And that’s in local driving!

That’s what we got on the last tankful of gasoline in the Vibe. Well, a little less, but rounded up, you bet. I’m liking this all right. Yes, it costs $337 a month to buy the car that saves on gas. Ah well. The old ‘89 Dodge Spirit was an economy queen by those standards, but terrible otherwise. Just sitting in it made you feel like you were being punished by your mom. Actually going anywhere was like being punished by your mom while riding on a sofa in an avalanche of cantelopes.

With the Vibe, the mechanical action of the motor and the gears, the brakes, and the suspension is a satisfying, enlivening thing. (At least to me.) Overall, the driving fun stimulates more energy than it requires, a net gain. But my perspective is limited — our first brand-new vehicle since ‘84, remember. What I mean is, there must be dozens of cars out there that are much more fun to drive, in comparison to which the Vibe might seem kinda get-yourself-down-the-road basic. But I don’t really know that, do I? I’m also getting 37 miles per gallon just driving around the neighborhood and have genetic permission to call that fun.

Two funs make a fun-fun. One more, and I’m a Beach Boy.

This is very cool: solar cells plus magnifiers in one unit, 5 cents per kWh! Commercial production in about a year. (Thanks to Morgan Maher at Reality Sandwich.)

I’ve been using these things since 1984, so I guess they owed me one. But here’s what happened when I took my MacBook (manufactured June, 2006) in to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Albuquerque.

First you have to know that I have absolutely flogged this thing. After two years of constant use, many of the plastic keys and the trackpad were worn smooth as glass. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, but the space bar key was sticking and nearly had a hole worn through it from repeated hits from the edge of my thumbnail. There were also tiny cracks around the edge of the top case, the result of hard use combined with a known manufacturing defect in these first MacBook models. I’d heard of people having much worse cracks and getting a new top case from Apple, but in this case the cracks were hardly even noticeable, and that wasn’t the point of my driving 2.5 hours in the rain. The sticking space bar key was, however.

I knew they wouldn’t give me a new battery. I know the right things to say to get the battery swapped out for free, but I just can’t lie, so bang, $137.50. I don’t really mind: I’m hard on laptop batteries, and it’ll be nice to get the full four hours of charge again. Besides, I figured the space bar key wouldn’t be much trouble, and I was right: the genius took my MacBook into the back, and 10 minutes later I had a WHOLE NEW TOP CASE w/ integral keyboard and trackpad for FREE! Apple must be replacing those old mid-2006 top cases with the cracks whenever someone brings an affected machine in for servicing. Hey, use any reason you want. I had to sign a paper acknowledging that the value of this replacement was $224, but they didn’t charge me anything, and what you’re reading now was typed on a brand-new keyboard.

Go in for a space bar key, come out with a new top case and keyboard for nothing. And no, this machine is no longer under warranty, nor do I have AppleCare.

What a day!

First of all, it’s been raining for about 12 hours, off and on. [Note for newbies: it doesn't do that here. Usually.] I stepped outside last night into mud and “corn snow,” the pelletized snow we frequently get. Or maybe that was hail on the ground. I wasn’t in a mood to investigate. Right now at 8:00 a.m. the sky is overcast and the mountains are gone, invisible behind a curtain of lowered gray.

In another hour, I take off for Albuquerque, 2.5 hours away. There I’ll visit the Apple Store and try to convince a genius to replace my battery for free while they’re installing a new space bar key. Then I come back this direction to Santa Fe, where I’ll visit a couple of glass shops to get estimates on a new windshield for the Vibe, and when I’m finished with that, I’ll visit the oral surgeon and pay close to $400 just to find out if I’m a candidate for a dental implant.

Ah, America. Ah, me.

These are, I feel, very weird times. I’ve felt off-balance for more than a week, as if I’m expecting something awful to happen, like the boy emperor starting yet another war and bumping gas prices to $10/gallon. As if that were the worst consequence, I know, I know… But all of a sudden, the money wants to flow OUT in a big way that’s unnerving. Perhaps this is to make room for more to come in!

We still need a bigger house and a studio. Everything is in flux but still seems stuck. It might be time for something big, which brings me back to my uneasy anticipation of whatever.

Good day to you all, at any rate. Stay calm and proceed in an orderly fashion to the viewing deck. Life goes on.

That would be on our new (since February) 2007 model Pontiac Vibe, which we just drove from Taos to Dubuque and back, over 2,400 miles counting all the to and fro in Iowa.

