It's back!

It took multiple efforts, e-mails, phone calls, and coordination of schedules, but my beloved MacBook Air is finally back in my hands.  MyService repaired its hinges under an Apple recall and charged me just for shipping.  I have a whole new upper clamshell.

While I've been able to get along quite well with only my iPad (and the occasional jump onto Noel's or the kids' computer), there are certain things I haven't been able to do for a couple of weeks while my computer has been away.  Chief among them is getting photos off my camera.  I've completed a couple of projects and have started to document my new crafting area (the "before" photos, at least), and all of it is still sitting on my camera.  I'm excited about what I've made, and eager to share it with my readers and Ravelry friends.  A succession of crafting posts is in the offing.

With my computer back, it feels like projects that have been put on hold can now be resumed.  I can remeasure the room and order the furniture.  I have the flexibility to work on my various personal and professional tasks anywhere I am.  Car's fixed, computer's fixed, appliances are working.  Having one or more of those items out of service for periods of time recently has felt like a disadvantage, like having a temporary handicap.  Things that pose no obstacle in the ordinary course of events suddenly became difficult, or required workarounds and extra planning.

Something can break or get put out of commission at any time.  As I've said frequently, it always feels as if such things don't happen on an even schedule, but in clumps.  We had both computers in the shop at once, a car sitting in the mechanic's lot, and a strange leak around our A/C that we couldn't figure out.  But we were able to deal with all of it thanks to a relatively low-stress and lightly-scheduled summer calendar.  I sometimes get worked up over everything that goes wrong; when things get out of my control, I frequently lose my cool.  Although there were setbacks in some of these situations, by and large I was convinced that we were doing the right thing, taking care of business, being responsible and not just reacting to inevitable breakdowns.  Now I'm hoping that all that effort will be rewarded with reliability from our mechanical support situations during periods to come when failures would end up being far more inconveniencing.

Earning my trust

I've had a pleasant day of interactions with some of my favorite businesses. Just as a bad experience with a business can temporarily make you a raving misanthrope, dealing with people you trust and who treat you right fills the world with rainbows and your heart with love toward your fellow man.

Since 2001, when we bought our Subaru Outback, we've been patronizing Skip's Foreign Car Repair here in Conway. A good, honest mechanic is worth his weight in gold, and there are hundreds of us locally who are praying Skip never retires. He's quick, communicative, and tells it like it is. I had planned to take the Subaru to him next week to get an oil change and some service I knew was about to be needed -- like a new timing belt -- before we drive it to Tennessee in six weeks or so. Today I walked out to the garage and found that it had a flat tire. Well, no problem -- I'd just have it towed to Skip's and get that started a little early.

I asked Skip to check to see if we needed a whole new set of tires, and within the hour he called me back to say only the damaged one needed replacing. Off I went to tirerack.com, where I bought the car's last set of tires. Looked up my previous order so I could match the tires exactly, placed the order to drop-ship to Skip's, and the tire was on its way before the end of the day. There's another business whose wealth of information, professionalism, and empowerment of the customer gives me a wonderful experience and a wonderful feeling, every time.

And speaking of online businesses, let me conclude this post with a round of applause for MyService.com. We don't have an Apple authorized service provider in our town -- the closest one is Little Rock, and the closest Apple Store is Memphis. So when I need repairs on my computers that AppleCare doesn't cover, I get online and place an order with MyService. They'll send me a prepaid shipping box, do a complete free diagnostic, contact me frequently with information and ask my permission before doing any work, and ship it back promptly. What I like best about MyService is the reliable communication. The same person calls or emails to keep me abreast of everything I need to know about my order. I always feel secure that I know where my computer is, what's being done to it, and what I can expect next.

Trust is an essential component to a healthy mental life. I feel so fortunate being able to do business regularly with people I trust. And I'm happy to sing their praises to friends local and readers everywhere.

Commute

Today marked the last day that the kids needed to be ferried to Little Rock and back. SLUFY was great -- without a doubt worth it -- but the driving was hard on Noel and me. Well, mostly on Noel; I managed to get out with only one day of transport duty each week.

