Category: Auto

posting…New Year’s weekend

Monday, 8 January, 2007 at 11:22 am

I’ve been a lazy blogger. Bad me. Umm, lessee…

December 27th, Wednesday, took my car in for 30,000 mile maintenance. The service area’s computers were out, and we (Daddy and I) waited an hour then found out the computers were back on but they didn’t tell us. -.-

My car didn’t get worked on until 2 in the afternoon, and so my car wasn’t ready until the next day. Argh. I woke up at nine to see if the car was ready but they didn’t call so I called them, then got put on hold for about 5 minutes before I was disconnected. (It’s a very busy place with not so good channels of communication open with the customers.) So then Daddy Hidek and I went in the van to pick up Noelle Tadash and SM00 for the weekend.

Friday we (everyone, Mum Daddy Hidek Noelle Tadash SM00 me) went to Mitsuwa in Torrance. Mmm, good udon. *grin* Everyone else (except Daddy, he didn’t get anything) had ramen.

Went to the bookstore. I bought the Paradise Kiss manga series in some special large(r) format. I don’t know what it is, I can’t read the Japanese on it, but I do know it’s an inch or so larger on the sides. Then we went to Fry’s, but Mum Daddy and I stayed in the car. They had the Wii but you had to buy 5 games with it. o.O Odd.

Oh yeah, it turns out my car was ready at 10 on Thursday. They must have called right after we stepped out the door. ;.; We went to pick it up at 3 but their computers were down again so we couldn’t pay with credit card. ARGH. So we left then came back at 5 to pick up my car.

Hidek rented Talladega Nights from Blockbuster, we watched that Thursday/Friday night, I don’t remember. We thought it was really funny. ^_^;; Daddy and I (and Mickey, some) watched practically all the extras. I really liked it. But this movie had less, er, guest roles? (drivers from NASCAR) than Cars did. :/ I thought that was kinda boring. But I guess they didn’t really fit into the story.

Erm, I don’t remember, one day we watched Shimotsuma Monogatari (English title: Kamikaze Girls) and Dark Water. Was it Saturday? And we watched Talladega Nights on Friday? It was weird, ’cause after watching Dark Water, that night SM00 went into the hallway and she came out saying water was dripping from the smoke alarm. O.o! The girl was coming to haunt us! But it turned out that the toilet upstairs flooded, and leaked downstairs. ehehe That night the boys and I played Texas Hold’em. Then SM00 joined us to play the boardgame Payday. (1994 edition. Apparently, the old version didn’t have the lottery. o.o But that part is so fun! XD)

Sunday we went to their house to make mochi. (Gee, I can’t say “pound mochi” can I?)

Monday, New Year’s, that was fun. I actually got to see the whole Rose Parade for once. o.o I think last year I was too nervous about school to sit down and watch television. And all the years before, we always went to a relative’s house to celebrate and not much tv watching got done. I guess I missed out on the Stephanie Edwards and Bob Eubanks era. :( I remember her, but I never really watched so I don’t know how she did the parade.

Tuesday Daddy, Hidek and I went to Borders. I returned the Nana manga that had the security device with the dried up glue that was pulling out the paper and got a $20 journal for only $1.73 with the return and my holiday savings. woohoo! Then I went with Daddy to Barnes and Noble. Why? I dunno. Just felt like going out, maybe I felt like looking at their journals and date books.

Wednesday Mum and I went out shopping.

Thursday I watched a lot of Monk season 3.

Friday, I don’t remember. o.O Saturday all the relatives got together at Noelle’s house for New Year’s. We left our house at 9 like we planned (shocking; maybe everyone was hungry, haha) and got to Noelle’s house around 10. Had good ozoni. XD Hidek bought Wario Ware, so we played that. I made wonton with Daddy helping. Then the boys played NASCAR I don’t remember which one, for the Gamecube. Then we had dinner. Yummm. I’ve got some leftovers sitting in the fridge for dinner sometime this week. XD

Sunday packed up my stuff. Pretty much all I did was watch tv. Drove up to school. Unpacked stuff.

car, buying, site and comp stuff

Monday, 30 October, 2006 at 9:55 pm

Well I took my car in to the dealership (not the one I bought from) and it was just a faulty seal in the fuel line, something like that, that could have been leaking gasoline. Eep. Cost my parents $300. Mum’s going to try talking to CarMax to make them pay for it because they had to drop the fuel tank over the summer to fix the fuel gauge, and they probably didn’t fix it all up completely which caused this recent problem. Don’t know if they’ll pay though. Hope they do. Got an oil change too, so I also hope there’s no sludge buildup in the engine.

Saturday my brother and I went to Best Buy. He bought Shaun of the Dead, and I bought Pink’s I’m Not Dead album and Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire special edition DVD. I was going to buy Absolute Sandman (Borders and Best Buy are right next to each other) but I remembered I had a 25% off coupon in my e-mail. I bought it the next day, when we went grocery shopping.

Insert rant about Border’s membership suckiness on actually saving me any money. I liked Waldenbooks’ Preferred Reader system, even though it probably would have put them out of business. I don’t know if I spent enough to reach the minimum required to get my holiday savings. *twitch twitch* I wish it were a minimum of $5 savings instead of $10.