The car had about 2,500 miles on it when we started. I had the oil changed to Mobil 1 synthetic the week before. Our two highest gas mileage figures were 38.6 and 37.5 mpg, both at high altitude, and the trip average was 35.5 mpg. So I still haven’t hit the magic 40 mpg figure, but with a little more break-in (and driving less than 80 mph on midwestern Interstates), that ought to be within reach.

Is it suitable as a car for long-distance travel? Hell, yes. We were totally comfy throughout, and the Vibe has an excellent filtered ventilation system. The one time I used the AC showed that feature to be flawless and simple to use. Oh, and the cruise control is an absolute delight.

There was plenty of room for all our gear, and then some. I find the Vibe to be extremely stable at speed, nimble on the curvy back roads, and very well suspended: enough “give” to make for a great ride, but nicely damped. The five-speed manual transmission is a delight to use and helps one get the most from the smallish 1.8 liter 4-cylinder engine, which loves to rev. The overall gearing is rather high, I think, since the tach reads only about 3,000 rpm at 80 mph. Bottom line: very mechanically satisfying to operate and drive. I had fun the whole way up and back.

Consumer Reports (which I normally don’t give a damn for) does show this model Vibe to be “much better than average” in all areas, giving it a higher reliability rating than my sister-in-law’s new Japanese Buick (Camry). Hey, I’ll take what I can get.

I don’t like what Pontiac did to the Vibe for the 2009 model year — a lower gas mileage rating in exchange for less than 10 more horsepower, among other atrocities — but the 2008s are just like ours. Even if you do get an ‘09 model, you likely couldn’t go wrong. These are very fine automobiles, and I’m just tickled pink.

Except for the ROCKS that cracked our windshield in Colorado, that is…

Dubuque is a fascinating old city with lots of character perched high on the limestone bluffs overlooking the mighty Mississippi. (The river is quite high now, too.) In the image below, you’re looking north from Eagle Point Park. The opposite bank is Wisconsin. While we were standing there, we saw three pelicans fly by. Yes, pelicans. They migrate through here, and on other visits I’ve seen large flocks of them.

That is one BIG river, folks!

The only “incident” of the day occurred while I was out to dinner with my wife, her sister and brother-in-law (the superintendent of schools in Dubuque), and her brother and his wife, who’d driven up from Atlanta. In response to a perfectly innocent question from the brother about whether “Santa Fe is still growing” — he works for Georgia Power loves to go on about such things — out of my mouth came:

“GROWING?! Growth is OLD. It’s finished. Growth is so… so 20th century!!!”

[silence]

No one said a thing for a good 20 seconds, I swear.

Maybe I was speaking in tongues, receiving a communication from the Universe, or maybe it was the alcohol. I’m not even sure what I meant, although I admit that the frequent references to how this or that place has “grown” so much tends to drive me bonkers, because they’re never delivered with regret. I can’t help it, I guess. Whenever conventional wisdom starts looming over me like a giant wave about to break, I just snap and have to fight back. He didn’t mean anything the least bit aggressive or argumentative by asking me that, of course, but my buttons got pushed. THE COLLECTIVE IS INSANE, you understand, or maybe you don’t. More power to you, though, if you’re immune to the perception — living with it all the time as I do is something of a chore.

My own fault, ultimately, but this came after a detailed discussion of my wife’s nephew’s new home in Georgia. Why any two people need a two-story, four bedroom house is none of my business, but it grated on me. It’s always a shock to get out into the world (America) and find that normal people think nothing of living in homes the size of aircraft carriers. At this very moment I’m sitting in a living room with three big sofas, four upholstered chairs, a baby grand piano, desks, coffee tables, and I don’t know what all. I swear it’s bigger than our entire house in Taos. Hell, the storage room here in the basement is bigger than where we live. I’m not jealous or envious in any way, but it seems so crazy.

The awkward moment at dinner was very telling, of course, because I violated orthodoxy. How dare one utter a dark, sarcastic word about the American Way! No harm was done, fortunately, and I soon regained control. But welcome to Dubuque, you might say.

(I really do need to get out more, too…)

Oh my God, I’m in Iowa again. I’ll have more to say on that soon enough, but first a word or two about what happened on the way here.

We left Taos on Friday morning, intending to follow this route:

North to Ft. Garland, CO >
Over La Veta Pass to Walsenburg >
Colorado Rt. 10 to Rocky Ford >
North to Limon, CO >
Catch the Interstate at Brush >
Head east to Ogallala, North Platte, or Kearney, NE

A tried and true path, one that we’ve taken many times before. If you know that part of the country and haven’t gone that way, you ought to try it. Very relaxing driving, most of the time, and almost zero traffic. This time, however, the weather had a say in the matter.