It was a 35 minute, 28-mile trip, each way, Monday through Friday. And then it was five hours of amusing one's self while the kids learned and grew. I don't mind the five hour down time -- I can log four hours at a coffeeshop with internet without breaking a sweat -- but the drive was exhausting, at least for me. The traffic, the rush, the monotony.

There are people who drive from Conway to Little Rock every day of their working lives. I suppose I'd get used to it if that were my lot. But I've spent way too much time with a .5 mile commute that I do on foot in a leisurely ten minutes. I've gotten attached to it, and correspondingly impatient with any time spent in an idling car or on a lengthy stretch of asphalt.

I've been working my way down to my minimal no-auto commute my whole life, it seems. As a kid, after we moved outside of town when I was in the eighth grade, it took 45 minutes to drive from our house to my high school. We left at 7 in order for me to make it before the 8 am bell. In grad school, I worked less than 10 miles from my apartment, but it took 20 minutes to get there on a good day since there was no way to bypass a lot of stop lights in the strip-mall district.

A few years ago I read a magazine story about how drastically every half hour of commuting time cuts into people's estimations of their quality of life. I love living right next to where I work, and every time I have to get back in the car to do some hard driving, I'm reminded of why.

Cars of my life, Part II: A car of one's own

Click here for Part I.



1988 Chevy Beretta. My parents bought my older brother a car (a 1984 Toyota Celica, I believe) when he graduated from college, and they continued the tradition with me. I remember test driving several cars before we settled on this little manual-transmission 5-speed. The silver paint job began to flake off the roof a few years later, and I found out that there was a recall on lots of GM cars with silver paint from that era. The car made it through one fairly significant wreck (a sun-in-your-eyes rear-ending in Athens that I'll not soon forget), and served me well for 12 years, making the journey from Chattanooga to Athens to Charlottesville and finally to Conway. It was retired in 2001 when I was seven months pregnant with Archer; we drove it to Little Rock one last time and traded it in for ...



2000 Subaru Outback. This car was a one-year-old demo car when we bought it, and it's still going strong eight years later. With our no-commute lifestyle, we don't put the miles on very fast. I think we're up to about 70,000 miles now. I really love this car, and I love my mechanic (Skip's Foreign Car Repair) even more. Which reminds me, I need to get the brakes serviced -- I'm sure our neighbors are tired of the squealing.



1989 Oldsmobile Toranado Trofeo. Noel bought this car used in Virginia in 1998 or thereabouts. The sale was brokered by one of our co-workers at GE Fanuc who was always wheeling and dealing several jalopies. We brought it here to Conway and used it as our emergency second car. After some kind of accident that I have blocked from my memory, the insurance labeled it totaled, and we basically stopped renewing the registration. We sold it to a couple of guys who were doing some work on the house and expressed interest. They apparently never filed for a title or registered it, because when it got seized in some kind of crime investigation about a year ago, we got notified by the police as if it still belonged to us.



2005 Honda Civic Hybrid. Remember how all the talk about hybrid cars was just starting up in 2004-2005? I had seen a couple of early models when they were brought on campus as part of an environmental sustainability week we were sponsoring. When we knew we needed a real second car to replace the unreliable junker we'd been using as our backup, I decided on a hybrid. At the time it was about greenhouse gas emissions. Now when I'm getting 35 mpg tooling around town in stop-and-go traffic, I feel like a real smart cookie.

Cars of my life, Part I: My unglamorous youth

We all travel through our years in a succession of vehicles ... the ones our parents and siblings drove, the ones we drive, the ones we get for our kids (except for my kids, who due to peak oil and fortunately for my stress levels will come of age after personal automobiles are all but extinct). Here are the ones I remember best.



