“Buy Local” Fail

I’m visiting my sister’s family next week.  I’ve been getting in the habit of buying books for my little nephews in preparation for their late teens when they start getting curious about drugs and porn.  Then I’ll be the goofy aunt who gave them “that” book, and maybe they’ll talk to me about stuff they can’t talk to their mom about.  Besides, the nephews are cute, and totally deserve a copy of Terry Pratchett’s “Where’s My Cow?”

I live in Cambridge, MA, one of the last places in the country with independent bookstores.  I decided to buy the book locally and bring it with me on the plane instead of, say, copping out and ordering it from Amazon to be shipped.

I went to Curious George Goes to Wordsworth.  They did not have the book, but said that they could order it.

I went to the Harvard Bookstore.  They did not have the book, but said that they could order it.

I went to Pandemonium Books and Games.  They’d certainly have it.  Nope.  They offered to order it.  I explained the nephews.  They tried to figure out if they could order it to be shipped to my nephews for me, but finally admitted that it would be cheaper for me to order from Amazon.

I just ordered the book from Amazon.

It’s still winter, but

We have snowdrops!

Arisia

I went to Arisia. It would have been nice to be on programming given that Wishbone came out last week, but organization is for other people.

Something important I learned as an Aspie is that when people ask how you are, you always lie. The catch is that sometimes I do not look ok and people will not take my word for it when I tell them. In the case of Arisia, I was experiencing the worst migraines I’ve had in almost a year. This led to many people saying “You look glassy-eyed. Are you ok?” I settled for telling them that the migraines weren’t nice, but that the drugs were.

Whatever.

Observation: there are lots of Aspies at cons. I mean, I knew this, of course, but damn.

Friday night was the Circlet Press party. I handed out lots of flyers. There’s something entertaining about offering people pieces of paper related to adult content. A few are emphatically not interested when you tell them Circlet publishes Erotic literature. But most are. I offered a flyer to a nice young lady whose eyes lit up like little sparklers. She told me that this was her first Arisia since she turned 18, and now she was delighted to go to parties that had been forbidden shortly before.

I had only bought a membership for Friday because I wasn’t sure how I’d feel. However, so many people I hadn’t seen in a long time were glad to see me. I decided to come back Saturday for more of the same.

I had a fantastic time going to parties and telling people that I wrote smut, would they like to check out my web site? This was even more fun after I found the rocket fuel party.

One gentleman informed me snootily that he didn’t need my site because his needs were served by Literotica.com. Have you ever looked at that site? I did once. I read the guidelines and found that everything that I had ever been advised not to write, and that everything that I had ever advised writers not to do, was required for Literotica stories. Ok, dude, you’re like, not a potential customer. No worries.

I also did some highly-useful schmoozing.

I found out something terrible. It was bad enough when all of my friends had kids. Now all their kids are starting high school. Augh!

Steampunk may be a bit overdone, but all the vendors of steampunk costume items work in leather, and their rooms smelled wonderful.

I had a great time, which made the subsequent minor snowstorm, the migraines it caused, and recent political events even more depressing. I’ll go have some more chocolate now.

More Sweater

I introduced my readers to my most recent sweater project earlier.

I’ve added the sleeves to the knit-in-the-round body as Elizabeth Zimmerman describes in Knitting Around. I will continue to knit upwards, reducing stitches at the points where the sleeves meet the body, until I’ve shaped the shoulders.

sweater assembled

Unusual Relationship Issues

You read or hear about it all the time. One half of a couple feels that their sexual needs are not being met. One way to deal with this issue is for the unsatisfied person to find another person to get, er, satisfied with. Sometimes open relationships are involved, but often people skip that part and just cheat on each other, with resulting drama.

All of my needs in that department are met, thank you very much. But I have another source of dissatisfaction. I’d like to go to parties in my area once in a while, and my spouse finds socializing to be the source of much anxiety.

I’m putting out feelers for someone who would like to be a party escort. Actually, I thought of posting something along these lines to CraigsList just to see what happens, but I’m not sure I could handle the hilarity.

