Things that might be decidedly odd…

Dance in Fremont, Theater in F-Dub

For the past couple days, my friend Lisa has been in town on tour with Ultragypsy, a belly dance troop from San Francisco. Last night I saw their performance at ToST in Fremont, which was fun and a nice change from the usual stuff. She crashed on my futon last night and we got up this morning to grab brunch with her friend Nick over at the Bluwater in Leschi.

Afterwards, I met up with Bryan to see a matinée presentation of a musical called Robin Hood Continued at the Knutzen Family Theatre in Federal Way. Apparently, it’s a new show written by the creators of Annie. Basically, it’s a musical about Robin Hood’s hypothetical role in the signing of the Magna Carta (ya, it’s a pretty weird premis). Our mutual friend Chris was playing keyboard for the show, so he had a couple free tickets for us to use and this was the last show of the run. When we arrived and parked, I noticed a Porsche parked across two parking spaces:

I imagine the driver did this as a way to avoid getting his doors dinged, but it so aptly captured the stereotype of a red Porsche owner as a total asshole that I couldn’t help but take a picture.

The performance itself was corny but enjoyable. The show seemed to start out slow, but picked up especially towards the middle with regard to the music and story line. About a third of the way through, at least two dozen people lead by a couple nuns walked out of the show in the middle of a scene. It was so bizarre that I could hardly believe what was happening. For a while, it seemed like the entire theater was going to file out of the place. The play had some possibly lightly offensive material concerning gender roles (Robin Hood’s daughter pretends to be a man so that she can lead her own group of merry men) and religion (Friar Tuck is said to have had a son by giving into temptation once–per week with a woman).

After the show was over, Bryan’s car wouldn’t start due to a dead battery. Eventually, we got it started with a jump from Chris, then drove to Costco in Seattle to buy a new battery. After all of that, we were pretty hungry and grabbed some dinner up at Jamjuree on 15th. Whew, what a day!

Car Pictures

To those who have asked (i.e., Brad), I will get some pictures of my new car up soon. I’m pretty beat from running around today and feeling a bit under the weather healthwise (a bit sensitive to hot and cold, slight fatigue, occasional queasiness), so I’m just going to take it easy tonight I think. Tomorrow though, I’ll try to take some pictures and post them here. I also need to go to Redmond at some point to take pictures of the Toyota for the ad as well.

Car Shopping

This morning, I managed to go visit the Mazda dealer over in the University District. The salesman I dealt with was helpful, but also laid back. I took a test drive of a 3 hatch grand touring for probably close to 30 minutes, going all around Ravenna, the U District and over into the Greenlake/Greenwood area as well. When I got back, we talked some more about the features and options of the car.

Driving the car was really enjoyable. Part of it is that it’s a manual (much more fun in my opinion) and part of it is that the car had A LOT of pickup compared to my current car. The steering, braking and acceleration all seemed more responsive too. I guess that difference is to be expected between these two classes of cars.

I’m definitely closer to buying after the test drive, although I might still check out the 6 still too especially since Mazda is giving ~$2K in cash back right now on that vehicle. I’m concerned that because it’s larger, it won’t handle as well or be as peppy (without the larger engine which would mean cruddier fuel efficiency). I’m honestly not sure if I need much more trunk space anyways. The backseat doesn’t really feel much bigger and let’s face it–I’m not the one who’s going to be sitting back there anyways.

The car I test drove today had all the features I’m interested in (even fancy things like a nice stereo and heated seats), but unfortunately I didn’t care too much for the color (purple). The car sells well around here, so there aren’t a lot of them with the options I’d like around (just 3 in pretty much all of greater Seattle). I’m still not 100% I’m ready to buy, but I figure I can keep looking and waiting for something with the options and color (I’m not too picky–purple just doesn’t work for me) I’m interested in.

More Car Stuff

After work today, I drove over to the Mazda dealer in Kirkland to look at some cars and maybe go for a test drive. Even though they didn’t close for another hour, the salesman told me it wouldn’t be possible to do a substantial test drive due to lack of time. They’d already locked all the cars and put away the keys, which made it somewhat of a hassle to even open a car up to see the inside. It was still nice looking at the different models, although they didn’t have the hugest selection at this place.

It’s easy to forget that the 3 is smaller than my Camry inside. For one thing, my knees hit the steering wheel until I adjusted it. Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be a huge difference between the size of the backseat in the 3 and 6 though. On one hand, seeing shiny new cars does make me want to buy one more, but on the other I realize that most of the cars I’m looking at are in fact not fundamentally different from my current one just smaller, sportier and with nicer interiors. I’m not really much of a size queen when it comes to cars–it’s just what I’ve gotten used to more than anything. In fact, when I bought my current car, I wasn’t even looking at cars as large as the Camry. Almost everything I looked at was an Accord, Civic or Corolla. The Camry had just jumped out because it looked like a good deal and was barely in my price range (largely because it was about 5 years older than all the other cars I’d looked at).

I think tomorrow I might go before work to the dealer in Seattle. According to the online inventory search, they have a lot more of the vehicles I’m interested in. Hopefully, I can test drive a couple of them as well.

Cars

Lately, I’ve gotten this idea into my head that I might want to buy a new car. My current car is adequate and in good shape, but it’s not all that exciting or nice. It’s very much the practical car I bought when I was a poor grad student. Now that I’m no longer a poor grad student, I’m starting to feel like it’s time to move on.

The thought has of course crossed my mind before, but I always figured I’d delay buying another car until after I’d bought a condo. I’m not particularly satisfied with my current condo options though. Namely, I don’t want to leave the vicinity of the hill yet I can’t really afford to buy more than a small 1 bedrdoom here (and even then it’d be a huge chunk of my income).

The upshot of all of this is that I’ve started to do some research online about new cars. In particular, I’ve been fairly enamored by the Mazda 3. This car actually first hit my radar during the summer when I carpooled in one on my way to Lake 22 to go hiking.

This coming week, I’m planning to visit a deal and take a test drive. We’ll see where that goes I guess.

Brakes

After putting it off for most of the summer, I broke down and took my car into get the brakes taken care of. It’s not like they’d gone out or anything, but my car has been breaking increasingly roughly for a while now. When I went up to the San Juans months ago, Rico (who works in the auto parts business) made some sort of exclamation about my rotors. Then Jay told some horror story about the tens (or maybe it was hundreds) of thousands of yen he had to pay for new rotors in Japan when he used to live there.

Now, the thing I hate most about getting my car fixed is finding a place to go. Experience has taught me to assume most mechanics are thieves who will screw you over at every chance. That leaves me with very few good options. I’d rather just pay more and not have to deal with as much bullshit. So I did what a lot of people do in that situation and just took the car to the Toyota dealer. On the plus side, the dealership downtown is a short walk (less than a mile I think) from my apartment and they’re supposed to know what they’re doing. The people there seemed to be fairly professional and they took care of everything in a timely and polite fashion. No games about when I’d get the car back or bald-faced attempts at selling me services and products I didn’t really need.

I had to get new pads on the front, have the front rotors machined, have the break fluid changed, new pads on the back and new rotors on the back (since they’re too worn to be machined). Plus, they noticed that my power steering fluid was in need of changing. I told them to just do it since if I didn’t I know it would continue to bother me. Unfortunately, getting everything done was really expensive. I obviously expected that, but the amount I paid was still more than I had expected.