I turned 40 on March 7th. I took the week of nominally to celebrate this, and one of the things I did was tinker with a post trying to capture where my head is at these days. I’ve written in entire sections and then redacted them and I’ve played with a couple of different themes. I’ve finally concluded I should just keep it simple. I happened across a Kurt Vonnegut quote that sums up how I feel about it all better than I could write, so I think I’ll share it:

The greatest peace comes from the knowledge that I have enough.

When I boil it all down, that’s where I’m at at present – content with my lot, challenged by and enjoying my career, surrounded by the material comforts I need and fortunate enough to be in a position to acquire the ones I simply want, and looking forward to at least another 40 years of it 🙂

So I took last week off. My original plan was to get three hikes in, but old man winter showed up with bitter cold, Soolin developed cracked and bloody paws last weekend, and the part required to fix my car still hasn’t arrived from Japan, so I had to develop alternate plans. Fortunately I’m an accomplished pajama-wearing slacker. In no particular order I:

• Read Steven Furst’s ‘The Polish Officer’ – Furst is fantastic as usual.
• Read Patrick O’Brian’s ‘The Wine Dark Sea’ – O’Brian has become one of my favorite authors and he did not disappoint.
• Watched a number of movies. ‘Pans Labyrinth‘ stands out as the one exceptional movie.
• Made level 60 for my primary character, Siven, in Worlds of Warcraft. This is the first time I’ve made max level in a MMORPG, despite playing a ton of them (DAOC, Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online, Everquest I and II, Horizons, Anarchy Online). Of course there’s the expansion pak and max level is now 70, so back to the treadmill I go.
• Played a ton of UFO:Afterlight, which may be the first competent riff on the original X-Com, aka the greatest video game ever made. This is the third in a series by these developers and it appears the third time is the charm. My only concern is with replayability since the game seems event driven, with certain developments and missions always occuring in a certain sequence. The tech tree is also inscrutable.
• Finally managed to get my huge classic games collection on shelves and semi-organized in a way which should not again end with them spilled all over the floor.
• Scanned my entire collection of analog photos, which took three days and managed to depress me so much that I stopped the image editing work needed to prep them to put on the web. Revisiting one’s past loves and lives on one’s 40th birthday? Not a good plan. I’ll get back to it.
• Updated this site and the server OS it runs on, which took the better part of a day. I am increasingly tempted to move to a hosted solution by someone else because of the timesink this stuff is. I want my photos and other resources online, but every time I tackle the maintenance required I question my approach to this.

All in all not a bad week, I loved it aside from the photo scanning episode. I’ll start putting up some of those photos over the coming week – coolest of the crop are all the photos I took during my road trip to alaska back in 1990.

So I dropped my car off at Mazda Tuesday. They call me Wednesday, say it’s all set, come get it. I ask what was wrong and they say the same part that failed two weeks ago failed again. I express some skepticism. I start the car in the dealership lot, drive less than 10 yards and pop, the check engine light comes on again. What’s most surreal about this is this is the second time this exact thing has happened to me with this car. Thank god I’m pretty even keeled about things. I had to walk right back into the dealership and not lose my temper.

Anyway now they’re thinking it’s a short circuit in the wiring of the car and have ordered a wiring harness from Japan which will take a week or so to get here. The explanation seems reasonable, but so have several other explanations I’ve been given (defective gas cap, bad car computer that needed an update, vacuum hose leak), so I’m still skeptical.

Meanwhile I am driving the car around with the check engine light on. I complained about this at the dealership, along the lines of ‘can I get a guarantee in writing that if the temp gauge or oil or fuel systems fail and my engine pops while this is going on, you guys are buying me a new car?’ but they weren’t having it, basically their point of view is everything is still under warranty and I’ll be covered no matter what happens. I guess we’ll see. The biggest bummer is I am on vacation next week and was planning to drive all over the place to hike. Now I have to decide whether it’s wise to do that or not.

It’s a bike, wait, no, it’s a car, wait, no, it’s a motorcyle. No, it’s a VentureOne, a damned cool hybrid car/motorcyle that leans dramatically into sharp turns, runs a hybrid or all electric power train yet is capable of 100mph and would, in theory, make a perfect little commuter vehicle which would be a total blast to drive. I can’t get a firm handle on the price, but it’s somewhere between 20-40k. The site has a selection of videos of the thing in action. If it is closer to the 20k end of things I would seriously consider getting one.

For more than the 12th time, and the 2nd time in the past month, the check engine light has popped on in my Mazda3. This is the final straw for me with this car. It’s had this history of doing this since the day after I drove it off the lot. My warranty is up at 50k miles and after that it’s going to cost me a minimum of $85 to get it looked into, so I’m going to get something else before I hit that number, which at the present pace would be sometime in the next 7 months or so.

It’s really a shame. Other than this issue, and the fact that Mazda stubbornly refuses to release its roof rack kit in the US despite offering it in every other territory (including Canada), I’ve loved the car. And to be fair to the car only one of the check engine light incidents have been serious (a part related to the fuel system failed, but it was a sensor), but the fact that they can never make the issue go away for good is troubling and at this point I’ve lost faith with the car. I’m also not going to eat the cost of getting it looked into every time it pops on when my warranty expires.

The question becomes what to get next. I have three cars on my list, all 3 from the last time I went through this – the Honda Element (practical but not very fun to drive), a Subaru WRX sports wagon (less practical but still fun to drive), and…a Mazda 3, but possibly the Mazda Speed edition this time. It may seem nuts to go for a car that’s done me wrong, but the issue I am having with mine is an abberation. No one else is confronting this kind of trouble, I just have lousy luck.

My plan is to see what the dealership will do for me (ie, give me a great trade-in on this car because Mazda sold me a lemon) and if they work a decent deal with me I will go for it. If they won’t, right now I’m feeling like the Honda is the way to go. It’s cheaper than the WRX is and most importantly it doesn’t take premium fuel, the cost of which really adds up over the lifetime of a car. Of course if Mazda does right by me, who knows, maybe I will go for the premium guzzling Mazda3 speed edition because hey, I’m 40 this year and deserve my mid-life crisis car 🙂

Feel free to suggest alternative models to consider. At or under $30k, no German cars, and some element of the practical ‘place to stick Soolin’ are all factors which will limit my choices.

When I was in NY, my monthly heating for my tiny little cottage was as high as $250 a month to feed the natural gas fueled stove that heated the place. Given this, I was afraid the heating bill for my 3 bedroom, uninsulated, no storm window, breezy 3 bedroom, turn of the century farm house were going to be north of $500. Happily it’s turned out that ~$300 is about as high as it’s going to get. Nothing to sneeze at but man, it’s a relief. Granted, I’ve had to make some sacrifices, sleeping in the living room for the last month and a half and sealing off the unheated (aside from by convection) upstairs rooms, maintaining a max 62 degree setting on the thermostat, and clothing myself in multiple layers to keep off the chill, but most of that I’m used to from my years in Maine anyway so all things considered this is great news.

I love working in higher ed. The title of this piece was scrawled on the bathroom stall I was standing next to while washing my hands this morning. No ‘call so and so for a good time’ here, thank you very much.