Linkstew

We have a ritual of going to Arby's in South San Francisco for lunch whenever one of our Subaru drivers is getting his car serviced. The problem is, South San Francisco is possibly the least hospitable place on the peninsula, and it doesn't really help that your average Arby's tends towards the ghetto side.

Let me first say that any city that thinks it's a good idea to write "South San Francisco - The Industrial City" on the side of their mountain probably isn't going to be a very nice place to live, much less visit.

While we were ordering our food, one of the employees went to her car, and returned with a cup of instant soup, presumably for her lunch. When she opened the door, the wind caught it and blew it open, and the gust blew some napkins and cup lids into the air, and one of the employees said "Wind storm!" and I had a sad vision of her saying that everytime a few lids were blown into the air.

It looked like a nice sunny day, so we decided to eat at one of the tables outside. As soon as we sat down in the middle of a sea of pavement, we realized how windy it was, but we decided we could weather the nuisance. We had a nice clear view of the South San Francisco sign in one direction.

A plane taking off from SFO passed over us, its shadow making it even colder for a second and its sound eclipsing the sound of the rattling fan of an air conditioner which had just kicked in at Arby's. And a few seconds later, the wind caused one of the metal umbrellas to start spinning around and squeaking loudly. The squeak of the spinning death blade and the rattle of the air conditioner continued intermittently for the rest of the meal.

Once we finished our meal, we undertook an expedition to find out why the back half of the parking lot was barricaded off. The barricades only served to keep a car from driving around the back of the building, and the only thing we found back there were the bathrooms. We walked over to the short concrete wall at the back of the parking lot to see what was on the other side behind the shrubbery that stuck up a few feet above the wall.

Tyler hopped onto the top of the wall and peered over the hedge to see someone's back yard -- about 30 feet below. I looked down between the wall and the hedge and noticed that it was actually a 30 foot tall hedge, and then I looked up at tyler, his toes sticking over the edge of the wall, the wind at his back, and the only thing between him and doom was that plant. He obviously still thought the hedge was in a flower bed that started level with the parking lot I was standing on, because that's what it looked like.

"You uh, might want to get down from there." I suggested.

It almost made me wish I was eating lunch in San Mateo.

(This was an attempt at a setting sketch. I'm not sure how well it really described the environment, though.)

Appropriately enough, I hit 10,000 miles while on the San Mateo bridge. Here are some statistcs:

• I've paid $832 for 444.448 gallons of gas.
• I've gotten gas 28 times.
• I've averaged 22.687 mpg.
• I averaged 70.9 miles a day, which is pretty much right, given that I live exactly 35 miles from my office.
• At this rate, I should hit 20,000 in mid-August -- two months before I've even had the car for a year. But there won't be any snowboarding trips to drive my total up, so hopefully I won't make it to 20,000 before one year.
• Clearly I need a job where I don't have to drive to work, so I don't get a guilt trip every time I get in my car.

One night last week, I came home to find I had what was clearly an envelope containing a check from the State of California waiting for me in the mail. For a minute I was really confused, wondering if it was a really late tax refund or something. But upon opening the envelope, I found it to be a $271 refund check for my car registration, at the governator's executive order.

Y'know... I would have been perfectly happy to let California keep that money. I'm sure they could have done plenty with it... They could have put it towards education, just to pick an example. But now that they've already bothered to give it back, I'll take it. It's not going to do anything to make me like Ahnold any, though. At this rate, it'll probably end up paying for my gas.

I really need a job where I don't have to drive to work.

I got my license plates today, and I'm fairly disappointed. The plate's letter block is fairly boring... But I guess I can feel some limited satisfaction in getting to sneak around the state's restriction that "The number '69' is reserved for 1969 year model vehicles" for vanity plates, and as long as we're looking at it that way, I guess the "4" on my plate is about the best possible number that I could have before the "69."

I got my citation today, and in case you were wondering, it turns out Berkeley's Left Turn Tax is $142.

A week to the day after I bought the car, I got my first bill in the mail. Well, actually, I got my first six bills in the mail.

I opened the thick envelope and saw the bill on the top, so assumed the rest of the content was more interesting stuff. But when I returned to read the "more interesting stuff" after making dinner, I found it was 5 more pay stubs, and 6 envelopes. Now I'm going to be all nervous about losing these things. Boo.

I pretty much spent all morning reading skimming my "2003 Subaru Legacy Owner's Manual," which consisted of a lot of warnings and cautions and notes, and a lot of those warnings and cautions were repeated word for word several times throughout the manual. Blah.

In the afternoon, I got my insurance package from AAA, which I found more exciting than it really should have been.

While at work Friday, I remembered that I need some sort of "all season" tires for snow driving, and I had no idea if my car (with all its mighty AWDness) had snow tires. So I hopped over to the Subaru website, and saw that the Outback Wagon's tires were labeled "225/60R16 97H M+S," while my Legacy Wagon's tires were just "205/55R16 89H."

A lot of stressful and confusing tire research ensued, but when I left work and looked at my tires, I saw that they were, in fact, labeled M+S. Whew, money spending averted! Which is good, because there are other car accessories I already need to buy.

6:50 am:
ROOMMATE: BENJY, WAKE UP, MY FLIGHT IS IN AN HOUR!
BENJY: Mumble.
ROOMMATE: FROM SFO!
BENJY: Mumble!
ROOMMATE: Benjy, hurry up!

Admittedly, this doesn't have a whole lot to do with my car, because even without my car we probably would have just taken my roommate's car...

What is interesting, is I managed to get from Berkeley, through a 10 minute wait at the toll plaza and across the bay bridge, with a stop at SFO, and to work in San Mateo, in less than an hour. This is notable because it normally takes 40-50 minutes to do 880 to 92 between 9 and 10. The only real flaws are that there's no carpool lane on 101, and the carpool lane on the bay bridge requires 3 people instead of 92's 2 people.

Hey, y'know what?

The city of Berkeley doesn't like it when you make a left turn from Ashby onto MLK between 7 and 9 am.

You know what else?

Cops don't like it, either.

A block after turning onto MLK, I noticed one cop behind me with his lights on, and another cop to my right. Not having any clue what was going on, and unsettled as I was by the fact that I'd just been swarmed by cops, I went ahead and pulled over.

He prefaced the whole exchange with "It's a city ordinance that you can't make a left turn from Ashby onto MLK between 7 and 9 am, and it's 8:13 right now. This is just a city ordinance, so it won't go on your record or affect your insurance, but I have to give you a citation."

And given his qualification, I figured I'd just pay my left turn tax and be done with it. "Oh... I just got the car two days ago, and I'm still learning the city." I told him. He gave me the citation anyway.

"I'm never awake between 7 and 9 am, so I ignore that sign every time I see it," I said in my head.

Of course, I didn't realize until a day later that the clock in the car was still set to daylight savings time.

So, you're in your newly purchased car, without any CDs, with a 5+ hour drive up I-5 in front of you... and you find yourself in Wasco, near a K-Mart... where they subdivided their music into "Music en Espanol," "Latin Music," "Compilations," and Everything Else... and "Music en Espanol" plus "Latin Music" put together had more CDs than "Everything Else."