trinacriabob

This.

An example of what I'm looking at ... a SEAT Ibiza coupe (gasoline instead of diesel, and a DSG 7 speed automatic) with this body style; most are manuals ... and under VW's family of companies at this point.

Nice, evocative photos. It stops at the clams! LOL. I am very ok with fish that is of the filet-able form. I have had intermittent bad gastric experiences with shellfish, so I tread carefully. I have no idea why it's random.

Good morning ... She'd make a great Karen. - - - - - Sadly, I share an alma mater with her - one of them. I'd really want any financial advice to be dispensed by someone with an MBA, or even a basic business degree, instead of a BA in Social Work with marginal grades. (Yes, I know she worked in financial services.) As much as she tries to come across as sincere, she tries too hard and there's way too much flash. Also, Tom Leykis doesn't like her. That counts! Happy Sunday.

They have manuals in the cars they test with as a baseline. If not, they probably have some code to restrict the license (to automatics). I'm going to say go with the flow in case you need to rent a manual or drive someone's manual car for some reason.

If overseas, economical car with automatic and not ICE. I will have too much on my plate ... the (stress of the) to do list is insane, including doing driving school. Italy will not swap U.S. driver licenses. (The school is always done with a manual, so I'll have to get back on that bicycle.) Portugal will exchange them. I talked to one lady in Italy who was really nice but also a douchebag in how she made it sound like I was preparing for a flight to the moon. I went to driver's ed in 10th grade, cracked jokes with my friends, did the work, got an A, got 2 wrong on the written test, and got a 100 on the drive test. My parents moved us to Italy before I ever started school and we came back before the 3rd grade. I did not speak English and K through 2 was in Italian. In the 5th grade, my teacher, a nun, said she wanted to talk to me. I was wondering what I had done wrong. She just wanted to pull me aside to tell me my standardized test scores, which surprised the hell out of me! Point is that Italians have one glaring fault - they are quite obtuse in getting it that smart people can figure things out. I think they have this narrow view because they did not colonize. Somalia doesn't count. OTOH, the Spaniards, French, and Portuguese did, so they are less likely to insult people for minor speech "irregularities" since people in other lands far away have slightly differently accented versions of their languages and some of their customs. End of rant. Small car. Automatic. Reputable brand. Gasoline engine.

Today marks the 1 year anniversary that I don't have a car registered to me. Letting go of the LaCrosse was initially difficult, but I've gotten used to it. I rent when I need to. (That's what people like Manhattanites do!) From 16 on, I had regular access to a car, even if our family ones weren't registered to me. I have to figure out what to buy and when. If across the pond, it will NOT be a new car. A weird state of limbo to be in, to be sure, but I don't really have a choice and I'll get it sorted out.

Neat! How are you situated with GM in the '70s and '80s?

Yeah, true. But it was put into motion for different reasons and it was a bug that my foreign born doctor out West put in my ear about 10 years ago. I filed it away. It then involved contacting the consulate to get the citizenship recognized and then be issued that passport. It's not bad if you're first-gen, but it's still a lot of work. You have these third-gen on one side who have to have it, and they have to come through with a big paper trail. Still, I never thought it would come to this. The EU in general is also very concerned with the outcome.

Two weeks to go ... and this "casual Catholic" is praying a lot.

Good morning ... ... happy birthday, Kamala Harris

Deniers always continue to dispute issues even when they are presented with hard data by scientists, economists, statisticians, etc. They're kind of dense and/or bring personal baggage into the equation. It's almost sad that they get the same vote (instead of relative weighting ... what a concept) as some of the people with more critical thinking skills. Then, it's definitely sad that our country's simpletons could determine policy and anything of import for those who live in large swaths with way more complex and enlightened areas.

What people name their kids can be very interesting. I was once checking into a hotel in a suburb of Toronto, and the name of the guy helping me was Supreme. I asked him if his parents were Oldsmobile fans ... nope, they were Motown fans. The year before, I was going to the breakfast room at a hotel in Portugal and one of the employees running the breakfast service was a guy named Majeek. Now, Supreme was laid back and likable, but Majeek was very cool. I forgot where in the Portuguese diaspora his family came from ... possibly the Cape Verde Islands. The more you travel, or just look around you and observe, the more trippy things you will see and unique people you will come across.

