There are no pics this week.

Danita and I planned to go to Greece in September. We wanted some extra time in Athens, so we arranged air tickets to arrive in Athens 2 days before the tour started. Last Sunday, I finally got aground to reserving the hotel room for those 2 days. About 6 hours after I locked that reservation in, the travel folks called to tell us they were cancelling the trip. I was *not* pleased. We’re working out what to do. One possibility is to use the airfare and the 2 day hotel stay as the beginning of our more-or-less self guided trip. We will pre-arrange local tours in combination with getting around on our own. It looks promising, thanks to our good friend Mr. Google.

Our Leaf was having a hard time getting out of the dealer’s repair shop. I requested a service loaner for us to pick up Monday and keep until our car was repaired. The dealership agreed. We got a brand new Sentra (with 1100 miles on it). It was kind of noisy and definitely less comfortable than our Accord, but it had some interesting features. One feature was adaptive cruise control, which I didn’t notice until I was driving to the dealer to return the loaner. I had the cruise control set. The traffic in front of me slowed down, but I never had to hit the brakes because my car slowed to keep pace. It felt very strange. Its performance was flawless, but in that short drive I never felt I could trust it. The other feature was a lane-change warning. If I turned on the signal to switch lanes and there was another car too close in that lane, it would flash and beep to warn me of a possible collision. This sounds like a way cool and very useful feature, but it quickly got irritating. When changing lanes around here, it’s often necessary to kind of push your way into the other lane. The bleeping beeper went off too often.

You might have noticed I just wrote about driving the loaner back to the dealer. Yes, that means our Leaf was declared leak-free. It’s sitting in our garage right now. I took it out in a rain yesterday. It came back as dry as a fine Cabernet.

With the Leaf leak plugged and some interesting options on the trip to Greece, things are beginning to turn around. We hope to have the other issues resolved before long, but I won’t tempt fate by pre-announcing success.

We only have one party this week — a neighborhood Italian potluck dinner this evening. Danita made lasagna. My goal is to get towards the front of the line so I can get a slice. There’s no charge for the potluck dinners, so they are BYOB. We have a nice bottle of Cabernet waiting and ready.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week So much has happened that it’s hard to believe it’s only been one week since I last posted. Many of our adventures and misadventures seem to involve water in one way or another.

Leaf Leak: Our new Nissan Leaf has a leak somewhere near the rear bumper. We found this last Sunday, when we drove it to Church in a light rain. The car went back to the dealer early this week. They found the leak but didn’t know how to fix it, so called in a specialist. The specialist had them order an obscure part from some faraway place. The car is still at the dealer. We’ve requested a service loaner, which we will pick up tomorrow.

Related delay: The Level 2 charger for the Leaf came in. It’s mounted to the wall. I have delayed calling the electrician until we can actually plug it into the car and see the battery charge.

Toilet Leak: Our house uses plastic plumbing. Each appliance has a cut-off valve, which is crimped onto the plastic water pipe. Apparently, after 10 years or so, the plastic pipe cracks and starts to leak. Our first leak was the master toilet. It resulted in water dripping through the ceiling of our basement play room. We spent that night and most of the next day without water in the house. Fortunately, Danita detected the leak very early. The only damage was to the ceiling. A moisture specialist confirmed there is no water damage or mold inside the walls. A contractor has come in to quote the price of repairs. The plumber that fixed the toilet has promised a quote to replace all 15 of these crimped cut-off valves. The only thing we use the play room for is my morning stretches, so the impact on our daily life is minimal.

Shower stall fall: Danita took a hot shower the other morning (as she often does). Apparently, this triggered a rapid lowering of her blood pressure. She fainted and fell, then felt nauseous. She bumped her knee and hurt a toe. She deservedly spent the rest of the morning relaxing in her jamies.

We also had some good things happen. Danita got her first two shifts in at the food bank. They went well. Friday we went to a chili cook off at our church, which was great fun. Tina Baumann (from Circle) turned 70. Her family threw a birthday party for her yesterday, which was also fun (after we found the venue).

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We got our new Nissan Leaf today. I’ll install a “Level 2” charger next week. For now, we’re using the 110 V charger that comes with the car. The cost of electricity to drive the car is about 1/3 the cost of gas to drive our Honda Accord. If you go the web, you can see some pics. We used to differentiate our cars by the color (ex: I’ll take the blue car tomorrow). Unfortunately, all the blue 2016 Honda Leafs had a bunch of extra options installed. Our choices were either red or boring (black, white, and various shades of grey). We took the red one. The Nissan red almost exactly matches the Honda red.

Besides getting a car, we have a neighborhood party tonight, a Circle luncheon at the Bertch’s tomorrow, and a neighborhood concert / desert party Sunday. Danita will start volunteering at the Howard County Food Bank. She has to start with few a training slots. She’s having trouble finding training slots that meet her schedule, but I’m sure she’ll work that out eventually.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

Buying a car is still frustrating. It’s been a long time since we bought a car. The internet has overhauled the buying process. All the old games dealers used to play are no longer played. Of course, they’ve come up with new games. We quickly zeroed in on a Nissan Leaf. But we would have to finance it to get the best price (which is $4,000 lower than the next best price). But the interest rate is 0% for the entire term of the loan. It just doesn’t make sense. Then the salesperson started talking about how high the depreciation is on electric cars. His theory is that the battery technology is rapidly changing, so nobody wants to buy used electrics. So we thought we might buy a Leaf off of a 3-year lease. The risk is minimal, thanks to Carfax, which reports the entire history of the car, including all owners, maintenance, etc. Of course, one has to buy a car off a lot. We found a blue one we thought we liked. The salesperson gave us some advice, which resulted in the car being sold out from under us. I found that out Sunday, and I was completely bummed. And when all the costs were added it, it wasn’t nearly as cheap as we were led to believe. So now we’re back to looking at a new one. A pox on car sales people.

Danita is zeroing in on her volunteer activities. She visited the shelter. (I was wrong — it’s just a shelter, nothing to do with violence against women). Tomorrow she’ll go to training at the food bank. She should be able to decide what she wants to do pretty soon.

I made a blunder. I got bored with the Superbowl game and went to bed at 9:30. Danita stayed up and got to watch the interesting part of the game. Oh, well. There’s always the replays on YouTube.

Other than that, things are moving along normally. The weather was so nice out today, I decided it can’t be February — 50 and sunny. What a great ride!

I hope this finds everybody doing well.