Julie), so that's probably a plus even if she ends up sparkly white with a red skirt.
II: THE BIKE DILEMMA
My biggest dilemma with the Kia at the moment: I don't have a way to transport my bike.
Julie had a 2" receiver hitch, and I used that to mount my bike rack. It's a decently good bike rack, which I measure by the fact that it's sturdy and I could get it on or off Julie in just a few minutes when I was just packing my own bike. (Two bikes took more time because they had to be pretty carefully arranged.) I've seen my dad use a bike rack that has to be hand mounted every time on his car, and it takes much more time/effort, so I'd prefer to go with the tried and trued.
Kia has a standard receiver hitch for Maria, but it's smaller 1.25" hitch. Now I could get a bike rack at that size, but they're reportedly flimsier.
And I've found at least one third-party 2" hitch that should fit Maria, but it looks like a slight pain to mount due to a a need to "drop" the muffler and cut a panel, and so I think I'd prefer to have a shop do it ... and the Kia dealership won't mount a third-party add-on.
Which, whatever.
The bigger problem here is that I really can't ride my bike until I get this all resolved. There are basically only two ways out of neighborhood, one is the highway, and the other is another high-speed road. Neither of them has reliable shoulders. All of them have tourists too taken in by the scenery. I can take a short little loop around the golf course that's between a mile or two but if I want to get out to anywhere else safe to ride, I need to pack my bike on Maria.
I've got a query in to our salesman if he recommends any other mechanics on island for working on a Kia. But I still need to do some work to make sure I've got the proper 2" hitch and that dropping back to a 1.25" rack wouldn't make more sense, and I haven't been diving into that because ...
III: A PRESENT YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR
I got another little gift I didn't ask for from Kia: a cold.
We were sitting around the dealership for four hours between Monday and Tuesday, but I suspect the culprit was all the handshaking that's still an unfortunate part of modern business dealing. I had really hoped it had gone away with COVID. We were happily fist-bumping here on island, but nope, the plague-carrying handshake is back.
I rarely get sick. I hadn't been sick since a few years before COVID, but now I've gotten two colds in six months or so. Super annoying! (The other one came home with us from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.)
IV: THE ELMER REPORT
We got the cutest picture of our former kit Elmer today. He was staring out at the snow in his new home on the East Coast!
It struck me as entirely amazing that our Kauai cat, who had never known climate control or a temperature much under 60 can now stare out at snow. But that's the weird, wonderful interconnected world we now live in. (As is you being able to read this, in the US, or Europe, or Australia, or wherever you are; so different from the much more balkanized world I grew up in, where distant states, let alone distant countries were just a distant dream.)
Every picture of Elmer we see, he appears to be happy and content (though perhaps a bit confused in today's picture with the snow!).
Meanwhile, our household is so much improved four months on. (K. and I were shocked to realize it was only four months!) Megara continues to grow less scared every day. Mango doesn't scurry through the downstairs trying to ward off attacks. And K. and I aren't constantly vigilant for the same.
So that continues to be the best of decisions, even if it was expensive and stressful at the time.
We've now had our new Kia for almost a week. We actually haven't taken it out much, but then we don't drive a lot. So she came home with us on Tuesday and has been out to the golf course and the ramen restaurant since.
We of course needed a name for the new car. She's a sparkly white car, and so my first suggestion was Emma, after one of my favorite X-Men characters, the White Queen. But, that had zero resonance for K., I think because Emma wasn't in the '90s cartoon. So after playing around with names a bit, we eventually came up with Maria Kia, because it's a nice rhyme-y name.
Maria turns out to have a lot of songs about her, but most of them aren't very good, and most of them aren't very memorable. There's a lot of "Maria, Maria, Maria." The one obviously good and memorable is obviously "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" but we hope we won't be singing that for a long time. (There was also a Blondie song we enjoyed, but it wasn't memorable, just pleasant.)
Oh and I should note that white would have been pretty much bottom of my list for car colors, because anything white on Kauai quickly turns to red because of the high amount of iron oxide in our soil (a slow transformation that has taken hundreds of thousands of years and so doesn't show up on the other islands). On the other hand, since I've been driving again I've noticed that brightly colored cars are a lot easier to see than darkly colored cars (like our belovéd, lost Julie), so that's probably a plus even if she ends up sparkly white with a red skirt.
II: THE BIKE DILEMMA
My biggest dilemma with the Kia at the moment: I don't have a way to transport my bike.
Julie had a 2" receiver hitch, and I used that to mount my bike rack. It's a decently good bike rack, which I measure by the fact that it's sturdy and I could get it on or off Julie in just a few minutes when I was just packing my own bike. (Two bikes took more time because they had to be pretty carefully arranged.) I've seen my dad use a bike rack that has to be hand mounted every time on his car, and it takes much more time/effort, so I'd prefer to go with the tried and trued.
Kia has a standard receiver hitch for Maria, but it's smaller 1.25" hitch. Now I could get a bike rack at that size, but they're reportedly flimsier.
And I've found at least one third-party 2" hitch that should fit Maria, but it looks like a slight pain to mount due to a a need to "drop" the muffler and cut a panel, and so I think I'd prefer to have a shop do it ... and the Kia dealership won't mount a third-party add-on.
Which, whatever.
The bigger problem here is that I really can't ride my bike until I get this all resolved. There are basically only two ways out of neighborhood, one is the highway, and the other is another high-speed road. Neither of them has reliable shoulders. All of them have tourists too taken in by the scenery. I can take a short little loop around the golf course that's between a mile or two but if I want to get out to anywhere else safe to ride, I need to pack my bike on Maria.
I've got a query in to our salesman if he recommends any other mechanics on island for working on a Kia. But I still need to do some work to make sure I've got the proper 2" hitch and that dropping back to a 1.25" rack wouldn't make more sense, and I haven't been diving into that because ...
III: A PRESENT YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR
I got another little gift I didn't ask for from Kia: a cold.
We were sitting around the dealership for four hours between Monday and Tuesday, but I suspect the culprit was all the handshaking that's still an unfortunate part of modern business dealing. I had really hoped it had gone away with COVID. We were happily fist-bumping here on island, but nope, the plague-carrying handshake is back.
I rarely get sick. I hadn't been sick since a few years before COVID, but now I've gotten two colds in six months or so. Super annoying! (The other one came home with us from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.)
IV: THE ELMER REPORT
We got the cutest picture of our former kit Elmer today. He was staring out at the snow in his new home on the East Coast!
It struck me as entirely amazing that our Kauai cat, who had never known climate control or a temperature much under 60 can now stare out at snow. But that's the weird, wonderful interconnected world we now live in. (As is you being able to read this, in the US, or Europe, or Australia, or wherever you are; so different from the much more balkanized world I grew up in, where distant states, let alone distant countries were just a distant dream.)
Every picture of Elmer we see, he appears to be happy and content (though perhaps a bit confused in today's picture with the snow!).
Meanwhile, our household is so much improved four months on. (K. and I were shocked to realize it was only four months!) Megara continues to grow less scared every day. Mango doesn't scurry through the downstairs trying to ward off attacks. And K. and I aren't constantly vigilant for the same.
So that continues to be the best of decisions, even if it was expensive and stressful at the time.