The world is a village. It doesn't matter where you go, you will always see people buying lottery cards, schedules, tickets, or scratchers. Most of these people have no business buying them. Said another way, most of these people wouldn't understand the most basic concepts of a statistics course if they bit them in the ass. "Probability" is your friend.

I saw this weird one changing planes at AMS. I usually sit by a window. Obviously an old 747 that's been put out to pasture, so to speak, that they've done weird things to ... so, then, is it a restaurant in the making? You can see KLM colors in the vicinity.

I get a headache just thinking of all the cars he has, is having worked on, flips, etc. I hope he keeps spreadsheets, or similar, to track the ins and outs. This system intuitively sounds bad, and it need not even be a northerly latitude. Moisture and anything trunk related spell trouble. Leaky landaus brought on by rust admitted water to the trunks of colonnades, for one. The car isn't as bad looking from the rear, and that includes the general greenhouse. However, the front is ghastly. It's yet another example of where Pontiac steered too haphazardly with their random overstyling, and I think the '04 to '08 GP were similarly less than they could have been based on their front clips.

Good morning ... ... my morning pretty much IRL and, no, not SF, but about halfway around the world from there.

I just looked at this again, having had a few more as rentals by now. The Mitsubishi Mirage works too hard to deliver what should be better fuel mileage. It appears to be going away. The Kia Soul does not appear to have slots to allow for a rear cover when the back seat is up. The Hyundai Venue has a cartoonish Kia Amanti look by its grille up front. The Jetta, which I disliked when boxy for a fair number of years, has morphed into an attractive vehicle. Vehicles that can turn in 200,000 miles with simple maintenance are definitely needed at these price points when other expenses are chewing up more and more of Americans' consumer spending power.

Insane. Milton made landfall at Siesta Key in Sarasota County as a 3. It was forecast to come in between Tampa Bay and Port Charlotte. I forgot the strength of the previous ones that recently hit the southwest coast of FL. So much preparation was needed. I saw a clip on evacuating the animals from the Tampa Zoo. I'm sad for those who didn't make it out. They mentioned that a plane carrying evacuees crashed. It's working its way northeasterly across the peninsular state.

If it had to be Texas, I much prefer that area. Somewhere I have a photo I took of some new houses going up near Clear Lake, east of NASA Houston Space Center and on water, but not quite at Galveston Bay. They were propping them up like this, and were using metal studs, joists, etc. Lightweight metal. That method comes and goes, it seems. It's damn moist down there, so that has to be addressed in how the metal is prepped ... and even cut. I sort of like this look. It says Sunbelt AND vacation.

This is a weird guy with a strange voice. I didn't look up his info. Where is he from? Some people make a living off of astrology because people either read those columns or consult with them, like they would a fortune teller or palm reader. I'm only on board with the part of mine that says we are travelers and likely to have a broad assortment of friends, and that it would include foreign ones! I don't know if I find them or they find me. I once worked with someone I shared a birthday with. We got along socially, like going to lunch and to b.s. Then, they put us on a project together and it was a "Felix and Oscar" nightmare and we no longer gelled. Three guesses as to which one I was and the first two don't count.

It's a combination of a lot of things, really. The southern part builds with concrete masonry units. The northern part frames in wood. The southern part has homes on slabs. The beachfront areas up north - expensive ones on the Panhandle, for example - raise the homes up on piers or pylons, but it's still wood framing above. It should all be designed with that 100 year event in mind if close enough to the coast. Still, with the storm surge, people need to leave.

Not so great colonnade years: 1973 and 1974 Not so great next-gen years: 1978, 1979, and 1980. Consumers had a right to be pissed. It actually cost more to go from too much (the '77 MC) to too little (the '78 MC), and that's just one example.

I was joking. I think he hates the colonnades and the malaise era. More '76 or even '75 GP for me. I had trouble with the '77 lights up front (the center lamp in between) and the taillight medallion with the swoopy wedding invitation calligraphy inside it. I was also sweet on '76 and '75 GLMs for their borrowing from or sharing with the GP (still drool over their fully instrumented dash), but being more manageable in terms of size.