Of Cars

So in June 2018 I totaled my Fit.  The accident itself was pretty non-dramatic; I rear-ended someone at around 25 mph.  It was wet, and I was coming around a blind curve, and they had stopped to make a left.  So I slammed on my brakes, slid on the wet road, hit their bumper with my grill/hood, did minimal damage to their car, and took out my radiator and a/c and folded up my hood.  With labor, the repair estimates were around $6k.  The insurance company gave me about that much for it.

I hadn't been planning to replace the Fit for another couple years; it was still in decent shape, and I liked not having car payments.  I had been looking at the CR-V for when I did replace it, since I wanted more cargo space and a car big enough for my husband to be comfortable in on road trips so we wouldn't have to take his car.  The CR-V is all of that, has all-wheel drive for the winter, and is well-reviewed.

I've been in a 2018 CR-V for about two years now; I've put 40k miles on it.  We've taken it on long road trips (to my parents), a medium road trip (Toronto), and I commute in it daily (when we're not in pandemic work-from-home mode).  I'm getting about 32 mpg average in the summer and 29 mpg in the winter. Based on this past December's unseasonably warm weather, I'm pretty sure the difference in mileage is entirely related to air temperature.  Warmer weather = better mileage.

I don't like it as much as the Fit.  Ultimately that's okay; the Fit was really fun to drive, and it had a great dash layout and storage (cup holder) options.  The CR-V is not as fun to drive; I went from a sport-suspension manual to a bigger, all-wheel-drive CVT.  It doesn't corner as well, and I'm still (two years later, still) readjusting to an automatic.  I also can't pick it out of a group of similarly-colored SUVs in a parking lot; I've had to acquire a magnet for the back to help it stand out.

As someone who likes to drive, and does so a lot (24k miles in a year), the Fit was a lot of fun.  But it was not a great family car - the one you take on trips and load up with groceries.  It has a ton of cargo space for its size (I have crammed as many as 5 bales of hay into one), but loading it up with groceries would frequently require using both the trunk space and the back seat.  The CR-V has more dedicated trunk space, and it's rare we have to use the back seat in addition to the back.  It also takes two full-size suitcases in the back; when we drove the Fit down to JFK, those suitcases had to go in the back seat with the seats flipped up (a great feature, but not ideal for a trip where you'd rather have your car trip stuff in the back seat). I also overloaded the Fit when I'd buy dirt (or manure) in bags for the garden; I think some of the rear axle work I had done can be directly traced to that.  At this point, we have fit a snowblower, a chest freezer, and a medium-sized refrigerator in the CR-V with the seats folded down (not all at the same time).

Besides the roominess, there are other things I like about the CR-V.  The Honda sensing system is great; the only time it has trouble is in very heavy weather or if the sensor gets iced up.  Now that I know where that sensor is, I can easily clear it so that it works again for the drive home.  The infotainment console works pretty well with Android Auto, and I am making good use of our unlimited data phone plan.  It has a really good default sound system at the EX trim level.  Having heated seats has been great for both winter and my lower back pain.  I had wanted to get a more fun paint color when I replaced the Fit, and the CR-V doesn't really have "fun" paint colors, but the dark gray I got is fine for now.  ("Modern Steel," or some such; the Fit was "Storm Silver Metallic.")

I'll probably replace the CR-V with another CR-V; there's a hybrid out now, and, although it likely won't do anything for my commuting mileage, it will probably save some gas for running errands locally.  The local dealership is generally pretty good for service, and they were really no-pressure when we were buying this one.  (They also do so much volume that they cannot keep used CR-Vs in stock, so if you need one that day, they may not be able to accommodate you, which is part of why we bought new and not year-old.)  Hopefully next time I am buying we will have a more forgiving timeline, and I can get a blue one.  (Or, if I am lucky, they will have it in green.)

First snow

It's a good thing I harvested the broccoli on Tuesday!  A little after two o'clock this afternoon, this started:

By four o'clock it looked like this outside:

When I left at about five-thirty, I had something more than an inch of snow on my car.  It's been three years today since I got my car, and I think it may have snowed a little then, too.  But not like this.