It was windy but sunny up through Walsenburg. We took Colorado Rt. 10 from there to Rocky Ford the way we always do, and it started getting cloudy. The wind picked up some more. On the way to Limon, the dust started blowing. Uh-oh. As it happened, the dust and wind were so bad we decided to bail out before Limon and head east on Rt. 96. (The storm was somewhere north and west of us, so we thought to skirt it before heading north again.) By now the blowing dirt was of Dust Bowl proportions: the wind was horrific, gusting to 60 mph, and what we heard sounded like someone throwing gravel against the car! I was sure there wasn’t going to be any paint left. My wife was driving, poor girl, and several times she had to come to a complete stop in the middle of the road because of zero visibility — a dangerous thing to do, but we were virtually alone on the highway.

Somehow we made it to Kansas. As we moved farther east, the wind died somewhat, the dust abated, and glory be, there were patches of sunlight and blue sky. By the time we got to Scott City, NE, it looked like we could make it another 100 miles north without much trouble (i.e., that the storm hadn’t moved that far southeast), so we decided to head for McCook, NE, just a short hop from Interstate 80 and our original route.

Hahaha.

About 15 minutes north of Scott City, all hell broke loose. The wind blew even harder. A proverbial shitpile of fine snow started blowing diagonally across the road, pushing us all over the highway. We found a regional weather station that reported a BLIZZARD WARNING for southwest Nebraska, just one county east of McCook. Seeing as how we were already in one by my standards, that was pretty damn scary.

The wind was howling and my honey struggled with the wheel. Just getting another 50 miles up the road looked awfully iffy, so I decided to bail out in McCook if we could actually get there. The Rand-McNally highway atlas had an 800 number for Holiday Inn reservations, and I remembered that there was one in McCook. Amazingly, my cell phone worked. The “service’ rep in bloody PAKISTAN had to repeat everything three times, but he was exceedingly polite. I nearly poked my left ear out from holding my finger in it (so I could hear through the other ear), but the reservation went through. That I could do this from the car, in a blizzard, was rather remarkable, I thought, but there was no slack for self-congratulation yet.

The last two hours into McCook through fading light were ghastly, as the snow turned much heavier and started sticking to the pavement. It was fast becoming dark. The roadsides and what I could see of the landscape were covered with white. The wind was unbelievable. We were also running out of gas, and you may easily imagine our relief at finally rolling into the Holiday Inn Express parking lot!

I’ve been in worse snow — once in Maryland, it snowed so heavily that the motor in my VW Rabbit quit — but I’ve never encountered anything like the weather we went through that day. If the ground had frozen before the snow started, we might still be there. On MAY 2ND, mind you. And the new car? Our Pontiac Vibe did very well indeed, notwithstanding being batttered by the wind, and still delivered between 32.8 and 38.6 miles per gallon for the day.

Saturday was sunny and breezy. We drove 700 miles and made it to Dubuque by 8:30 p.m…

[No doubt another time when I just shouldn't write, but here goes anyway...]

I belong to a certain Macintosh-oriented email list. Earlier yesterday I read about how Qwest is now offering 20 mbps DSL — the fastest available in this country — in a few selected areas. Then last night I encountered a blog post about how one can have 100 megabyte-per-second DSL in France, plus long-distance phone service and TV channels included, for about $85. Infuriated, I posted a message to my email list asking the following:

…how in the HELL does America innovate its way out of three dozen different potentially fatal fixes with a freaking stone age telecommunications infrastructure??? (Never mind that we got bridges falling down…) How do we compete with anybody? Hello??

A German list member commiserated with me. A guy in northern VA was sympathetic. And then a third person — a very dear soul who reads this blog — responded with a list of links to U.S. military photo galleries, adding that “these are not just cool (well some of them), but they have great meaning to us over on this side of the world.”

Um…

Disregarding for the moment that I live here too, we get the following:

1. Our telecommunications infrastructure sucks.
2. People in Europe can get TEN TIMES the bandwidth for less dough.
3. Yeah, but just look at these Navy fighter jets!!!

I hardly know what to say. The problem is that a similar dynamic operates in many areas of concern. Sometimes it seems as if the light just keeps getting dimmer, no matter what one does.

