My husband and my sister keep insisting on knowing what I want for my birthday, and though I really don’t want anything much I figured I’d post my amended list from last Xmas:
-A good quality blender
-New mixing bowls (plastic is fine)
-A good quality: small saucepan & large frying pan
-A cloak (with a hat, like in the French Lieutenant’s woman)
-Babysitting coupons
-Gift certificates to nice (or not so nice) restaurants
-Piedmont Springs gift certificate
-Down comforter
-Framing my pictures (I have LOTS of pictures I need to frame!)
-Salad spinner
-movie tickets
-sunglasses (any)
-good quality mandoline
-Driving lessons
I particularly want a salad spinner 🙂
Author: marga (Page 92 of 158)
Not only do we have a new (red) car, but I finally put a favicon.ico on my website – so now you can see a little daisy (for the uninformed, Margarita is daisy in Spanish) every time you visit 🙂
Yesterday we bought a new car. It was a first one for us. Until then, we’d taken pride of never having spent more than $5K in a car. Driving cheap cars, not having a monthly payment, was not only how we kept afloat during tough economic times, but our way of turning away from the uber-consumerist society in which we live (and in which we so readily participate at Christmastime) .
But after crushing our car last year, we needed a new 4-door car to accommodate the whole family. We went through all the feasible possibilities. I wanted a wagon – but we discovered that at best these cars get 25 mpg – same thing with minivans which I didn’t really want (too big). I liked the Matrix, which are basically corollas with hatchbacks, but their 31 mpg (Hwy) didn’t convince me. So we went back to our original plan: a corolla – we’ve owned 2 so far and we’ve been happy with them. But, but, but… as long as we were talking fuel efficiency, shouldn’t we just go for a hybrid? They are, OTHO, significantly more expensive than corollas.
We went back and forth and finally the environment won out. So yesterday, we went car shopping. We were in sort of a hurry because we wanted to have the car before my sister arrives early next month – that way she’ll have something to drive while she’s here (and can thus taxi us around). But I didn’t really have to buy a car yesterday, and now I sort of wish I didn’t.
We first went to look at used hybrids at a dealership near our house. They had both priuses and civics, selling for about the same price: $19K for basic or just above basic models with about 50K miles. There wasn’t a price difference between the two. Of course, that was the price before negotiation – I’ve no idea what the real price would be.
Then we went to see the new civics – Mike liked them and I negotiated what was probably the best deal they could give us. Still, we had to see the priuses first. And we did, at the Toyota dealership in Alameda.
Mike test drove one and he liked it more, I think the thought it was smoother. I liked the fact that it has a higher MPG rating for city driving (and this will mostly be a city car), that it’s a hatchback and that the back seats recline. I also liked the back camera – when and if I ever drive, I’m sure it’ll be very useful getting out of our driveway. So in sum, I wanted the prius.
I knew that it was a more popular car than the civic, so I was willing to pay more than for the civic, but I ended up paying about $1K more than I wanted to (and $2K more than the civic). And for this I blame myself. I wasn’t ready to negotiate – I hadn’t done my homework and the only basis for price I had were the numbers the civic dealership had given me. I didn’t have a negotiating plan and I hadn’t thought the process through. They, of course, have the process down to a T and I fell for their tactics. So now I’m feeling pretty screwed, and instead of feeling happy for having a new car, I feel stupid for having bought it yesterday just like that. I guess this is why they have laws making cars non-returnable 🙂
In addition, we got a red car. I don’t mind the color, per se, but everyone and their mother has a red prius and I would have liked to have a different one. Hmm, I wonder if we should return it and get a different color (that you can do within 3 days :-).
But the point is that I’m unhappy when I should be happy (and this is without doing any research to figure out just how much I overpaid!). I can’t even say “lesson learned” as I don’t plan to buy a new car ever again 🙂
For some reason, I love reading about expeditions to Everest. I loved “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer (an awesome writer) and enjoyed “The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm” by Matt Dickinson and “Doctor on Everest: Emergency Medicine at the Top of the World – A Personal Account of the 1996 Disaster” by Kenneth Kamler. “Climbing High : A Woman’s Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy” by Lene Gammelgaard wasn’t as good, but I didn’t have any major complaints about it. “High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed’ by Michael Kodas just plain sucked.
It was an interesting subject: how Everest has become so busy and commercialized that it has attracted all sorts of crime and unethical behavior. Injured, overtired or confused climbers are often left for dead by others trying to make it to the summit of the mountain and back. Under-equipped climbers steal provisions, equipment and in particularly oxygen bottles from others, severely risking the lives of the victims. Sherpas (who really come up horrible in this book) demand more money to continue mid-way through the climbs and to rescue injured climbers, attack them, leave them for dead (while still alive) and also steal equipment. Guides abandon their clients and participate in side-business of dubious morality of not legality. One particularly dangerous one is the refilling of oxygen bottles, often without informing the buyers of the fact – refilled bottles have a high failure rate, and at 8,000 meters a failing oxygen bottle may very well kill you. And then there is prostitution, gambling, overdrinking, drug and steroid use and other vices of civilization.
It was very interesting to find out all of this, and if I ever had dreamt of climbing Everest (which I haven’t, because I do have some grip on reality), this book definitely would have made think twice about it.
The problem with the book, however, is that it was very badly written and organized even worse. There are two major story lines in the book – an account of the author’s own 2004 Connecticut Expedition and the account of an elderly Bolivian climber who died on Everest and the alleged responsibility of his guide. These are told more or less in chronological order and, while ultimately boring, they are easy enough to follow. Other stories, however, appear disjointedly throughout the book. In some of them, the author expresses what seems to be sincere admiration for specific individuals, in others, those same individuals are torn apart. People do have good and bad sides, but there is too little character development to understand what these people are really like.
The story of the disintegration of the Connecticut team is also not very understandable. The author suggests that members of the team turned against other members suddenly, but there is little explanation about how that came about. He seems more interested in vilifying his perceived enemies than in finding an objective place from which to look at the expedition. Jon Krakauer he is not.
He also can’t write like Krakauer, it’s suprising to me that he is a professional writer (a journalist), and while he uses the tools of storytelling, he doesn’t do it successfully.
In sum, as far as Everest books go, this is way down the pile.
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