On the first day of September, we drove to Edmonton in our 2016 Hyundai Sonata for the last time. Not the last time to Edmonton. The last drive with the Sonata. I had thought we had a lifetime warranty on the Sonata engine, but in cleaning out the glove compartment found the paperwork that said 200,000 kilometers. It had 193,000 when we traded it in on a new 2023 Nissan Rogue SV with close to zero kilometers on the clock. Just under wire for the warranty!
The dealer had our new car sparkling in the show room when we arrived. A sign hung from the rearview mirror announcing it was sold to us. The doors were locked. I bristled as other shoppers left nose prints on the passenger door window to get a closer look at the interior. How quickly we become possessive.
We gave the finance guy $10 k in unmarked used bills. He returned $20. Used a couple of credit cards toward the purchase price to maximize the points. The balance was made up with a bank draft we had stopped to pick up in Lloydminster on the trip to Edmonton.
Apparently, we were supposed to watch several hours of videos before hand-off. Skipped that.
It still took a couple of hours before they drove the car out of the showroom and handed us the keys. We were able to register the vehicle and pay the Saskatchewan sales tax over the phone. Overall, the process was relatively painless.
I had dreaded a Tru-Coat scenario but it didn’t happen. The only glitch was the promised floor mats weren’t there yet (supply chain) and unlike my assumption when I asked for floor mats to be thrown into the deal, they were not the all-weather ones, but cloth. Test your assumptions! I ordered a set of all-weather floor mats from Amazon while waiting for the paperwork at the salesman’s desk. They arrived the next day, Saturday.
Saturday, we celebrated Ansel’s birthday with a cake and presents. In the evening we went to Churchill Square with fifteen thousand closely spaced friends to watch a Disney themed Symphony culminated with fireworks. While waiting for the concert to start I handed out curved illusion tracts.
Sunday, we drove home through the never-ending smoke from forest fires. We needed to be ready on Monday for a busy week getting ready for winter. That seems premature, doesn’t it? Not if you expect to be working away in a couple of weeks.
We dropped by for a low-key celebration of Deborah’s birthday with some cheese cake.
I cleaned the chimney and stove pipe about fifteen days earlier than usual. We ordered new winter tires and alloy rims for the Rogue. I took pictures of the winter tires from the Sonata and posted them for sale on Kijiji. There were two, new unused tires and four mounted on alloy rims. If the new ones for the Sonata don’t sell by the time the new ones come in for the Nissan the dealer will take them in trade.
Despite the busyness we still had time for walks in our woods and along the grid road. The mushrooms are abundant and varied. I’m at over a hundred days in a row at over 10k steps.
The annual optometrist appointment happened. My eyes are stable. The prescription changed just a bit from last year. 20-20 after cataract surgery two years ago with the need for readers for close work. After wearing glasses for almost seventy years, I wear progressives. Readers are never where you want them. Progressives are always on your face even if the top half are mostly just tweaking things a bit.
On the seventh I drove to town to give a urine sample for a pre-employment drug and alcohol test. The breathalyzer read 0.0. They should have tried fifty years ago if they wanted more than that. The current standard for drug testing is cheek swabs. Too many people were failing the urine test for weed. The local test facility doesn’t do cheek swabs, but I asked for a waiver to the more rigorous urine test. Much better to make a ten-minute drive to town for a urine sample than a two-hour drive to Lloydminster for a cheek swab. The samples were couriered away. My negative test results came back two days later. Being negative for some things is positive. Strange world. Embrace negativity?