And of course, while I upgraded from a jacket to a coat today, I didn't bring a hat.

The drive home wasn't bad, although parts of it were slushy.  There was a car spun off on the opposite side from where I spun off a couple years ago; there was a trooper and a tow truck there.  This was before that, in Schoharie County still:

Closer to home the snow isn't sticking as much, but we've got a bit of a layer on the back yard.  (Looks like they're saying about two inches.)  This does kind of nix my idea of giving the lawn a last trim this weekend.

Woot!

The husband has managed to sell my old car, for more than I expected to get for it. Yay!

I really liked it, but, well, it's a 1993 Plymouth Acclaim. The repair costs were mounting, and I have a 33 mile commute. I got a 2009 Honda Fit back in October, which has also been awesome.
The Acclaim was comfortable for me, and I liked the instrumentation, that it was a column shifter, and the intermittent settings for the windshield wipers were amazing. It actually handled snow pretty well. I had a nice CD player put in when the tape deck died, which had an auxiliary jack on the front, which made installing the XM radio cake - and I could also use the mp3 CD player I had, and whatnot.

So today we'll go and clean it out and deliver it, then take off the plates & stickers. I'll have to mail the plates in - I might even get a refund for the 2nd year of the registration. Once they get the plates back at the DMV, we can cancel the insurance. Whee.

Adventures

So last week's adventure was just that I got promoted in the WoW guild I'm an officer in - I'm now the #2 person in the guild in terms of authority.  My job is basically administrative - make sure meetings happen, prod officers if they're not being officerial, and such.

This week's adventure was spinning my car off I-88 on the way home from work Tuesday night.  It was a little after 11 p.m., and it had been snowing since I left for work at 5 p.m., and it had been freezing rain when I left Wal-Mart at about 10:45.  The plows turn around at the Schenectady/Schoharie border, about the 103 mile marker.  So the road was pretty slushy.  I think I've only driven in that much snow once before.

Three or four miles past the plow turn around, on a downgrade, I got my wheels a little off, but not all the way to the rumble strip.  Getting back on the road started me sliding left - I was thinking, "Wait, why am I spinning?  I didn't over-correct!"  I don't think over-correcting or not would have mattered - it was pretty slick.  I don't recall braking, actually; I don't think I did much, if at all - I was going about 35 when I started sliding.  Trying to straighten out started me spinning to the right.  There was a reflecter pole with one of those little green pseudo-mile markers just before where I slid off; on the way towards the edge of the road, I was thinking, "Shit, I hope I don't hit that little green sign."  So I slid off the road, mostly sideways and still spinning slightly, and got one of those swoosh-waves of snow like skiiers make when they stop or turn sometimes.

The car ended up spinning about 225 degrees (I could see the vehicles coming down the hill towards me), and I was completely off the road, but not very far.  Given the stretch of I-88 that I drive, I was pretty lucky in where I slid off - there weren't any guide rails, trees, steep slopes, or rock outcrops; I basically just slid backward off the road at a 45 degree angle and stopped when my back bumper and tire hit the ice in the ditch at the bottom.  If there hadn't been 6-8" of snow on the ground off the road, I might not have even needed the tow to get back up on the road.  (Though I probably wouldn't have slid off in the first place if that were the case.)

I called Mark, and then AAA, and the State Police got there and put flares out while I was waiting for the tow truck to come pull me back up on the road.  The car is okay, though I think the tail pipe might have gotten bent upward slightly.  I got home about an hour and a half later than I usually do, though some of that was from stopping at Wal-Mart to get oil for the car on the way home.

So I had about 50 minutes sitting on the side of the road, and it occured to me that people who die instantly in car crashes probably aren't thinking about their families or God or any of that - their brains are still processing the accident in progress.  I was also thinking that maybe I should apply to that position that would mean I wouldn't be commuting 31 miles to work, 26 of them on hilly interstate that is only half well-maintained in bad weather.