1980 Cadillac Seville. My mom drove Cadillacs ever since I can remember. This was one of the strangest. Remember that high, sloping trunk design that looked like somebody had sheered off the back end of the car with a giant rotating saw? It also featured little feedback LEDs on the right and left corners of the front end, which were supposed to tell you what lights were on (headlights, parking lights, turn signals). I still have a soft spot for the retro technology of the Cadillac -- wood grain instead of metal, plenty of knobs and dials, an embrace of digital readouts that seemed half-hearted at best -- they were always surrounded or even undercut by analog inputs and outputs. Whenever I hear "Looks Like We Made It" I think of the sample 8-track that came with the car, which had two Barry Manilow songs on it.



1978 Mustang II. This was my older brother's car for a few years. I grabbed every chance I could to ride in it so I could hear actual rock and roll coming out of the 8-track tape deck. It had an automatic transmission, but the shiny chrome shifter was between the front seats. I thought this car was completely badass. Whenever I hear ELO's Out of the Blue, I think about riding home from Sunday night services in the passenger seat of this car -- half an hour of swirling, Beatlesque pop cranked up to levels our parents wouldn't have tolerated.



1975 Volkswagen Beetle. I learned to drive a stick in this car, out on the deserted country roads around our Apison, Tennessee home. I think Dad picked it up cheap just to teach us in. He loved to talk about the legends surrounding the car -- that if you drove it into a lake it would float; that you could fix the engine with rubber bands. It felt more like driving a toy than an actual vehicle, which is great for learning --the stakes seem so low. I believe it only had an AM radio.



1981 Buick Skylark. My parents let me use this car during my senior year in high school. It was that boxy K-car look -- about as unsexy as cars got. But it was a measure of freedom, until I got stuck in the middle of a three-car pileup on I-24 East just before the East Brainerd Road exit. The car was totaled. No cassette deck, so I listened to KZ106 exclusively in this car; I believe Kansas was playing when I had the wreck.



1984 Honda Prelude. My dad traded in his usual Audis and Mercedes for this sporty number when I was just about ready to leave home. It was red and zippy and vaguely triangular and low to the ground and had the sunroof and the headlights that swiveled up out of the front end. I loved that car. Still to this day, I think I crave that car. It's everything I thought a sports car should be.



1978 International Harvester Scout II. ... But whenever I came home from college, this is what I drove. It was brown with a white hard top when we got it as the third or fourth owner. I swung in too close to the row of mailboxes at the end of our driveway on my way home one day and took off the passenger side mirror. When the radio cut out or dissolved into short-circuity static, it could be fixed most of the time by vigorous flathanded thumps on the dashboard. I think it was my younger brother rather than me who sideswiped some of those yellow concrete poles set up to protect gas pumps and suck, leaving a set of yellow scrapes down the passenger side that made it look as though the Scout had survived a run-in with a school bus. After my carless years were over and I was out on my own, my folks had it painted flat blue and my younger brother continued driving it. Lap belt only, and a suspension like our Kubota tractor -- you bounced all the way around town. Mom and Dad swear that the person they sold it to still uses it, and although I don't see how we'd get confirmation, it's a believable tale; the proto-SUV was indestructible. Even after Doug's collision with a city bus in the Brainerd Road tunnel, the Scout abides.

Note: All errors of dates and attribution of vehicular damage are my personal responsibility, and I'm sure they will be corrected quickly by my siblings.

Tomorrow! Part II: A car of one's own.

Report from Hoople: Day 2 (Wherein I Fear Electricity)

Nota Bene: For the next eight days, this blog will function primarily as a Remote Parental Communication Device. Do not expect reflective content. School behavior, potty-related issues, bathing schedules, and bedtime crying jags will be faithfully recorded for the benefit of the Temporarily Canadian Spouse. All other visitors should plan to read this instead, for the duration.

I always forget how guilty I feel being at work, acting like I can carry on life normally and interact with other people, when I'm the sole responsible parent. Dropping Archer off at school and Cady Gray off at daycare (or, as we put it to her to differentiate it from the preschool she started part-time last week, "old school") feels illicit, like abandonment. Surely the child welfare authorities will know that I'm not sitting at home by the phone ready to jump into action when their teachers call. How I can justify going to class, to lunch, to meetings, on the off chance that the kids might need me?

