Rogue Won

It's funny how attached we become to worldly possessions. That's the case with my car.

This is a 2001 Pontiac Sunfire. Katie bought it when we had just started dating, in December 2003. She drove it for a few years until we got something bigger for her to take the kids around in, and this has been my commuter car for the last 10 years. So yeah, I've become attached to it. It's not much to look at, but it's been surprisingly reliable over the years. It's also got relatively low mileage for an 18-year-old vehicle (164,000).

But all things must come to an end, and so it's time to bid farewell to this relic of our courtship. And like our courtship, I went through a while "shopping around" and then once I found the right vehicle it clicked immediately.

I ended up getting a 2015 Nissan Rogue. It's significant to me because every car I had ever owned was a GM vehicle (2985 Chevrolet Celebrity, 1994 Chevrolet Corsica, 1999 Chevrolet Lumina, the Sunfire, and our 2008 Chevrolet Uplander). So this is a completely different experience.

It's also significant because for the first time I actually had the chance to purchase a vehicle that I wanted to drive rather than whatever was available in my price range that would get me around okay. So I chose a vehicle with heated seats, panoramic moonroof, all-wheel-drive, navigation, and a bunch of nice safety features like cameras and blind-spot monitoring. And it still gets better gas mileage than the Sunfire. So I'm very happy.

And so of course it came time to name the vehicle. The Rogue had been owned by a smoker. The dealer was pretty good about getting the smell out, but it will take some time for it to go away completely. That also made it much less expensive, so it was a trade-off I was willing to make (my old Corsica had been the same, and it ended up being fine). It's silver, and it has a lot of gadgets. So I named it Bender, after the character from Futurama.

Welcome home, Bender.


Comments

)en said…
Aww, special! Congratulations. Looks like a real nice upgrade. Don't get into a fender bender, Bender. I don't really care about cars but Julian sure does. Sean has been excited to have someone to talk cars with, an interest that's sort of been lying dormant for several years, apparently. Kid is obsessed with audis right now and we play a game where we search for Audis when we're on the road. "Audi! One point." It KILLS him when I see one before he does, which is the best. 10 points if you see a maserati, which is akin to spotting Big Foot or finding the lost city of Atlantis or something. (Again, apparently)
October 15, 2019 at 11:55 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, you couldn't get white onions because of the war; all you could get...

Do you ever get stuck in a conversation that you can’t get out of? I’m not talking about those times when you have to be somewhere else or there’s a rational need to leave, but rather those times when, with every word the other person utters (it’s typically just a two-person conversation), your brain threatens to escape your body and make a break for it. All you can do is try to play some old TV theme songs in your head, or maybe design circuits if you’re the engineering type, all the while searching for an opportunity to escape. Now I’m boring myself just thinking about those situations.
Read more

Thirty Thoughts

1. Is that more hair in the shower drain every morning? 2. What's the big deal? It's just a number with a zero at the end. Why should we consider that significant? 3. Am I still allowed to wear shorts? 4. I need to buy a house within the next five years or we won't have it paid off by retirement age. Then again, my generation won't be able to retire until age 80, so I shouldn't worry. 5. I really should be eating more green, leafy vegetables. If I leave potatoes in the fridge long enough, will that count? 6. Going back to school is getting less and less likely. Then again, sending kids to school will be enough trauma. 7. At least I no longer look like I'm 12, which I did until I was about 23. 8. I will never wear my cell phone on my belt. 9. For some reason, there's a big difference between having a kid and having kid s . 10. You kids get off the lawn! 11. I wonder when my memory will start to go. 12. Inside of me beats the heart of an 18-year-old. At leas...
Read more

Moral Compass

On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being “afraid to step on a blade of grass” and 10 being “I’m gonna kill everyone!”), how bad is it if I were to warm up my car in the morning for 10 minutes before coming to work?
Read more