Wednesday, April 12, 2006

A life without a car is a life turned upside-down

Today Sean's picking me up at lunchtime and we're going to go get my car. The fuel something-or-other on the caburetor has been replaced, which means that there should no longer be a problem with gas getting to the engine. There is still a problem with the pressure in one of the cylinders--the explosion is "leaking", per se, so that it doesn't add as much oomph to the engine--but this is on a gradual decline, and is not worth messing with if we are simply getting rid of the car at the end of the year.

Which we are! We will be giving the Subaru to Ben and Manda, as promised, at Thanksgiving, and then buying me a new car.

At this point I'm thinking Yaris. Sean said the PT Cruiser didn't get high marks in the car rating magazines he studied when he decided to buy a Corolla. Of course, we don't know how well the Yaris rates, since it's brand-new. (It's the second generation of a car that has been around in Europe for several years. While we could find out how the first generation fared, that might not be very meaningful information.)

I have the rest of the year to decide. In the meantime, I will still be test-driving the Yaris liftback in the next couple of weeks.

This week I've been forced to get up earlier so that Sean could drive me to work and then go to work himself. I spend my morning in my office, wasting time online until 10:00 rolls around. After work I've been getting rides from coworkers, or Sean, or friends--Brooke picked me up yesterday and we went to the Greeneway.

When I get home I'm very tired. I figure something out about dinner (last night we both just ate cereal) and putter around on the computer. I always think that I will go to bed a little earlier so I can get more sleep, but then I end up staying up until midnight.

I don't know if I actually do need more sleep or not; though I'm tired in the mornings I usually shake it off by the middle of the day. But of course, I'm then tired again after work.

I will be so glad to have my own transportation again. America's general lack of decent public transportation means that I have been essentially stranded wherever I go. It would be nice if I could just hop on a local train or subway and be at or near my destination in half an hour or less, but hey, this isn't Japan. If I did try public transportation, I'd probably have to walk a fair distance to a bus stop and then ride around for over an hour to get to work.

Here's the Augusta Public Transit home page! It appears that I can go anywhere for $2.00. And here are the routes. Hmm. It looks like if I wanted to walk all the way to Target, I could get on the Sand Hills route (10) and that would take me downtown, and then I could take the Downtown Shuttle (18) to North Augusta. Let me revise my estimate; I think that would take a few hours ;P

I'd like to see a map with all their routes on it, instead of having individual maps. I'd also like a dynamic page that can figure out the best route to take based on my starting and ending positions, but whatever.

Oh well, you can't say I didn't try to understand Augusta Public Transit.

Bottom line: it will be good to have my car back.

2 comments:

Christopher said...

Well, Tucson is a much smaller city, by far, but to get to my job on ze autobuse (for lack of an accent mark on my compy, I added an e) I would have to take two routes (the 22nd street route 7 an the Pima campus east and west route 3) to get to my job which is on the south east side of town (I live in central) for a full system map, you can go here:

http://www.suntran.com/pdf/2006%20CURRENT%20MAP.pdf

its really far away (about 2hours 30mins one way) to get to work. My job starts at 6, so I'd have to be at a bus stop no later than 4:20am to catch the right succession of busses, if they leave that early (some leave only as early as 6am) They claim to be America's best city transit for 05' if so, I feel really sorry for the rest of America.

Heather Meadows said...

LOL!