Looking for one person living in the greater Boston area who wants to enjoy the occasional pool party or group outing with me. Gender is irrelevant. Applicants must have car and must not smoke. In return I will make sure you have a good time, and will reciprocate with baked or knitted goods and a split of gas money.

And if anything particularly funny results from this quest, I’ll be sure to blog it without names or identifying information. If nothing funny happens, I’ll try posting to CraigsList just for the LOLZ.

Something Completely Different: Knitting

I haven’t got much knitting done this year.  It aggravates my RSI issues, and I had to sort of re-learn how to hold the needles after my finger got broke in the car accident.  However, cold weather is a big impetus to knit.  I’m working on an Aran-style cabled sweater.  Here are some pictures. As usual the formatting will probably get screwed up on LJ, but the pics should still be visible. The three pictures are, in order, one sleeve, an annoying mistake in the OXO cable pattern, which I will have to fix, and the beginning of the body.  The sweater is being knit on size nine circulars.  The yarn is KnitPicks Comfy Bulky Yarn.

sweater arm

sweater mistake

sweater body

The Last Word (?) on the Car

I’m sorry I don’t have any gorgeous man-nipples to show you today. However, I do have news about the car. After the Honda dealer ripped out the carpet and the sodden and mildewed jute beneath and started taking stuff apart, they found the leak source. There was a manufacturing defect where three panels were supposed to be welded together. The weld had failed. They put it back together and tested it with a power washer, then replaced the jute and the carpet, which had been sent out for cleaning at a specialty shop.

We had a very interesting conversation with the head of service about the whole thing. Many apologies were tendered.

Meanwhile, I haven’t driven in about two years. I’d been having trouble with driving somewhere and getting a migraine so miserable that I couldn’t drive home. I’ve taken the new car out twice, once with the spouse along, then later on a short trip where I could leave the car and walk home if my head blew up.

While the car is a remarkably plain white Civic, some people have asked for pics. I’ll get those soon when the weather improves and I remember to take the pictures before the sun sets.

More Car Stuff

What the dealer said about water in the car was not correct. For one, more water appeared on the driver’s side floor when the car was not being steam cleaned. There aren’t many ways to get water in the car when it’s not actually raining or you haven’t been careless with your Poland Springs bottle. In this case, we believe the airconditioner condensate drain is responsible. Even though it’s November, the a/c has been on because we didn’t understand some of the details of the climate control system. In Honda Civics any setting that involves the front windshield defogger will turn on the a/c, and pushing the a/c toggle will not turn it off. If not for this, we might not have noticed until next summer.

We have an appointment for the fairly inept dealer to look at the car on Monday. In fact, I’d rather our shop deal with it, but we’d have a hard time getting them to pay for it, while the lemon law requires them to fix it to my satisfaction. I did talk to a manager who seemed to grasp how annoyed I am about it. That said, a clogged drain should be easy to fix, and taking up the front carpet and cleaning it adequately should be possible even for these guys.

A use for Asperger’s Syndrome?

Having Asperger’s sucks. I’m not into the big “proud of who I am and won’t change” thing, and if there was a cure I’d take it in an instant. I’m tired of constantly embarrassing myself and not noticing until weeks or months later. However I may have found a use for it: torturing used car dealers.

As I wrote previously, I lost my car in an accident. This sucked. We’ve been using Zip Car to get around, and it’s pretty cool. However, winter is hovering, and we’ve been starting to think that having a car again would be nice. And warm.

My previous car purchases were sleek, black sporty things. But I do so little driving myself (because of the headaches) these days, and my spouse is completely uninterested in the finer points of cars. They’re just a way to get around. With that in mind, I hit the internet to shop for used Honda Civics.

Everything you’ve ever heard about buying used cars is true. I have some edge in that while I’ve only bought one other car myself, I’ve watched my dad torture dealers before, which is pretty easy for him since he knows more about cars than most dealers do.

Our criteria made things a little harder. We don’t care about much, but we wanted a car that had never been smoked in, ABS, and a manual transmission. It turns out that all Civics after 2000 have ABS. While I’ve had some trouble getting private sellers on Craig’s List to answer questions about smoking, it turns out that dealers these days only have unstinky cars on the lots and send ones with smoke smells straight to auction because they are too hard to sell. Manual transmissions, on the other hand, are awfully hard to find.