After leading a graduating senior information session in the early afternoon, I went home to fix the kids cups of juice, and then got back in the car to drive over to Archer's school. Even though I was going to get there a few minutes early, I looked forward to the chance to knit a few rounds on my sock with the cool breeze coming through the window. But when I turned the key in the ignition, nothing happened.

You can imagine how that made my heart skip a beat, after the mysterious car troubles just two days ago. That incident involved the other car; this time, I was driving our Civic Hybrid. I stared at the dashboard in confusion. All the instrument lights were on, the radio came on, the A/C started blowing, but the car hadn't started.

With a sinking feeling, I turned the key again. This time it chugged three times and started. As I pulled out, relief quickly gave way to anxiety. This car never huffs and puffs -- it starts smoothly and immediately, like turning a switch from off to on. What if its battery was about to die, just like the Subaru's? I started worrying that if I turned it off while waiting for Archer, it wouldn't start back up, and we'd be stuck at his school. Then I realized that even if I left it running while waiting for Archer to come out, I'd still have to turn it off at my second stop at CG's daycare. I'd never leave the car running while I went inside a public place -- it just seems like an invitation to have the thing stolen.

Undoubtedly I was jittery about automotive ignitions and their related electrical systems after the experience on Tuesday afternoon. I ended up sitting in the car with the engine running while I knitted a little and waited for Archer, but then parking and turning it off while we went inside. After I got them back in their car seats, I sat down and turned the key firmly. It seemed like a took a fraction of a second longer than usual to hum to life, but that's probably my imagination. No cranking noises, no other signs of trouble. Once we got home (where there's an extra car -- with a new battery, no less -- waiting in case of need), I felt a lot better about our transportation.

But that's the unnerving thing about parenting alone. There's no backup. At any sign of trouble, your mind starts racing about who you would call, and how you would manage. You're driving the same streets, going to the same office, but the brink is much closer than it seems when there are two of you.

On the way home from the school pickups, Archer mentioned that he would talk to Daddy on the phone tonight. "We probably won't talk to Daddy today," I told them, "but we can send him an e-mail." Archer piped up: "Mom, remember: A phone ... cuts ... the world in half." Befuddled, I asked, "How does it do that?" He answered: "In a phone call, there is only one place." Oh, I think I get it -- he's trying to describe a connection. Or maybe cyberspace. Either way, I know what he means.

Back to the SUV

A polite but earnest gentleman from DriveCongress.org left a comment on my post concerning the proposed higher CAFE standards for automotive fuel efficiency -- a comment very similar, it turns out, to those that have been left on a couple of other of blogs that have mentioned higher standards positively. (See the evidence by googling the organization's name.)

DriveCongress.org is an astroturf website set up by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Their current talking point is this: People want big cars and trucks, and the government shouldn't prevent manufacturers from giving them what they want. (And in a related subpoint, some people need big cars, and if they're regulated out of existence, those people will suffer.)

James Surowiecki, the always-trenchant economic reporter for the New Yorker (and author of the wonderful Wisdom of Crowds), looked at precisely this claim in his column a couple of weeks back. Yes, people buy the SUVs and monster pickups with which Detroit stocks their local dealerships. So yes, they do want these cars. But a solid majority of these same people, in poll after poll, support higher fuel efficiency standards. And it's not simply cognitive dissonance; they continue to support the rise in standards even when the poll explicitly points out that higher fuel standards will mean a reduction in the number of large vehicles that can be produced and sold. "One recent survey of pickup owners," Surowiecki writes, "found that seventy per cent strongly favored tougher requirements."

So the common-sense connection implied by my drive-by commenter -- that because people want to buy and own large inefficient cars, they don't want the higher standards that will make those cars unavailable -- is wrong. The question, of course, is why people's buying habits and desire for regulation that will change those habits are so out of step.

