It's easy to see myself taking the wheel

[austin_dern]

With my agreement to buy the car made quite clear, and the insurance company faxing over a letter which notified Whom it may Concern that I have coverage even though I don't have the card in yet, and my balloon popped and pinstripes going on, the next thing to do was wait, as various people offered my father to grab a seat so that he could sit down. My father preferred to stand, and everyone else in the Toyota dealership ... really hoped that he would sit down. Eventually he got to walking around talking with everyone in the dealership. My father was in training for the 1964 United States Olympic Small Talk Team. He also discussed with everybody who wouldn't flee how happy he was with the Toyota Something which was bought just at that very same dealership just last year and a couple months.

I talked with my mother, about how strange it was that so much of this process was so exciting considering how much of it was simply sitting in a cubicle with no sales people around. I signed various forms allowing them to apply to the Motor Vehicle Commission for things like registration and license plates --- after really more thought than it deserved I chose not to keep my old plates --- and we waited more.

Then it came time to talk with the financing person, who took me --- and after I glanced at my parents, them too --- to his office, tucked away in the middle of a long hallway past the bathrooms and where nobody was going to wander in to them by accident. With some more forms to fill out he started going over the forms I had already signed and presented to me various options for payment schemes based around a five-year plan, with different extra warranty package options. Some of them seemed of obvious immediate interest to me, such as the one to extend the warranty to 100,000 miles for everything, or tire replacement coverage in case something does happen to the Alloy Wheels. (There's even a pro-rated rebate in case I don't need this over an appropriate subinterval of the life of the warranties.)

Interesting but not quite compelling to me was the choice to get an alarm with Panic Mode and remote starting; I felt like that was something I might use for the fun of it but would never seriously apply. We did discuss the implications of my moving somewhere else, in prepaid maintenance visits and the like; it does seem that as long as I stay in a part of the United States or Canada with more than one Toyota dealership in a hundred miles I'll probably be covered. And there are reasonable terms to transfer all this to a future car buyer, or to get pro-rated rebates if I must move somewhere that all this is worthless.

Then came the shocking part of all of this, and the moment I was very glad I'd insisted on my parents coming along.

Trivia: Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who would become famous for murdering his wife Cora and attempting to flee across the Atlantic in a steamship race followed by radio, had his home in South Crescent, off Tottenham Court Road, and in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury Square and Bloomsbury Road, center of the Bloomsbury Group. G K Chesterton, H G Wells, and Ford MadoxHueffer [ Ford ] were near neighbors. Source: Thunderstruck, Erik Larson.

Currently Reading: Extraterrestrial Civilizations, Isaac Asimov. I realize that this book was printed in 1979 but it's still freaky to come across ``a Soviet biologist, Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin (1894 -      )''.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Recently, there've been people claiming that the body found in Dr. Crippen's cellar was male (http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/life/stories/2008/10/01/1A_PBS_CASE.ART_ART_10-01-08_D1_8DBEI2E.html?sid=101). If so, that exonerates him of the exact crime for which he was hanged, but still leaves him with bits of a dead body wrapped in his pyjamas, buried in his basement.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I did hear about that, actually. In a neat bit of coincidence it was in the news just about the same time that I was listening to this book on disc. But ... even if the evidence should pan out, that still leaves the question of what happened to his wife, and why his explanations for where she was set the combined land and sea record for clumsy badness. It'd be neat to have the whole century-old story radically rewritten, though.

(Really, the whole transatlantic chase still strikes me as headline-grabbing. Surely they could wire responsible Canadian agents to take him into custody a lot easier.)

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Why are you making me go to bed in this kind of suspense?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Aw, I'm sorry. But it really is too much detail to include in one segment on top of what's already in today's. I can't keep turning in 4,000-word essays.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Apparently Mr. Oparin only made it to April 21, 1980. But yes, one does rather expects '(18xx - ' to be finished by now.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, the one time I did read an Asimov science book updated to reflect developments since his death, I was disturbed to find discussions of things that happened two years after he'd died.