The man stared weary ‘cross the valley
o’er all that he had wrought,
what he had yet still to do,
and felt a yawning despair overtake him.
– Anonymous Forty-five years, eh? Malformed though I am, I somehow surpassed my expectations to reach this point, and it’s certainly been an interesting life thus far. College, marriage, a few books, and perhaps even the pinnacle of my career, and then what?
Well, it finally happened. A caught Covid a couple weeks ago starting Monday July 25th. Despite being in Italy in early 2020, I somehow dodged the initial outbreak and then remained Covid free for the next two years. I was even beginning to believe I’d already caught it asymptomatically some time in the past and was actually immune now. Like that time I had a random two-week long dry cough in 2020.
Jen and I have been using a Dyson DC-15 Animal ever since we got an apartment together in 2007, and it has been showing its age for a while. The brush driver was extremely hard to turn by hand, it frequently left things behind, and one it has always emitted a high pitched tone that drove me to don firing-range hearing protection.
I’d recently disassembled the agitation brush system to clean out a bunch of cat hair and dust that had caked itself into the gear assembly that drives the agitator.
The TL;DR here is that my long vehicle search is over. The last few weeks have been a ceaselessly expanding and contracting series of criteria based on whatever seemed available at local dealerships and Facebook Marketplace. I probably should have just ordered something at a dealer to get exactly what I want, but the supply chain is still extremely precarious, and I’m not convinced the 3-4 month order pipeline will remain viable.
Salesmanship
This weekend, it was time to examine the Toyota RAV4. The local Toyota dealership in town had a 2021 XLE Premium model on the lot, so I figured we could head down and at least take it for a drive to compare it to the Forester and CRV. The weather looked like it would soon take a turn toward some pretty bad storms, so we didn’t want to drive very far.