This morning the sadness is overwhelming. Perhaps this is partly so because of what I sometimes feel about myself, having been raised not to aim too high, not to dream too great (lest one suffer disappointment), not to believe in happiness, etc. etc. I constantly conflate the nation’s psyche with my own, of course. Probably most of us do, and it’s a trap. There’s only one reason to fear criticism, because it resonates with suppressed belief. Whether the belief is false or not is immaterial, because it never sees the light of day.

My wife reports the Vibe got 36.36 mpg on the last tank. That’s about 325 miles worth of driving, two-thirds of it on the highway, but mostly in the mountains using 4th and 3rd gears instead of 5th. I call that just dandy and expect to hit over 40 mpg on the open road when we take that little trip to Iowa.

Oh, yes. There’s a road trip coming up. I’ll have more to say about that later, but in preparation for it, I had the Vibe’s oil changed and switched to Mobil 1 synthetic. That’s what I always do with all our “good” cars. Here in Taos, I go to a local oil change emporium. They only have two service bays, but they’re fast and friendly, and I sometimes have a chance to enjoy a little car talk with the staff, all local Hispanos.

The reason I bring this up is that car culture is big with these guys. Not a one of them would be caught dead in some of the heaps I’ve driven. I mean, these dudes are proud, so it got my attention in a hurry when the assistant manager zeroed in on the new Vibe — not the sort of vehicle that usually qualifies, so you know that something deep has shifted.

The guy was smart. He already knew it had a Toyota engine and asked about my gas mileage, shaking his head when I told him. Right away, he wanted to know what it cost, and I told him. “Why are you interested?” I asked, by way of encouragement, trying to draw him out.

“Oh man,” he said, turning serious and somber. “I gotta downsize…”

He disappeared under the Vibe with a wrench, and I went outside to wait, where I took the picture of the Lotaburger posted on FotoFeed. As things happen with the Internet, someone I know who used to live here saw the photo and figured out where I’d had my oil changed. Based on an experience his girlfriend had, he emailed me to issue a warning about the place. It seems that after an oil change, my guys had forgotten to re-attach what he called a “skid plate” under the girlfriend’s VW, ultimately resulting in some $300 worth of damage that she had to pay to get repaired in Santa Fe. Hmm.

Now, I can safely say I’ve never seen a VW with a skid plate of any sort, but maybe I don’t get out enough. The most recent vintage VW I’ve ever been underneath was my old ‘84 Jetta GLI. So hey, maybe they all have skid plates now and no one told me. I wrote something almost snotty to my friend along those lines, excessively defensive about my choice of oil change jockeys, I suppose, but he didn’t seem to mind and emailed back that something had sure as hell gone missing, and that was that.

Anything is possible, especially with people having too much fun at work (or not enough), and even more so when it comes to German engineering, if there really is such a thing any more. I suspect there is, even if the cars are built in Paraguay or Kurdistan. (They aren’t, BTW.) There certainly was plenty of it in the air-cooled VW buses that I owned.

Things were always getting left off those motors or put on backwards when I had them worked on, usually something esoteric and inscrutable like the sheetmetal baffles in the cooling shroud around the cylinders. Probably I have that right. (I might not!) Whatever it was, if it wasn’t put back right or left out altogether, eventually you’d burn a valve or fry a piston, usually in the middle of nowhere. Looking back on it now, it’s simply amazing how often the damn things blew up on me, yet I didn’t try another make for decades. But oh, those buses. How I loved and hated them. One time I ended up stranded in darkest Oklahoma with the aforementioned fried cylinder, at the mercy of a garage that didn’t usually handle “those little foreign jobs.” Oh God. The parking lot was littered with decomposing diesel trucks awaiting burning or repair. It was freezing cold, and I was almost broke.

I don’t remember where I stayed, probably in the bus after they took the engine out. A couple of days later I was back on the road, but I’m sure it happened again. A valve, a cylinder, the pin from the middle of the fuel pump, whatever. It was always something. And yet, facing disaster at every turn was somehow bracing and inspiring. Experiences like that forced me to learn how to screw things up myself, always much more satisfying anyway. Some day I’ll tell you about removing the carburetor jet on a ‘69 Saab (to get the ICE out) by the side of an Iowa Interstate in January. If I’d dropped it in the gravel, we’d still be there, and none of the rest of this would ever have happened. And so much did!

Now my hair is white, but the headlights come on by themselves.

It’s only 4X optical zoom, but that helps, and there are enough pixels that I can go in deeper with a crop. Here’s one of the first hummingbirds of the season, zooming in for the kill:

If only it were as warm outside as it looks