It's been a long couple of weeks...
First off, just before New Year's, on the way back from picking up
sabs at the airport after Christmas, I managed to put my WRX into a four-inch tall cement curb at about 10MPH. This was enough to crumple the control arm, rip out the endlink, possibly bend the strut, and cause some fender damage.
End result, the car has been in the shop for the last two weeks or so getting repaired, and I have yet another "compact" rental from Enterprise -- a 2004 Chevy Silverado LS Extended Cab pickup truck. Now, this is the third in a series of not-so-compact rentals from Enterprise over the past few years... I always reserve a compact, but they never have them, so I get these large vehicles at the same rate as a Neon or something similar. A few years ago, it was a 2002 Ford F-150 SuperCrew XLT, in December, it was a 2004 Jeep Liberty, and this time, it's the aforementioned pickup.
Let's just say that they renew a whole new love for my small car. These beasts are often impossible to maneuver in tight spaces, especially when you need to engage the 4WD to keep them from spinning like tops when the weather turns bad. Of the three, the Jeep has been the best, but none of them handle like my Impreza.
I've also managed to calculate a financial way to afford a used Lotus Elise by mid- to late-summer. Now, I'm hoping the used market for them continues as it has so far, and they'll be reasonably affordable by the time I've saved up enough to pay off my Subaru and get a down payment on the Lotus.
Before doing so, I had to make sure that I could
fit in one... so I made the trip last Wednesday down to
Aston Martin of New England in Waltham, MA, which now houses the "local" Lotus Motorsports dealership after the one in Brighton closed down. I got a chance to test ingress, egress, and pedal spacing on two Elises, one soft top, one hard top, both in British Racing Green.
Beautiful cars. Seeing a 6'3", 270 pound man with 12.5 EEEE feet climb in and out of such a tiny vehicle was not a pretty sight, but there's plenty of headroom, adequate space around the pedals, and great fit in the seats. I might even be able to fit a helmet in there with the top up.
So, the dream begins.
In other news, I've taken this afternoon to rearrange all of the furniture in my office at work. I've moved the desks, re-wired my computer and monitors, and basically cleaned the place up a lot. In the process of repairing one of my desks, however, I managed to coat three of my fingers with a thick layer of Krazy Glue... so now I'm rubbing my fingers together to make it come off.
However, it's also after 7PM, and I've been here since 8:30AM today... and our demonstration at the annual
Surface Navy Association National Symposium is set up... so that means that I can depart for home.