After a couple of weeks of fruitless questioning of car sellers, I found a likely prospect on cars.com. It is a white four-door, 2001, with a standard transmission. It also had a rare clean one-owner Carfax report. I made an appointment with the dealer, and we rented a Zip Car to go look at it.

It was a perfectly reasonable car, except that it smelled. Not of smoke, but of mildew. What probably happened is that it was steam cleaned but not allowed to dry out properly. This was pretty darned lame. However, it wasn’t a deal breaker, because smells can be cleaned up.

I had a Buddha-like lack of attachment to buying this car. It was the first one I looked at. I wouldn’t mind not having to look more, but I didn’t care either way. This is a good attitude to have when looking to buy something expensive. The dealer, on the other hand, didn’t want to let me out of the place without extracting a deposit. More fool them.

The car had been listed on the web at $7700. This is just about the blue book price (something easy to check on the web). Word from the dealer is that they’d originally listed it at $9900, to which I can only say I want what they are smoking. The car had been traded in two months ago and sat on the lot ever since because no one wanted a manual. The hapless car guy asked me what price would make me sign an agreement to buy the car that day. I’d been doing some thinking, so I told them $6900.

Now we get to the part where I unleash the full powers of Aspergers on the unsuspecting manager. I have to work hard to get along with people in the best of circumstances, and I do not care one bit whether or not the manager of a car dealership likes me or not. Thus when he said things like “You’ve got to meet me half-way here!” I answered with things like “Why?” The manager tried asking me if I’d seen any other cars at that price, with full confidence that I hadn’t, and that the logic of it would force me to relent on price. In fact, I hadn’t seen any other Civics at that price, but I didn’t see that as a reason to agree with him when I’d only looked at one car. My spouse thinks that this was the funniest part. It doesn’t sound funny as I write it, but that’s because you can’t see the manager’s face. Since nothing he said to me accomplished anything, he finally caved. I signed an agreement with some big, fat contingencies on it.

One of them was that we get the car checked by our own mechanic. The dealership tried to talk me out of doing this because “Your mechanic isn’t a certified Honda mechanic, and ours is!” Right. It turns out that their certified mechanics has overlooked belts, hoses and a thermostat overdue for replacement, a leaking axle boot, and a pressing need for a coolant flush. By then the guy we were working with looked like he was going to cry. I got them to agree to do all the needed work. They’ve been dragging their feet on it a bit, but we expect to have the whole thing wrapped up by Friday.

Assuming nothing happens to derail the sale, my next big decision is whether to apply a Darwin fish or a Flying Spaghetti Monster emblem to the car’s rear.

I have a happy bod.

I just shelled out a bunch of money for an pre-owned Aeron chair and it landed on my doorstep Saturday. I’ve sat in Aerons before. After a little time in one, you may start to feel that having to sit in any other desk chair is in fact a form of abuse.

This purchase was, ironically, made possible by my recent car wreck. I got the payout for the totalled car, and decided to go with ZipCar for now. I’ll admit that I’m completely neurotic about not having a car, which is very stupid considering how I haven’t driven a car for over a year due to migraines. I got tired of driving somewhere and being unable to drive back when the blurry vision and auditory hallucinations kicked in. However, I do have a spouse who drives. If we’re lucky we won’t have too many arguments due to the additional hassle of having to pick up the ZipCar.

Other purchases have included some fairly nice yarn for warmer sweaters since I’ve been so darned cold since I lost so much weight. I’m probably going to cave and buy some alpaca, even though whatever I buy will need to be hand washed (current plans do not include replacing our ancient washer/dryer with something that approximates handwashing). I picked up a little something for myself at Toys in Babeland, but you don’t get to know what. Under serious consideration is a fairly simple 8-plait bullwhip to start learning new ways to make loud bang noises in the park, though first I have to learn to get a forward crack out of the signal whip without removing my ear. And then there’s replacing the house’s water main. It’s an expensive job, but will be split with downstairs (cause it’s a condo, natch). It would be nice not to get stucked freezing and covered with soap every time someone flushes the toilet.

Happy Night of the Living UHauls!