Umm … I realized while writing the entry that I bought a $100 book when I bought Absolute Sandman volume one, and that if I doubled that amount I could buy this limited edition of American Gods. (But I think I’ll just buy the Melinda story. Or ask for it for Christmas. *grin*)

Ehm … I haven’t really touched Absolute Sandman yet. I kind of feel like Martin, Bart, and Milhouse when they bought the first issue of Radioactive Man. Don’t touch it! The oils on your fingers will ruin the pages! I already feel that way about (non-mass market paperback) books and try to only touch the outside of pages, how much worse will I be with a $100 book?

Last night I finished the whole process of backing up files onto my desktop so I could install Norton AntiVirus 2007 on my laptop. I don’t want to type up everything again but basically: the install was really slow, I stayed up til almost 12 finishing, and after it installed I didn’t restart I just shut down, so when I started today everything loaded really really slowly. I’m thinking the slowness is because I only have 256 RAM. I wish Daddy could figure out how to add to my RAM. boo.

I guess I didn’t need to backup everything, but I’m glad I did ’cause I was meaning to ever since summer. The reason I was reluctant is that I don’t want to abandon my laptop, I love (in a totally non-materialistic manner) my laptop and don’t want to stop using it just because I got a newer shinier toy. But I think I’ll keep maintaining my site files on my laptop. Even though I prefer to design on my desktop. XD; Also most all my music is on my laptop. I think I’ve turned it into my non-portable, ancient “paper weight” mp3 player. haha. Mickey loaned me his not-so-good but-still-great-nonetheless speakers, so those are connected to my laptop and the cheap Dell speakers are left on my desktop for Starcraft. I’m happy.

fsgirl and more car problems

Thursday, 26 October, 2006 at 11:35 pm

… I need a new layout up here. But I feel guilty when I think about taking this layout down. It’s like the girl I drew there IS flimsysilence. She’s the mascot. I can’t remover her!!

Just had a thought. I’ll stick her image up on the domain info page. Yeah. Good idea.

Anyway.

Um. I walked up three flights of stairs today twice. Why? First time to study. (For some reason I just really don’t like the idea of being someplace where it’s more crowded. Even at my last college, sometimes I didn’t like sitting at the desks because there were so many people around me.) Second time because I finished my midterm a lot sooner than I thought, and I had a lot of free time so I went to read Carrie. (I’m up to the big scary finale! *grin*)

On the way home my check engine light went on. Found out I haven’t had an oil change for 5000 miles. I guess I just forgot over the summer. >_> I remember being at 28000 miles! Why didn’t I remember to change the oil?!?! Grarr!! So I called the nearest Dodge dealership and I have to take my car in tomorrow as early as possible. Hoping I get my car back in time to get to class on Monday! Hoping I get my car back at all… (reference: see “car problems” entry)

fry fuel

Saturday, 11 March, 2006 at 12:33 am

This thought came to me while walking home from school …

You know how they’re turning used cooking oil into fuel for diesel engines? They say it smells like something. I don’t remember what. (Apple pie? O_o) And there was this episode of Dirty Jobs where this guy would take used oil from a Mexican restaurant and turn it into fuel for his diesel engine. It smelled like … something, I’m sure. I don’t recall.

Well, I was wondering, couldn’t McDonald’s take their old french frying oil and turn it into an alternative fuel? And hopefully it would smell like their fries. XD;; Good, influential advertising!

You’re driving along … “Mmm, I smell … let’s go to McDonald’s!”

(Yes, I did think I smelled fries while walking home. >.>)

envirodork

Friday, 9 September, 2005 at 10:48 am

It is COLD today! o_o And yesterday and all the rest of the week it was hot! So weird. Where did this cloud cover come from?

Anyway. I wanted to find out what kind of mileage my car is supposed to get, because I never remember, so I looked up my car on Yahoo and I found this site: fueleconomy.gov. Isn’t it so cool! XD

Here’s my car, Dodge Stratus 2001. A year ago I used to get almost 28 mpg, but now I only get 26.9 mpg, probably because I’m driving home in the afternoon instead of in the evening. People in the afternoon want to go home, so they go 75 … and the trucks in the right two lanes (which I usually prefer to drive in to go a more reasonable speed and therefore get better mileage) go 60 or so, which is just irritating to me (and besides big rigs freak me out). So I’m going 75 instead of 65. Actually, when I was getting 28 mpg I would go 75~80 on the freeway. But I had this neat trick, see. When going downhill I would hit the gas so I’m going 75, then when I’m going uphill I would ease off the gas a little so I’d slow down to 65/70. I stopped doing that though because to go 75 I had to be in the second lane, and people in the second lane didn’t like it when I slowed down going uphill. ahaha.

Anyway. That site is neat! The worst mileage my car ever has is probably 24/25 during the summer, ’cause I’m not driving on the freeway every weekend. muahahaha.

—

[10:53] Hm. I was looking at the Save the Redwoods League website, at the picture on the mainpage, and thinking about Sequoia, and thinking about people clearcutting the forests in Northern California … and I started to feel sick. Physically sick, like dizziness and nausea. Is that normal? O_o