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.
The last two winters, Jen’s parents have let me borrow their “extra” car because Jen was out of town, or I had to park at an airport, or some other reason. While a Porsche Cayman (S trim or otherwise) can drive in most such scenarios, this winter was particularly brutal, with several storms depositing more snow than such a low car could handle. This made me extremely glad I had an alternative.
