And I vote for the Camry, too.
This is my first priority when considering a car. It changed my life, man!
That looks like a rephrasing of Vimes’s Law (a rich man can buy a $50 pair of boots that will last for ten years, while a poor man can only buy a $10 pair of boots that he’ll have to replace every year. After ten years the rich man has spent $50 on boots, while the poor man has spent $100).
Question for @wolfpup: has the Camry been subjected to generally the same environmental conditions as your current rustbucket? (if so, I’d consider taking the offer a no-brainer)
A tax CREDIT? We poor benighted USAians only get deductions (from taxable income) for charitable donations. I’m jelly.
Stop giving these people ideas!
I was concerned enough last time that they were going to try to draw blood from somewhere in my leg. Although considering the edema I have in my legs I’m not sure they could use a long enough needle to reach a vein.
And BTW I have a big bruise inside my elbow at one of the places where they tried (and failed) to draw blood.
If you mean driven on more or less the same roads in the same general geographic area and weather, yes.
We’re extremely amicable as long as we don’t spend too much time together! 
But yes, she’s a sweetheart. She’s going to a lot of trouble to offer me the car. She could just pick up the phone and have somebody from the auction place pick it up, and end up getting a lot more for it. Instead she’s going to have to have it safety certified (mandatory for ownership transfer) and resell the snow tires which I don’t want (I prefer all-weather tires that can be used winter and summer).
What was that quote from Stephen King’s character in ‘Creep Show’ (1982)?
"This is going to be… Extremely… Painful…’
Inasmuch as Snowplow Guy just dropped off this season’s contract, allow me to list my financial woes for the month:
- New fridge
- New car
- Overpriced Ukrainian handymen*
- Snowplow Guy
The only consolation is Snowplow Guy is charging the same as last year. He usually likes to hike his rates at every opportunity. He probably feels guilty for what he’s charging me for what is really a fairly small driveway. He also refuses to work on a per-call basis, a deal that my rich but notoriously cheap buddy managed to get with a different snowplow guy, but he’s in a completely different area.
* When I complained to the Head Ukrainian, he said – probably correctly – that he and his associates were all experts in their fields. They certainly know their plumbing, and the guy they sent over to rewire and install three new smoke detectors and replace light bulbs in three ceiling fixtures was apparently a licensed electrician who did everything in about 20 minutes flat, but all I really need for work like that is a bum who, unlike me, can stand on a ladder without falling off, and is happy to get enough for his work to buy a mickey of cheap whiskey!
But I suppose the principle that you get what you pay for is probably true even here. Good general service people are hard to find.
For several decades I have had subscriptions to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Asimov’s, and Analog. One of the reasons I enjoyed about having these subscriptions was that I received each of the magazines in my mailbox, usually within a few days of each other, before they were available in the bookstores.
Then back in May the magazines changed publishers. The May/June issues did not arrive timely. I sent an email inquiring when I would receive them, and got a reply explaining that due to the change in distributors there were distribution delays. Then the July/August issues were also delayed - as in I didn’t get them until sometime in August.
I have still not received the September/October issues. I should note that the November/December issues of EQ and Analog are available online (Asimov’s is not -yet). I sent an email complaining about this. Let’s see what sort of bullshit excuse they give me now.
Sounds like a job for the neighbor’s kid looking to make a couple of bucks.
We are moving.
I have too many books.
I love them all, but I do not love packing them. I am thinning as I go, but I am keeping 98%, so it’s not helping much.
Because I tend to not think about it too much after November, I just found out that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is no more. The url nanowrimo.org now is simply a parked domain. I participated in it materially starting a few years after it was founded until and including last year and contributed to the project financially. It really was a great project that got me to really write. I knew things were rocky last year, but I did not realize it was now completely defunct, along with all my writing statistics (you did not put your actual novel there) which if I had been paying attention, I would have grabbed some screen shots or something. There are people out there who will do their own version of the even next month, and I may participate again, but it still feels like a loss, even though it was not financial or personal.
//i\\
Some months ago we got an invoice for USD 106.00 from the IRS, due to interest.
I paid with a check, and made it a bit more, because I expected there to be more interest.
We just got a check from the IRS for USD 13.72. I expected them to deposit the overpay in the U.S. bank account, which they have had in their records for at least 5 years. Or credit my next year’s taxes.
I can’t cash a check here. So I have to send it to my parents in the U.S., which is at least CHF 2.50 (USD 3.11) for postage.
And allegedly the IRS isn’t accepting checks after September 30, 2025 (or was that just TACO?). But they were still issuing checks as of October 3, 2025.
Grrr.
Man, I don’t know what’s going on with my laptop. It’s about three years old so it’s about to hit its planned obsolescence, I suppose. Last month it started making these noises, like a hard drive struggling, but I think the hard drive is solid state, so I’m pretty sure it’s the internal fans that have gone all hinky. The laptop works fine for the most part, except it will not update Windows. It tries and then goes to “Couldn’t complete updates - deleting changes” or something like that. And just now, I fired it up and I’ve been logged out of everything I’m usually logged into. SDMB, Twitter, Gmail, everything. I don’t know if the weird sounds are related but, shit … I can’t afford a new laptop.
That part is semi-easy to explain. It’s indicative of all the browser “cookies” on your machine being cleared. So that’s what happened.
The why is harder: You might have done this with a random set of confused keystrokes. The browser’s internal cookie database might have gotten corrupted and the browser’s “fix” was to delete the whole thing, knowing they’d be recreated as you logged back in.
You can check… hit the Windows key and type “device manager”.
Select that and look under Disk Drives. If it has SSD in the name, then
it’s solid state. If it isn’t, REPLACE IT NOW !!!
Well. That’s a bummer.
I guess though if you have a traditional hard drive completely freeze up, it’s also “solid state”.
It’s just not supposed to be.
Bricks are solid state too. And many PCs have become such over the years.
Exactly!!!
Yeah, I just love the word “brick” as applied to electronics, so had to trot it out when you invited it.
IANA expert on current tech laptops but I wonder how many 3yo laptops = 2022 “model year” are even equipped with spinning disk drives? I would’ve naively assumed the last such laptop was made in 2020ish. Spinning large format drives for desktops, towers, servers, etc? Sure. But for a laptop? I thought those had gone the way of the buggy whip.
But maybe I’m all wet in that belief.