Surowiecki finds the answer in the work of Thomas Schelling, who in the 1970s studied the attitudes and behavior of hockey players vis-a-vis proposals to require helmets. He found that the players said (in secret ballots) that the NHL should require helmets of all players, at the same time as most of them chose to go without helmets in games.

What people want, in other words, is for everyone to be subject to the same rules -- rules they believe in, but will not unilaterally impose on themselves if others are allowed to continue doing otherwise. It's an arms race, car buyers feel, and even though they strongly believe that everyone will be better off in more fuel-efficient cars, they're unwilling to cede to others perceived advantages in safety and prestige. If those advantages were removed by regulation and the playing field leveled at what the majority believes is reasonable, then they'd feel freer to buy according to their values.

Sounds a little like this Onion t-shirt, I admit. Yet the free market makes hypocrites of all of us who find it impossible to give up available conveniences and "improvements" in an environment where others can keep them without repercussions -- even with incentives. "In calling for a law requiring better gas mileage in our cars, then, voters are really saying they're unhappy with the collective results of the choices they've made as buyers," Surowiecki concludes. "Sometimes, they know, we need to save ourselves from ourselves." Recently I've seen cracks appearing in the mantra of personal responsibility we've had drummed into as an absolute moral and political law for the past twenty years. Is it possible that this is another of them -- counter-commonsensical as it may be?

Bigger is better?

I first ran across the new Big Oil talking point in a Charles Krauthammer editorial two weeks ago. The new party line: Increasing CAFE standards (the federally-mandated average fuel efficiency an automobile manufacturer has to achieve across its fleet) will kill people.

At first glance, there's some grim logic to this. To increase fuel efficiency, cars have to be smaller and lighter. And smaller and lighter cars are not as safe in a crash, primarily because the "crumple zones" (the parts of the frame built to collapse and take the energy from a collision, so the cabin doesn't have to) are not as big and can absorb less energy.

How much less safe? Well, Cecil Adams addresses that question in his Straight Dope column for Friday the 13th. Conservative think tanks are trumpeting numbers like 50,000+ highway deaths since the 70's directly attributable to fuel efficiency targets set by the government. Turns out that even the government's own numbers (through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) estimated in 2002 that smaller cars have cost between 1300 and 2600 deaths per year.

But it's not like we didn't know that going in. Nobody thought, pace Krauthammer, that raising CAFE standards is a painless way to bring utopia on earth. All decisions about automobile and highway regulations are made in a cost-benefit analysis. Does Krauthammer like his 70-mph speed limits? They undoubtedly cost lives. And the small loss due to the increase in lighter cars is vastly offset by laws that mandate active restraints (seat belt laws -- 211,000 lives saved since 1975) and the inclusion of passive restraint systems in new cars (air bags -- 14,000 lives saved between 1987 and 2003).

Even more damning, it's not like big cars and their large crumple zones are providing a cost-free increase in safety. Crashes are one thing -- rollovers, to which SUVs are more prone, also kill. And the heavy cars are more dangerous to the occupants of other cars on the road than their fuel-sipping neighbors. Malcolm Gladwell masterfully deconstructed the myth of SUV safety in 2004, and like all Gladwell's work, it's well worth a half hour of your time. Here's Cecil's summary:

A 2002 study of 84 cars, trucks, SUVs, and minivans conducted for the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that SUVs and pickup trucks had the highest combined risk of any vehicles — that is, risk to both their occupants and occupants of other cars. True, the average SUV protected its occupants better than the average small car. However, some midsize cars protected their occupants just as well as SUVs without unduly endangering the occupants of other vehicles. The study also found that the safest compact and subcompact cars were as safe for their drivers as the average SUV, and safer from a combined-risk standpoint.

Are CAFE standards sneaking in our homes at night and smothering us in our sleep? Not by a long shot. Buy a hybrid car with a high safety rating and the sun will shine brighter, food will taste better, the laughter of little children will bring more joy, and most important, fewer people will suffer on the road or in areas at risk for climate change.